The story goes that in 1986 African-American female writer Sophia Stewart submitted a manuscript titled,” THE THIRD EYE,” to a science fiction comic book contest that was sponsored by the Wachowski Brothers from an ad that was placed in a national magazine. She never heard from them and her manuscript was never returned. Years later, in 1999, when the first Matrix film was released Stewart recognized that her work had been appropriated by The Wachowski Brothers and she filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement in 2003 against them, Warner Bros., Joel Silvers, Village Roadshow Entertainment, James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd and the Terminator franchise. Now every three or four years after she had filed the lawsuit contradictory stories are circulated on the internet about her either having won the lawsuit (in 2004) or that the lawsuit had been dismissed (in 2005). And just as recently as December 10th 2011, other websites including www.brandnewz.com have announced that Miss. Stewart has won a multi-billion dollar settlement for copyright infringement against the Matrix franchise and The Terminator franchise. She allegedly won her lawsuit based on the fact that,” according to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original [Matrix] film, in an attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement.”(1). This should be breaking news around the world, but mainstream media outlets will not report on this story and Miss. Stewart gives a fascinating account as to why. She says that,” The reason you have not seen any of this in the media is because Warner Bros. parent company is AOL-Time Warner… this giant owns 95 percent of the media… let me give you a clue as to what they own in the media business… New York Times papers/magazines, LA Times papers/magazines, People magazine, CNN News, Extra, Celebrity Justice, Entertainment Tonight, HBO, New Line Cinema, Dreamworks, Newsweek, Village Roadshow, and many, many more! They are not going to report on themselves. They have been suppressing my case for years.” (2)
Now one of the main strengths of any conspiracy theory is the persuasive power of those that believe in it to discredit the institutions we have to prove or disprove the validity of a theory. Whether it is the discrediting of the Warren Commission (JFK), the CDC (HIV as a racist plot) or the 9/11 commission the strength of any conspiracy theory rests upon our inherent distrust of an institution which can then allow the believers to discredit that institution and present their theory as the truth. In Stewart’s case that institution that must be discredited is the media (in the form of the gigantic AOL-Time Warner conglomerate), which is ironically the very institution from whom she is seeking monetary damages. Stewart’s claim that AOL-Time Warner owns 95% percent of the media is patently untrue. We’ve got to leave some room for Viacom, Clear Channel, and the others. Moreover The LA Times, one of the newspapers she claims as part of the suppression of her case, did actually run a story on her and her lawsuit on July 31 2005 called,” The Billion Dollar Myth,” by Kemp Powers. (3) But a major source of trouble in believing Stewart’s claim of copyright infringement is found in her very own testimony.
For one thing, each time her story is told whether in her own words or paraphrased by others the copyright dates for her original manuscript,” The Third Eye” change from either 1981 or 1983. These copyright discrepancies are significant because she expanded her lawsuit to include The Terminator franchise where the first film was released in 1984. But nowhere in her tale of infringement does she reveal how Cameron or Hurd got a hold of her original manuscript. Moreover, Cameron and Hurd were already sued by prolific science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison who claimed that The Terminator drew from material from Ellison’s SOLDIER and DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND episodes of the ABC’s television show, The Outer Limits (1963-1965). Ellison won his lawsuit despite the objections of James Cameron. I have seen the SOLDIER episode of The Outer Limits and the similarity of that story to The Terminator is uncanny and supports Ellison’s claim of copyright infringement, but this real verifiable evidence brings us back to Stewart. Why didn’t she sue Cameron and Hurd in 1984 when The Terminator was first released? The original Terminator was a box office blockbuster when it was released in October of 1984 and I’m sure she would have noticed her material in this film at the time of its release as she did subsequently with the original release of The Matrix in 1999.
Another troubling aspect of her story is the mysterious ad that she alleges the Wachowski Brothers placed in a “national magazine” and that she responded to in 1986. As stated in the L.A. Times article by Kemp Powers,” In 1986 Andy [Wachowski] was 18 and Larry [Wachowski] was a 24 year old college student,” so evidence of their ability and interest to place an ad in a national magazine, as well as, their ability to publish a comic book needs to be revealed. Stewart’s story never tells us what national magazine or the name of the comic book contest so that any real verifiable evidence is left wanting. With no evidence, her allegations of a conspiracy further circumvents any of the institutions that we have to investigate the validity of the conspiracy against her.
But what is it that makes Stewart’s lawsuit and the alleged conspiracy against a Black writer so compelling that every two or three years an announcement circulates throughout the internet that she has won her case? Is it that her claim of theft and financial injustice by a white controlled corporation reaches deep into the African-American psyche which itself holds on to the theft of our ancestors from Africa and the injustice (financial, physical and spiritual) we have suffered within a white controlled nation throughout history? The list of stolen Black copyrights, patents and ideas by whites –those that can be proven and those that can be believed- is as long as your belief in America as a system of oppression against African-Americans. Yet Stewart’s lawsuit and conspiracy returns again and again like a light-skinned relative that everyone whispers could pass for White at a Black family reunion. The answer is like a family secret that grandmother will carry to her grave.
My heart aches for Stewart because in one sense I want her claims to be true. I want her to win her case as a symbol of vindication and justice for all that Hollywood has taken and keeps from us as African-Americans. But to truly believe her conspiracy theory and her lawsuit I have to pretend to be ignorant. I have to pretend to be ignorant of the fact that Cameron and Hurd were already successfully sued by prolific science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison concerning work he had completed in the 1960’s. To believe in Stewart, I have to be ignorant of the fact that alternate reality/computer simulacrum themes had already been pursued in the works of prolific science-fiction author Phillip K. Dick (Total Recall/BladeRunner/A Scanner Darkly) and specifically in the work of science-fiction author Daniel F. Galouye. In fact Galouye’s book, Counterfeit World (Simulcron 3) was the basis for the late great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s rediscovered masterpiece,”WORLD ON A WIRE (1973). Fassbinder’s film followed similar themes of a computer controlled alternate reality complete with headgear brain attachments and predated The Matrix by 26 years. To believe Stewart, I have to be ignorant of the fact that if you cut footage out of the final theatrical release of your film (before that film is ever seen by the public) that a lawsuit for copyright infringement cannot be won on the basis of what is left out of a film as opposed to what is actually in the film. And finally, to believe Stewart I have to pretend to be ignorant and that’s just something I’m not willing to do, regardless of how I feel against the white controlled entertainment industry.
But I must confess that all of this has been written to reveal and support one substantial truth; that whether we believe that Sophia Stewart was the victim of a vast Global corporate conspiracy or that she is another victimized genius whose work was stolen and unjustly exploited: the substantial truth is that as African-Americans we have got to make and distribute our own motion pictures. Hollywood was not invented for African-Americans. We not only have to start creating/supporting/and developing our own content, but we must also develop and control the distribution of that content on a global platform. If I were to believe that Sophia Stewart is the genius that she claims, then the greater tragedy is found in the fact that her work could not have been produced by any Black filmmaker between the years of 1981 – 1986. In fact no Black filmmaker today would have the power to produce a visionary science fiction film with a 100 million dollar budget within the severely curtained production/development deals allowed for African-American filmmakers by Hollywood. Not even the golden boy, Tyler Perry, could pull this off or for that matter would want to produce such a picture as narrowed and limited as he is by what he thinks African-Americans want to see. And this is the truth whether Stewart’s lawsuit is a conspiracy or a hoax.
Notes
1) “Black Author wins The Matrix Copyright Infringement Case” Download date 12/10/11 http://www.brandnewz.com/?p=3702
2) Ibid
3) “The Billion Dollar Myth” by Kemp Powers, Download date 12/10/11. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jul/31/magazine/tm-mothermatrix31
Friday, December 30, 2011
The Greatest Lie Ever Told to the African-American Filmmaker
It would seem that the more different people tell the same lie, the easier it is for others to believe it as the truth. I have already discussed in several articles and in my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, that there is a segregated relationship between how African-American films are funded, distributed and exhibited vis-à-vis how white American films are funded, distributed and exhibited. It is this racially segregated and unequal relationship that aids in holding back African-American films (independent and commercial) from the narrative and stylistic advances often explored in white American and international cinema. To understand this aesthetic segregation we have to first acknowledge that there is always –every year- a certain amount of white films produced and distributed for prestige (Academy Awards, international awards and noble causes) rather than for profit.
For instance, no one at Fox Searchlight Pictures was expecting the great cinematic poet Terrence Malick’s work, THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) to be a 500 million dollar blockbuster when it was released this Summer, but the film which stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, premiered at the Cannes film festival after a two year delay by the auteur himself, where it finally won the coveted Palme D’or. The film has played domestically and internationally earning little more than 12 million dollars as of September 1st in America from a production budget of 32 million dollars with high critical acclaim.(1) What can be deduced from this example is that white Hollywood creates and maintains its national and international cultural preeminence by funding, distributing and exhibiting certain films that are in no way made to return steep first and second weekend short term box office profits, but instead certain films are made to enhance the richness of white Hollywood’s cultural legacy and seduce those critical of Hollywood’s greed that the business is not always about profit: it is also about the art.
The truth is Hollywood makes a fortune on a handful of blockbuster films and their sequels that make millions upon millions of dollars domestically and across the globe. Yet, there is another truth repeated by author Mario Puzo on the first page of his book, THE GODFATHER, where he quoted from 19th century French writer, Honoré de Balzac that is à propos to white Hollywood’s success : “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”(2) The crime behind the fortunes of Hollywood which will be discussed in this article is the greatest lie ever told to the black filmmaker.
The Lie: African-American films have little to no international market appeal.
This single lie which has been repeated by white producers, Hollywood insiders, agents and critics alike is the single greatest lie that has both swindled many African-American filmmakers from their just deserved foreign licensing rights and contributes to the lower production budgets, shorter development times and general lack of narrative and stylistic risk taking in African-American films commercial and independent vis-à-vis white films commercial or independent. As I stated in SLAVE CINEMA:
“Ironically, this notion that no one is interested in African-American films outside of the African-American community was started during the spark in the production of African-American films in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Many Hollywood executive power brokers literally swindled many African-American filmmakers out of their share of foreign licensing rights by convincing them that their urban themed films would have little audience interest outside of the U.S. market. We would do well to note here that surviving copies of Oscar Micheaux’s work have been found as far away as Spain (Cf., Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson, 261), so there is and always has been an international audience for African-American films but the whites that control the industry have a vested interest in telling us that there is not… Even a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter about the success of Tyler Perry states that,” execs, while careful to emphasize that they want to produce more fare for black audiences, say that the business picture is more complicated than it would appear on the surface. Advantages like new audiences for lower-budget product are offset by certain disadvantages, like limited international potential.” (pgs. 119-120) (3)
It would seem unnecessary to have to ask that if African-American music and musicians have an international appeal, if African-American athletes are known the world over, and if African-American fashion and dances are known around the world, why would African-American films have little international box office appeal? Even when we listen to the hottest French rapper today, La Fouine (pronounced: La Foo-knee) in the song Gucci Sale Musique (Trans: Dirty Gucci Music) from his latest double CD, we hear references to African-American music in the lyric:
“Je suis Notorious BIG, bitch je suis, Ready to Die.” (Trans: I am Notorious BIG Bitch, I’m ready to die.)
If we search YouTube carefully we see Swedish and Belgian youths, Crip walking, and youths in Switzerland sagging their pants with oversized hoodies and NY baseball caps on, the Boston Celtics’ Paul Pierce playing basketball in China and hip-hop fashions worn in the streets of Japan; why wouldn’t every African-American filmmaker with a Hollywood contract demand that his or her foreign licensing rights be respected? Why aren’t all African-American independent filmmakers making sure that the DVD’s of their films contain at least two different foreign language subtitle tracks or at least one foreign language voice dub track? Why? I believe that the destructive power of the lie that African-American films have little to no international market appeal takes advantage of African-American mentalities that have been shaped by 400 years of slavery’s oppression. That is to say that the lie gains its power and is often accepted as true because of the way the lasting legacy of slavery has shaped our mentalities and curtailed the expectations we associate with our racial identity. But the most persuasive tool that seduces us to accept the lie that African-American films have little to no international market appeal is that the coveted Hollywood Contract is a symbol of status and division among African-American filmmakers.
Whether or not you believe in the veracity of the “Willie Lynch Letter” as a doctrine of white supremacist control over African-Americans during the era of slavery, the gilded ideal of the Hollywood Contract has actually been the most powerful tool used to divide and ‘control’ African-American filmmakers since Spike Lee’s deal with Columbia pictures to fund and distribute his second feature film, SCHOOL DAZE (1988). Whether that contract with a major Hollywood studio is a P&A deal (Prints and Advertising), Negative Pick-up, First Look, etc, the contract itself and the major studio attached to it becomes a dividing line between the haves and the have nots; or in keeping with the theme from Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE, the wanna-be’s and the jiggaboos. After SCHOOL DAZE and later Singleton’s BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) the Hollywood Contract became a status symbol that divided most practicing and would be African-American filmmakers into two distinct categories and deliberately pitted them against one another:
1) The House Negro Filmmaker (also known as the commercial filmmaker)
2) The Field Negro Filmmaker (also known as the independent filmmaker)
The House Negro Filmmaker tries desperately to please his white masters with a successful profit making product using A-list actors, generic story lines, conventional action and safe non-threatening bourgeois ideals that appeal to both white and black audiences. On the other hand, The Field Negro Filmmaker attempts to represent reality on-screen the way he or she believes a majority of African-Americans see their everyday social realities. The Field Negro Filmmaker wants to make a successful profit making film with b-list or unknown actors, a race specific story line, conventional action but with threatening street ideals that upset the bourgeois ideals of both white and black audiences. Whether you please your masters or you please your brethren it is very possible that neither filmmaker is actually pleasing him or herself as an artist.
The Hollywood Contract (on par with the status provided by the good government job, the good factory job in the African-American community) changes the practice of filmmaking into a status seeking enterprise. The House Negro Filmmaker with a Hollywood Contract is privileged with the ability to ‘hob-nob’ with the A-list stars and celebrities; he or she is perceived as having ‘made it’ to friends and family; their film is seen on screen and occasionally on cable and satellite television. But the down side of The House Negro Filmmaker is that they have been rendered powerless in the production and development of their own subsequent works. Often the studio interferes with their work in the form of budgetary restrictions, usually citing the lie that African-American films do poorly in the international market as the reason. Their scripts are placed in ‘turn around’ (industry jargon for ‘not at this time’) or their films underperform due to script revisions, ratings board interference, foreshortened development timetables, poor advertising, even limited screen ratios. Thus, The House Negro Filmmaker, like the House Negro who served his white masters inside their plush antebellum estates, has to perform specific duties to maintain his privileges and status by learning to stay in his place, so he is still a slave; he is still un-free. The Hollywood Contract is more of a shackle than it is a key. Not to diminish the work of all House Negro Filmmakers, since some of their films usually expand Hollywood’s restricted representations of race by casting African-Americans in roles usually reserved for whites while simultaneously pleasing those African-Americans that adhere to conventional bourgeois ideals.
By contrast, The Field Negro Filmmaker seeks the status of the Hollywood Contract but only on the terms that his or her first film, reveals the way they actually believe it is on the streets for African-Americans. (See: The Realist Tendency, Part One) The Field Negro Filmmaker usually invests his or her own money into the film or the money of trusted friends, family or funds gathered by any means necessary to bring to the screen an aspect of African-American life thought of as suppressed or under-represented by commercial Hollywood films and House Negro Filmmakers. Whether gritty “Get out of the Game” street dramas or weed induced comedies, The Field Negro Filmmaker’s work can only be validated in the end by the attainment of The Hollywood Contract. In the eyes of family and friends, The Field Negro Filmmaker is a broke failure until he can secure that Hollywood Contract and insulate himself with the privileges of the status it bestows upon the signer. The Field Negro Filmmaker usually accepts the lie that his or her urban themed film will not play well in international markets because they have very little knowledge about urban cultures overseas, do not speak a second language, and are blindly concerned with the urban African-American community as their sole target audience. If the House Negro Filmmaker has to accept the lie as a prerequisite to the offer of a The Hollywood Contract, then the Field Negro Filmmaker accepts the lie on the basis of his or her own ignorance of the value of their work in markets other than those considered strictly African-American. Not to disrespect the work of all Field Negro Filmmakers, some of their work does call attention to aspects of African-American social realities that are suppressed or deliberately overlooked by mainstream Hollywood cinema.
I have yet to explain why foreign licensing rights are so important to all filmmakers and particularly to those of color. Let me begin with the fact that a large percentage of Hollywood’s worldwide box office grosses come from overseas markets. A quick glance at the box office totals of almost any American produced film on websites like ‘boxofficemojo.com’ will, more often than not, reveal an equal or higher amount of international box office grosses in comparison with domestic grosses. The additional profits associated with foreign licensing rights,” allows white filmmakers a wider margin of error when judging the box office appeal of a film against the artistic purpose and integrity of a film. This wider margin of error encourages certain white filmmakers to experiment with style, dialogue, the presentation of action, editing, setting as well as allowing these white filmmakers to take chances on subject matter and its overall narrative presentation.” (pg.16, SLAVE CINEMA) It is as a direct consequence of the denial of foreign licensing rights to African-American filmmakers that there exists, in my opinion, a segregated and unequal divide between African-American filmmakers and white filmmakers.
Returning to the issue of how the illusions associated with The Hollywood Contract pits African-American filmmakers against each other, we see how the competition involved in getting a film noticed by the industry (through festivals, word-of-mouth, social media networks) causes the House Negro Filmmaker to look down upon the Field Negro Filmmaker as an uncouth, retrograde threat to the status and privileges he believes he has worked so hard to achieve. In fact, the House Negro Filmmaker usually develops selective amnesia and forgets that he was once a Field Negro Filmmaker and had to raise money for his first film by hook or by crook. To illustrate this analogy we need go back in time and look at the tenuous and volatile relationship between Spike Lee and Matty Rich. Matty Rich launched his filmmaking career with the 1991 independent film, STRAIGHT OUTTA BROOKLYN, which was financed with credit cards and donations. He would be our Field Negro Filmmaker who attained a Hollywood Contract for his next film, THE INKWELL (1994) which received mixed reviews and was a commercial failure.
Spike Lee, of course, began as a Field Negro Filmmaker with his first feature length independent film, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT in 1986. When he signed his Hollywood Contract with Columbia pictures for SCHOOL DAZE he had successfully transitioned into House Negro Filmmaker status. It is well known that Spike Lee spewed much vitriol against Matty Rich allegedly because he didn’t go to film school and was, ”ignorant,” in Spike’s opinion. (4) Yet only a few years later Spike would have his choke chain yanked by Hollywood when Warner Bros. refused to increase the budget of his epic bio-film MALCOLM X (1992). He would have to go back to his Field Negro Filmmaker roots and raise money from sources outside of Hollywood to complete that film and later several others.
The privileges and status associated with the fabled Hollywood Contract often blinds the House Negro Filmmaker from his or her roots and causes them to see the Field Negro Filmmaker as a competitive threat to their illusion of artistic control in the white controlled Hollywood industry. Matty Rich’s filmmaking career may have stalled and failed for several other reasons, but the hatred and anger between he and his fellow African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee, certainly blinded both of them from the Janus faced nature of The Hollywood Contract. So if you, like many of us, have ever wondered why successful African-American filmmakers and stars only rarely attempt to unite and help those up and coming in the industry, it’s not because of what’s written in the contract that is preventing them, but rather the illusion of status and privileges associated with The Hollywood Contract that divides and ‘controls’ the African-American filmmaker and changes their perception by causing them to see others as a competitive threat.
My only suggestion for a way out of this, for lack of a better phrase,” Hollywood trick bag,” is a radical one. I believe that all of the African-American filmmakers who have signed Hollywood Contracts wherein which they were denied their foreign licensing rights should band together and file a class action lawsuit against all of the parties involved. Whether these filmmakers win or lose the case would not be the measure of the lawsuit’s success or failure, but instead the lawsuit and the controversy it would inevitably create would make all filmmakers of color aware of the importance, the significance and their rights to foreign licensing when and if they are ever offered the gilded Hollywood Contract. Moreover, if these filmmakers should win they could use the money to start and maintain a “Collard Greens Circuit” as I have described in a previous article as an alternative means for funding and distributing African-American cinema. The crime behind the great fortunes of Hollywood and the impoverishment of African-American cinema has to be corrected. If white controlled Hollywood wants to keep a segregated relationship between how white films are funded, distributed and exhibited and African-American films then perhaps a truly segregated cinema, where we keep our profits to sustain and control our own images would show them that a house divided cannot stand, but that if you build another house it surely can.
NOTES
(1) These box office totals are subject to change. Download date 9/3/11. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=treeoflife.htm
(2) Cf., page 9, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, New American Library, 1969 New York: New York.
(3) Cf., “Perry’s Success has black films in fashion” by Steven Zeitchik in The Hollywood Reporter, October 17, 2007.
(4) Cf., “Spike Lee on Filmmaking,” Metcalfe Nasser, www.blackfilm.com, download date 9/3/11.
For instance, no one at Fox Searchlight Pictures was expecting the great cinematic poet Terrence Malick’s work, THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) to be a 500 million dollar blockbuster when it was released this Summer, but the film which stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, premiered at the Cannes film festival after a two year delay by the auteur himself, where it finally won the coveted Palme D’or. The film has played domestically and internationally earning little more than 12 million dollars as of September 1st in America from a production budget of 32 million dollars with high critical acclaim.(1) What can be deduced from this example is that white Hollywood creates and maintains its national and international cultural preeminence by funding, distributing and exhibiting certain films that are in no way made to return steep first and second weekend short term box office profits, but instead certain films are made to enhance the richness of white Hollywood’s cultural legacy and seduce those critical of Hollywood’s greed that the business is not always about profit: it is also about the art.
The truth is Hollywood makes a fortune on a handful of blockbuster films and their sequels that make millions upon millions of dollars domestically and across the globe. Yet, there is another truth repeated by author Mario Puzo on the first page of his book, THE GODFATHER, where he quoted from 19th century French writer, Honoré de Balzac that is à propos to white Hollywood’s success : “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”(2) The crime behind the fortunes of Hollywood which will be discussed in this article is the greatest lie ever told to the black filmmaker.
The Lie: African-American films have little to no international market appeal.
This single lie which has been repeated by white producers, Hollywood insiders, agents and critics alike is the single greatest lie that has both swindled many African-American filmmakers from their just deserved foreign licensing rights and contributes to the lower production budgets, shorter development times and general lack of narrative and stylistic risk taking in African-American films commercial and independent vis-à-vis white films commercial or independent. As I stated in SLAVE CINEMA:
“Ironically, this notion that no one is interested in African-American films outside of the African-American community was started during the spark in the production of African-American films in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Many Hollywood executive power brokers literally swindled many African-American filmmakers out of their share of foreign licensing rights by convincing them that their urban themed films would have little audience interest outside of the U.S. market. We would do well to note here that surviving copies of Oscar Micheaux’s work have been found as far away as Spain (Cf., Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson, 261), so there is and always has been an international audience for African-American films but the whites that control the industry have a vested interest in telling us that there is not… Even a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter about the success of Tyler Perry states that,” execs, while careful to emphasize that they want to produce more fare for black audiences, say that the business picture is more complicated than it would appear on the surface. Advantages like new audiences for lower-budget product are offset by certain disadvantages, like limited international potential.” (pgs. 119-120) (3)
It would seem unnecessary to have to ask that if African-American music and musicians have an international appeal, if African-American athletes are known the world over, and if African-American fashion and dances are known around the world, why would African-American films have little international box office appeal? Even when we listen to the hottest French rapper today, La Fouine (pronounced: La Foo-knee) in the song Gucci Sale Musique (Trans: Dirty Gucci Music) from his latest double CD, we hear references to African-American music in the lyric:
“Je suis Notorious BIG, bitch je suis, Ready to Die.” (Trans: I am Notorious BIG Bitch, I’m ready to die.)
If we search YouTube carefully we see Swedish and Belgian youths, Crip walking, and youths in Switzerland sagging their pants with oversized hoodies and NY baseball caps on, the Boston Celtics’ Paul Pierce playing basketball in China and hip-hop fashions worn in the streets of Japan; why wouldn’t every African-American filmmaker with a Hollywood contract demand that his or her foreign licensing rights be respected? Why aren’t all African-American independent filmmakers making sure that the DVD’s of their films contain at least two different foreign language subtitle tracks or at least one foreign language voice dub track? Why? I believe that the destructive power of the lie that African-American films have little to no international market appeal takes advantage of African-American mentalities that have been shaped by 400 years of slavery’s oppression. That is to say that the lie gains its power and is often accepted as true because of the way the lasting legacy of slavery has shaped our mentalities and curtailed the expectations we associate with our racial identity. But the most persuasive tool that seduces us to accept the lie that African-American films have little to no international market appeal is that the coveted Hollywood Contract is a symbol of status and division among African-American filmmakers.
Whether or not you believe in the veracity of the “Willie Lynch Letter” as a doctrine of white supremacist control over African-Americans during the era of slavery, the gilded ideal of the Hollywood Contract has actually been the most powerful tool used to divide and ‘control’ African-American filmmakers since Spike Lee’s deal with Columbia pictures to fund and distribute his second feature film, SCHOOL DAZE (1988). Whether that contract with a major Hollywood studio is a P&A deal (Prints and Advertising), Negative Pick-up, First Look, etc, the contract itself and the major studio attached to it becomes a dividing line between the haves and the have nots; or in keeping with the theme from Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE, the wanna-be’s and the jiggaboos. After SCHOOL DAZE and later Singleton’s BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) the Hollywood Contract became a status symbol that divided most practicing and would be African-American filmmakers into two distinct categories and deliberately pitted them against one another:
1) The House Negro Filmmaker (also known as the commercial filmmaker)
2) The Field Negro Filmmaker (also known as the independent filmmaker)
The House Negro Filmmaker tries desperately to please his white masters with a successful profit making product using A-list actors, generic story lines, conventional action and safe non-threatening bourgeois ideals that appeal to both white and black audiences. On the other hand, The Field Negro Filmmaker attempts to represent reality on-screen the way he or she believes a majority of African-Americans see their everyday social realities. The Field Negro Filmmaker wants to make a successful profit making film with b-list or unknown actors, a race specific story line, conventional action but with threatening street ideals that upset the bourgeois ideals of both white and black audiences. Whether you please your masters or you please your brethren it is very possible that neither filmmaker is actually pleasing him or herself as an artist.
The Hollywood Contract (on par with the status provided by the good government job, the good factory job in the African-American community) changes the practice of filmmaking into a status seeking enterprise. The House Negro Filmmaker with a Hollywood Contract is privileged with the ability to ‘hob-nob’ with the A-list stars and celebrities; he or she is perceived as having ‘made it’ to friends and family; their film is seen on screen and occasionally on cable and satellite television. But the down side of The House Negro Filmmaker is that they have been rendered powerless in the production and development of their own subsequent works. Often the studio interferes with their work in the form of budgetary restrictions, usually citing the lie that African-American films do poorly in the international market as the reason. Their scripts are placed in ‘turn around’ (industry jargon for ‘not at this time’) or their films underperform due to script revisions, ratings board interference, foreshortened development timetables, poor advertising, even limited screen ratios. Thus, The House Negro Filmmaker, like the House Negro who served his white masters inside their plush antebellum estates, has to perform specific duties to maintain his privileges and status by learning to stay in his place, so he is still a slave; he is still un-free. The Hollywood Contract is more of a shackle than it is a key. Not to diminish the work of all House Negro Filmmakers, since some of their films usually expand Hollywood’s restricted representations of race by casting African-Americans in roles usually reserved for whites while simultaneously pleasing those African-Americans that adhere to conventional bourgeois ideals.
By contrast, The Field Negro Filmmaker seeks the status of the Hollywood Contract but only on the terms that his or her first film, reveals the way they actually believe it is on the streets for African-Americans. (See: The Realist Tendency, Part One) The Field Negro Filmmaker usually invests his or her own money into the film or the money of trusted friends, family or funds gathered by any means necessary to bring to the screen an aspect of African-American life thought of as suppressed or under-represented by commercial Hollywood films and House Negro Filmmakers. Whether gritty “Get out of the Game” street dramas or weed induced comedies, The Field Negro Filmmaker’s work can only be validated in the end by the attainment of The Hollywood Contract. In the eyes of family and friends, The Field Negro Filmmaker is a broke failure until he can secure that Hollywood Contract and insulate himself with the privileges of the status it bestows upon the signer. The Field Negro Filmmaker usually accepts the lie that his or her urban themed film will not play well in international markets because they have very little knowledge about urban cultures overseas, do not speak a second language, and are blindly concerned with the urban African-American community as their sole target audience. If the House Negro Filmmaker has to accept the lie as a prerequisite to the offer of a The Hollywood Contract, then the Field Negro Filmmaker accepts the lie on the basis of his or her own ignorance of the value of their work in markets other than those considered strictly African-American. Not to disrespect the work of all Field Negro Filmmakers, some of their work does call attention to aspects of African-American social realities that are suppressed or deliberately overlooked by mainstream Hollywood cinema.
I have yet to explain why foreign licensing rights are so important to all filmmakers and particularly to those of color. Let me begin with the fact that a large percentage of Hollywood’s worldwide box office grosses come from overseas markets. A quick glance at the box office totals of almost any American produced film on websites like ‘boxofficemojo.com’ will, more often than not, reveal an equal or higher amount of international box office grosses in comparison with domestic grosses. The additional profits associated with foreign licensing rights,” allows white filmmakers a wider margin of error when judging the box office appeal of a film against the artistic purpose and integrity of a film. This wider margin of error encourages certain white filmmakers to experiment with style, dialogue, the presentation of action, editing, setting as well as allowing these white filmmakers to take chances on subject matter and its overall narrative presentation.” (pg.16, SLAVE CINEMA) It is as a direct consequence of the denial of foreign licensing rights to African-American filmmakers that there exists, in my opinion, a segregated and unequal divide between African-American filmmakers and white filmmakers.
Returning to the issue of how the illusions associated with The Hollywood Contract pits African-American filmmakers against each other, we see how the competition involved in getting a film noticed by the industry (through festivals, word-of-mouth, social media networks) causes the House Negro Filmmaker to look down upon the Field Negro Filmmaker as an uncouth, retrograde threat to the status and privileges he believes he has worked so hard to achieve. In fact, the House Negro Filmmaker usually develops selective amnesia and forgets that he was once a Field Negro Filmmaker and had to raise money for his first film by hook or by crook. To illustrate this analogy we need go back in time and look at the tenuous and volatile relationship between Spike Lee and Matty Rich. Matty Rich launched his filmmaking career with the 1991 independent film, STRAIGHT OUTTA BROOKLYN, which was financed with credit cards and donations. He would be our Field Negro Filmmaker who attained a Hollywood Contract for his next film, THE INKWELL (1994) which received mixed reviews and was a commercial failure.
Spike Lee, of course, began as a Field Negro Filmmaker with his first feature length independent film, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT in 1986. When he signed his Hollywood Contract with Columbia pictures for SCHOOL DAZE he had successfully transitioned into House Negro Filmmaker status. It is well known that Spike Lee spewed much vitriol against Matty Rich allegedly because he didn’t go to film school and was, ”ignorant,” in Spike’s opinion. (4) Yet only a few years later Spike would have his choke chain yanked by Hollywood when Warner Bros. refused to increase the budget of his epic bio-film MALCOLM X (1992). He would have to go back to his Field Negro Filmmaker roots and raise money from sources outside of Hollywood to complete that film and later several others.
The privileges and status associated with the fabled Hollywood Contract often blinds the House Negro Filmmaker from his or her roots and causes them to see the Field Negro Filmmaker as a competitive threat to their illusion of artistic control in the white controlled Hollywood industry. Matty Rich’s filmmaking career may have stalled and failed for several other reasons, but the hatred and anger between he and his fellow African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee, certainly blinded both of them from the Janus faced nature of The Hollywood Contract. So if you, like many of us, have ever wondered why successful African-American filmmakers and stars only rarely attempt to unite and help those up and coming in the industry, it’s not because of what’s written in the contract that is preventing them, but rather the illusion of status and privileges associated with The Hollywood Contract that divides and ‘controls’ the African-American filmmaker and changes their perception by causing them to see others as a competitive threat.
My only suggestion for a way out of this, for lack of a better phrase,” Hollywood trick bag,” is a radical one. I believe that all of the African-American filmmakers who have signed Hollywood Contracts wherein which they were denied their foreign licensing rights should band together and file a class action lawsuit against all of the parties involved. Whether these filmmakers win or lose the case would not be the measure of the lawsuit’s success or failure, but instead the lawsuit and the controversy it would inevitably create would make all filmmakers of color aware of the importance, the significance and their rights to foreign licensing when and if they are ever offered the gilded Hollywood Contract. Moreover, if these filmmakers should win they could use the money to start and maintain a “Collard Greens Circuit” as I have described in a previous article as an alternative means for funding and distributing African-American cinema. The crime behind the great fortunes of Hollywood and the impoverishment of African-American cinema has to be corrected. If white controlled Hollywood wants to keep a segregated relationship between how white films are funded, distributed and exhibited and African-American films then perhaps a truly segregated cinema, where we keep our profits to sustain and control our own images would show them that a house divided cannot stand, but that if you build another house it surely can.
NOTES
(1) These box office totals are subject to change. Download date 9/3/11. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=treeoflife.htm
(2) Cf., page 9, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, New American Library, 1969 New York: New York.
(3) Cf., “Perry’s Success has black films in fashion” by Steven Zeitchik in The Hollywood Reporter, October 17, 2007.
(4) Cf., “Spike Lee on Filmmaking,” Metcalfe Nasser, www.blackfilm.com, download date 9/3/11.
The Realist Tendency in African-American Film Aesthetics
One
All too often we as African-Americans use the art form of cinema as a signifying practice; that is to say we are caught in the attempt to try to replicate certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with and therefore signify as true. These certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with in our filmic representation of ourselves can be described as a realist tendency, not so much politically proscribed as Soviet Realism during the Communist era, but instead determined and maintained by strongly held belief systems within and outside of our race.(1) If there is a realist tendency in African-American film, it manifests itself as an artistically limited need to show how African-American life really is (in the Ghetto, on the dense urban streets, la vie qoutidienne) and let the audience signify the validity or ‘truthfulness’ of a particular film via the box office gross and DVD sales.
The problem with this realist tendency in African-American film is that it secures and legitimates a belief system which is then tied to our racial identity and poisons our perception of our social realities. No matter how much evidence there is to contradict what we believe to be true about ourselves, we always find aspects of our lives that fit our preconceived beliefs and signify it to be true. For example, if it is generally believed that a majority of Black men don't take care of their children, then any evidence to the contrary is usually discredited, dismissed, or simply ignored. This goes a long way in explaining why the box-office gross of Tyler Perry's film, DADDY'S LITTLE GIRLS (2007), was his lowest grossing film to date. It also explains the release of films like, JUMPING THE BROOM (2011), LOTTERY TICKET(2010), WHO’S YOUR CADDY?(2007), ATL (2006), ROLL BOUNCE (2005), SOUL PLANE (2004) etc, because these films don't challenge what we believe we know about ourselves but instead these films and others like them reiterate this signifying practice of the realist tendency in African-American film. We are limited by our own limited perspective of ourselves; we are bound by the chains that we have ourselves fashioned.
In an appendix in my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Edition (2011), I commented on this realist tendency in my critical analysis of the fourth season of the HBO cable network show THE WIRE.
“THE WIRE is successful only in that it recapitulates a pessimistic and grim perspective of urban ghetto life that most of its viewers need to believe in as a way of measuring the advantages or disadvantages of their own real life circumstances. Those who don’t live in such a ghetto can say to themselves,” Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those problems,” and those that do can say to themselves,” This is the way it really is here in the ghetto.” But it is really a matter of perception exemplified by sociologist Elijah Anderson’s dichotomy of decent and street in his book, CODE OF THE STREET. Those who are glad they don’t have to deal with those problems as dramatized in the show are holding on to decent middle class values in their real lives and those that see those problems as a realistic portrayal of their day to day experiences are adhering to a street orientation which is opposed to those middle class values. These beliefs can be maintained by either kind of viewer even if such a view of urban ghetto life as presented in THE WIRE is not entirely true or realistic.” (pg. 260)
In short, what we signify as ‘black’ is really a matter of perspective and perception that when it is transposed into the medium of film, many black and white filmmakers adhere to these perceptions for the sake of making the material appear ‘realistic’ or authentic, when in actuality this perception is a simplification of the most complex aspects of our racial identity. To give a more explicit rendering of my point it has been reported that during in a 24 hour period on a weekend in August of 2011, 17 people were shot and 6 people were killed in my city of Detroit.(2) This news sent shockwaves throughout the city and around the country. These news reports give the impression of lawlessness and a grim day-to-day reality in the urban ghetto. But during this same 24 hour period the majority of the citizens in Detroit lived their lives within the boundaries of the law and without incident. That is to say, that the violent impression of the urban ghetto is constructed and maintained both by how the media sensationalizes and concentrates its crime reporting and how these news reports feed into a preconceived pessimistic and grim perspective of the urban ghetto held by whites and blacks alike. Thus, the actuality of urban ghetto life that can be perceived through the day-to-day interactions of people who do not commit violent crimes is swept away by the need to believe in a lawless and grim day-to-day perspective of the urban ghetto that is fed by media reports and preconceived ideas.
It is this need to believe in a lawless and grim urban ghetto that so many black filmmakers refuse to challenge because they only consider the content of their films (positive images/negative images) and not the formal organization of their films (editing, mise-en-scene, acting styles, music, shot selection and narrative organization) as a means to challenge the perspective that so many of us need to believe is true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Therefore, many black filmmakers don’t realize that it is the conventional formal organization of their films that supports the realist tendency in African-American cinema and not solely the content. Simply making sure that all the black characters have jobs and adhere to “decent” middle class values does not capture the complexity of our racial identity nor our social realities. There are several questions begged here in my description: Whether or not just because we as blacks identify with a certain aspect of African-American life represented on screen can the formal organization of the film allow us to question that representation? Does an alternative formal organization of the film expose certain social processes and ideological mechanisms that are hidden from us by a conventional representation of the same events or circumstances? Can a film actually challenge what we need to believe is real with an approach to the complexity of how things actually are? Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race?
This last question is actually the most important: Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race? Can the black scholar carry a gun? Can the black gang banger comprehend Charles W. Mill’s The Racial Contract? What we also learn from Elijah Anderson’s CODE OF THE STREET is that most African-Americans engage in a form of,” Code switching,” where individuals switch to the codes and informal rules of the street in social settings that require a readiness for violence and a jockeying for status and respect and then switching back to the codes and rules of decent “bourgeois” mentality when in those social settings that require adherence to middle-class moral values and a display of intelligence and cultural wit. (98-106, Anderson) Therefore, an African-American realist tendency in film has filmmakers representing only one aspect of our dual nature (or code) so that an audience can readily identify these selected aspects and signify what they see as true. This exploitation/representation of one selected aspect over another suppressed aspect is what generated the “In the ‘Hood,” genre of films versus the “Family/Love” genre of African-American films in the Nineties. Today, in a film like,” JUMPING THE BROOM,” we see the two aspects combined as a comical conflict of class expectations between an upper middle class family and an urban working class family. The individuality of a character is suppressed to represent a certain type or class of individuals who adhere to decent or street codes of behaviors and expectations.
Some of the aspects of what I call a realist tendency in African-American film can be described as dramatic and performance paradigms that are repeated in films that feature a majority African-American cast and/or themes and circumstances that are used to represent the urban ghetto:
1) Dialogue that uses curse words spoken in an urban (read: black) dialect. For example the word “motherfucker” is pronounced,” mutherfucka,” to signify urban authenticity or African-American realism. Often when a black actor is cast in a film, lines of dialogue are either changed or improvised by the actor to adhere to this African-American realist tendency. For example, singer/actress Kelly Rowland’s angry cursing in 2003’s FREDDY v. JASON and of course the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).
2) A male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence that follows a theme of revenge (for perceived insults, slights and dishonor) and retaliation (against the members of an opposing gang, or persons perceived to have ordered violence). The ‘In the ‘hood,’ films of the nineties and beyond exemplify this aspect. Most importantly street level drug dealing is almost always associated with Black males as can be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s film, TRAFFIC (2000) where a black male drug dealer sexually exploits a white Ohio Judge’s drug addicted daughter.
3) The mistreatment, torture or death of an innocent character as an ironic counterpoint to those guilty individuals engaging in street violence, drug dealing or other lawless behavior. Perhaps starting with the death of Ricky (Morris Chestnut) in Singleton’s ,” BOYZ IN THE HOOD (1991) and continuing well through such films as JASON’S LYRIC and FRESH, the killing of an innocent is an aspect of African-American social reality that is often used to support a realist tendency in films that represent African-Americans. (3)
4) The use of Rap/R&B music as a soundtrack throughout scenes to reinforce the urban dialect of the dialogue, the male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence, and the threat of violence within the content of the story; in short to reinforce the ‘blackness’ of the story or character who is black within the story. An interesting representation of this paradigm can be seen in John Carpenter’s masterpiece remake of Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film THE THING (1982) where Stevie Wonder’s song, “Superstition” is associated with the black character, Nauls (T.C. Carter).
5) The dramatic creation of black characters limited by the dual nature of African-American realist tendencies which can be categorized by the antinomies listed: street/decent, ghetto/bourgeois, lower class/middle class, urban/rural, northern/southern, west coast/east coast, dark skinned/light skinned, house nigger/field nigger… In effect, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to write of black characters as: scientists (although there are many), world explorers, fantasy heroes (African folklore), astronauts, spies, revolutionaries, Presidents, kings, queens, mythological heroes, gods, conquerors, oracles, geniuses, madmen, composers and virtuosos. We are chained to a limited perception of whether the black character is from the ‘hood or from the affluent suburbs and this leads to a singular dramatic conflict between the ‘hood character and the bourgeois character.
These aspects, taken together, constrict the variation in narrative style and severely limit the content of many African-American filmmaker’s works by coercing African-American audiences to expect these particular aspects in films so that they might identify with the characters and the circumstances and thus signify the film as a true representation. Moreover, African-American filmmakers, either out of fear of not attaining financing for their work or being simply oblivious to these restrictions because they themselves see the limitations as true, don’t utilize alternative formal strategies to challenge these representations. Among the ways in which we know that this realist tendency constricts African-American filmmakers in both the form and content of their work is the fact that we have yet to successfully produce a feature length African-American science fiction or fantasy film. These genres are in themselves antithetical to the various aspects of the realist tendency that I have just described. How can we ever know what freedom is if we don’t believe it to be true or an actual aspect of our racial identity and social realities?
Having described what I assert are some of the major aspects of a realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics, the second part of this essay will endeavor to suggest various formal strategies African-American filmmakers who want make challenging films with unique and distinctive narrative and cinematic styles might utilize to go beyond these restrictions in the representation of race in the cinema. Yet, to make these suggestions I will have to do what is thought of as untenable in most discussions of African-American film aesthetics. I will have to draw on the work of white American, European and foreign filmmakers and/or theorists. Such suggestions that draw on the work of whites are often perceived by many black film scholars, critics and theorists as an attempt to,” use the Hollywood tradition and its system of ideological supports as the basis for evaluating black filmmaking.” (4) That is to say, that previous black scholarship and criticism’s conceptualization of what constitutes ‘white cinema’ does not distinctly differentiate among Hollywood, European, and foreign filmmakers, but instead groups all non-black filmmakers as part of the conspiracy of global white supremacy in the cinema. But as I attempted to reveal in a new chapter called,” Race Traitors: White Filmmakers Who Make Black Films,” in the second edition of my book, SLAVE CINEMA, there were and still are many white American and European filmmakers who challenge conventional racial representations via the formal organization of their films which include African-American actors and/or themes.
A major mistake in my opinion in African-American film criticism and scholarship is the presumption that film form is as racially coded as film content. That, for example, the incendiary racism that constitutes D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) extends beyond the racist content and taints the formal cinematic language and editorial structure of the film. Yet, the fact that Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the form and structure of BIRTH OF A NATION and other white capitalist American filmmaker’s work in their apprehension of film form provides some evidence to disprove that the cinema’s formal language is inherently racist. In short, the point-of-view shot sequence is not racist and is an integral aspect of filmic narration, but rather the point of view of the filmmaker and the content he creates can be explicitly racist. This is why the second part of this essay will concentrate on what I believe to be the originating sources of African-American critical analysis of racial representation (or content) and the conflation of film form and racist film content and this error has contributed to the realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics. As we shall see, it is not just content that African-American filmmakers must manipulate to challenge racial, ideological and political regimes, but also the formal organization of their films must be aggressively manipulated to challenge their audiences.
All too often we as African-Americans use the art form of cinema as a signifying practice; that is to say we are caught in the attempt to try to replicate certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with and therefore signify as true. These certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with in our filmic representation of ourselves can be described as a realist tendency, not so much politically proscribed as Soviet Realism during the Communist era, but instead determined and maintained by strongly held belief systems within and outside of our race.(1) If there is a realist tendency in African-American film, it manifests itself as an artistically limited need to show how African-American life really is (in the Ghetto, on the dense urban streets, la vie qoutidienne) and let the audience signify the validity or ‘truthfulness’ of a particular film via the box office gross and DVD sales.
The problem with this realist tendency in African-American film is that it secures and legitimates a belief system which is then tied to our racial identity and poisons our perception of our social realities. No matter how much evidence there is to contradict what we believe to be true about ourselves, we always find aspects of our lives that fit our preconceived beliefs and signify it to be true. For example, if it is generally believed that a majority of Black men don't take care of their children, then any evidence to the contrary is usually discredited, dismissed, or simply ignored. This goes a long way in explaining why the box-office gross of Tyler Perry's film, DADDY'S LITTLE GIRLS (2007), was his lowest grossing film to date. It also explains the release of films like, JUMPING THE BROOM (2011), LOTTERY TICKET(2010), WHO’S YOUR CADDY?(2007), ATL (2006), ROLL BOUNCE (2005), SOUL PLANE (2004) etc, because these films don't challenge what we believe we know about ourselves but instead these films and others like them reiterate this signifying practice of the realist tendency in African-American film. We are limited by our own limited perspective of ourselves; we are bound by the chains that we have ourselves fashioned.
In an appendix in my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Edition (2011), I commented on this realist tendency in my critical analysis of the fourth season of the HBO cable network show THE WIRE.
“THE WIRE is successful only in that it recapitulates a pessimistic and grim perspective of urban ghetto life that most of its viewers need to believe in as a way of measuring the advantages or disadvantages of their own real life circumstances. Those who don’t live in such a ghetto can say to themselves,” Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those problems,” and those that do can say to themselves,” This is the way it really is here in the ghetto.” But it is really a matter of perception exemplified by sociologist Elijah Anderson’s dichotomy of decent and street in his book, CODE OF THE STREET. Those who are glad they don’t have to deal with those problems as dramatized in the show are holding on to decent middle class values in their real lives and those that see those problems as a realistic portrayal of their day to day experiences are adhering to a street orientation which is opposed to those middle class values. These beliefs can be maintained by either kind of viewer even if such a view of urban ghetto life as presented in THE WIRE is not entirely true or realistic.” (pg. 260)
In short, what we signify as ‘black’ is really a matter of perspective and perception that when it is transposed into the medium of film, many black and white filmmakers adhere to these perceptions for the sake of making the material appear ‘realistic’ or authentic, when in actuality this perception is a simplification of the most complex aspects of our racial identity. To give a more explicit rendering of my point it has been reported that during in a 24 hour period on a weekend in August of 2011, 17 people were shot and 6 people were killed in my city of Detroit.(2) This news sent shockwaves throughout the city and around the country. These news reports give the impression of lawlessness and a grim day-to-day reality in the urban ghetto. But during this same 24 hour period the majority of the citizens in Detroit lived their lives within the boundaries of the law and without incident. That is to say, that the violent impression of the urban ghetto is constructed and maintained both by how the media sensationalizes and concentrates its crime reporting and how these news reports feed into a preconceived pessimistic and grim perspective of the urban ghetto held by whites and blacks alike. Thus, the actuality of urban ghetto life that can be perceived through the day-to-day interactions of people who do not commit violent crimes is swept away by the need to believe in a lawless and grim day-to-day perspective of the urban ghetto that is fed by media reports and preconceived ideas.
It is this need to believe in a lawless and grim urban ghetto that so many black filmmakers refuse to challenge because they only consider the content of their films (positive images/negative images) and not the formal organization of their films (editing, mise-en-scene, acting styles, music, shot selection and narrative organization) as a means to challenge the perspective that so many of us need to believe is true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Therefore, many black filmmakers don’t realize that it is the conventional formal organization of their films that supports the realist tendency in African-American cinema and not solely the content. Simply making sure that all the black characters have jobs and adhere to “decent” middle class values does not capture the complexity of our racial identity nor our social realities. There are several questions begged here in my description: Whether or not just because we as blacks identify with a certain aspect of African-American life represented on screen can the formal organization of the film allow us to question that representation? Does an alternative formal organization of the film expose certain social processes and ideological mechanisms that are hidden from us by a conventional representation of the same events or circumstances? Can a film actually challenge what we need to believe is real with an approach to the complexity of how things actually are? Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race?
This last question is actually the most important: Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race? Can the black scholar carry a gun? Can the black gang banger comprehend Charles W. Mill’s The Racial Contract? What we also learn from Elijah Anderson’s CODE OF THE STREET is that most African-Americans engage in a form of,” Code switching,” where individuals switch to the codes and informal rules of the street in social settings that require a readiness for violence and a jockeying for status and respect and then switching back to the codes and rules of decent “bourgeois” mentality when in those social settings that require adherence to middle-class moral values and a display of intelligence and cultural wit. (98-106, Anderson) Therefore, an African-American realist tendency in film has filmmakers representing only one aspect of our dual nature (or code) so that an audience can readily identify these selected aspects and signify what they see as true. This exploitation/representation of one selected aspect over another suppressed aspect is what generated the “In the ‘Hood,” genre of films versus the “Family/Love” genre of African-American films in the Nineties. Today, in a film like,” JUMPING THE BROOM,” we see the two aspects combined as a comical conflict of class expectations between an upper middle class family and an urban working class family. The individuality of a character is suppressed to represent a certain type or class of individuals who adhere to decent or street codes of behaviors and expectations.
Some of the aspects of what I call a realist tendency in African-American film can be described as dramatic and performance paradigms that are repeated in films that feature a majority African-American cast and/or themes and circumstances that are used to represent the urban ghetto:
1) Dialogue that uses curse words spoken in an urban (read: black) dialect. For example the word “motherfucker” is pronounced,” mutherfucka,” to signify urban authenticity or African-American realism. Often when a black actor is cast in a film, lines of dialogue are either changed or improvised by the actor to adhere to this African-American realist tendency. For example, singer/actress Kelly Rowland’s angry cursing in 2003’s FREDDY v. JASON and of course the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).
2) A male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence that follows a theme of revenge (for perceived insults, slights and dishonor) and retaliation (against the members of an opposing gang, or persons perceived to have ordered violence). The ‘In the ‘hood,’ films of the nineties and beyond exemplify this aspect. Most importantly street level drug dealing is almost always associated with Black males as can be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s film, TRAFFIC (2000) where a black male drug dealer sexually exploits a white Ohio Judge’s drug addicted daughter.
3) The mistreatment, torture or death of an innocent character as an ironic counterpoint to those guilty individuals engaging in street violence, drug dealing or other lawless behavior. Perhaps starting with the death of Ricky (Morris Chestnut) in Singleton’s ,” BOYZ IN THE HOOD (1991) and continuing well through such films as JASON’S LYRIC and FRESH, the killing of an innocent is an aspect of African-American social reality that is often used to support a realist tendency in films that represent African-Americans. (3)
4) The use of Rap/R&B music as a soundtrack throughout scenes to reinforce the urban dialect of the dialogue, the male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence, and the threat of violence within the content of the story; in short to reinforce the ‘blackness’ of the story or character who is black within the story. An interesting representation of this paradigm can be seen in John Carpenter’s masterpiece remake of Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film THE THING (1982) where Stevie Wonder’s song, “Superstition” is associated with the black character, Nauls (T.C. Carter).
5) The dramatic creation of black characters limited by the dual nature of African-American realist tendencies which can be categorized by the antinomies listed: street/decent, ghetto/bourgeois, lower class/middle class, urban/rural, northern/southern, west coast/east coast, dark skinned/light skinned, house nigger/field nigger… In effect, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to write of black characters as: scientists (although there are many), world explorers, fantasy heroes (African folklore), astronauts, spies, revolutionaries, Presidents, kings, queens, mythological heroes, gods, conquerors, oracles, geniuses, madmen, composers and virtuosos. We are chained to a limited perception of whether the black character is from the ‘hood or from the affluent suburbs and this leads to a singular dramatic conflict between the ‘hood character and the bourgeois character.
These aspects, taken together, constrict the variation in narrative style and severely limit the content of many African-American filmmaker’s works by coercing African-American audiences to expect these particular aspects in films so that they might identify with the characters and the circumstances and thus signify the film as a true representation. Moreover, African-American filmmakers, either out of fear of not attaining financing for their work or being simply oblivious to these restrictions because they themselves see the limitations as true, don’t utilize alternative formal strategies to challenge these representations. Among the ways in which we know that this realist tendency constricts African-American filmmakers in both the form and content of their work is the fact that we have yet to successfully produce a feature length African-American science fiction or fantasy film. These genres are in themselves antithetical to the various aspects of the realist tendency that I have just described. How can we ever know what freedom is if we don’t believe it to be true or an actual aspect of our racial identity and social realities?
Having described what I assert are some of the major aspects of a realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics, the second part of this essay will endeavor to suggest various formal strategies African-American filmmakers who want make challenging films with unique and distinctive narrative and cinematic styles might utilize to go beyond these restrictions in the representation of race in the cinema. Yet, to make these suggestions I will have to do what is thought of as untenable in most discussions of African-American film aesthetics. I will have to draw on the work of white American, European and foreign filmmakers and/or theorists. Such suggestions that draw on the work of whites are often perceived by many black film scholars, critics and theorists as an attempt to,” use the Hollywood tradition and its system of ideological supports as the basis for evaluating black filmmaking.” (4) That is to say, that previous black scholarship and criticism’s conceptualization of what constitutes ‘white cinema’ does not distinctly differentiate among Hollywood, European, and foreign filmmakers, but instead groups all non-black filmmakers as part of the conspiracy of global white supremacy in the cinema. But as I attempted to reveal in a new chapter called,” Race Traitors: White Filmmakers Who Make Black Films,” in the second edition of my book, SLAVE CINEMA, there were and still are many white American and European filmmakers who challenge conventional racial representations via the formal organization of their films which include African-American actors and/or themes.
A major mistake in my opinion in African-American film criticism and scholarship is the presumption that film form is as racially coded as film content. That, for example, the incendiary racism that constitutes D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) extends beyond the racist content and taints the formal cinematic language and editorial structure of the film. Yet, the fact that Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the form and structure of BIRTH OF A NATION and other white capitalist American filmmaker’s work in their apprehension of film form provides some evidence to disprove that the cinema’s formal language is inherently racist. In short, the point-of-view shot sequence is not racist and is an integral aspect of filmic narration, but rather the point of view of the filmmaker and the content he creates can be explicitly racist. This is why the second part of this essay will concentrate on what I believe to be the originating sources of African-American critical analysis of racial representation (or content) and the conflation of film form and racist film content and this error has contributed to the realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics. As we shall see, it is not just content that African-American filmmakers must manipulate to challenge racial, ideological and political regimes, but also the formal organization of their films must be aggressively manipulated to challenge their audiences.
Two
The near exclusive concentration on film content (story, characters, stereotypes, structured absence, music soundtrack) in African-American film aesthetics as opposed to film form (narrative style/dynamism, film language, mise-en-scene, editing, shot selection, sound, film score) has two powerful originating factors:
1) The African-American critical reaction against D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
2) Network television shows from the 1950’s (The Jack Benny Show, Beulah), 60’s (I Spy, Julia), 70’s (Alex Haley’s Roots Mini-series, The Jeffersons, Good Times), 80’s (The Cosby Show), and 90’s (Fresh Prince, Living Single, etc).
In one of the earliest African-American critiques of the film BIRTH OF A NATION Lawrence Reddick describes the film’s dissonant duality,” From a strictly artistic and technical point of view,” he writes,” it was a masterpiece of conception and structure. Even today, it is important from this angle.” Nevertheless, Reddick points out,” Birth of a Nation has remained, without question, the most vicious anti-negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”(5) In our abhorrence of the content of BIRTH OF A NATION and its political utility (increasing both KKK membership and lynchings of blacks during and after its initial release) African-American critics and filmmakers were reluctant to appreciate the form of the film as they attacked how the film represented African-Americans. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult to appreciate the form of this film since the content attacks us as a people with its blackface caricatures and its racially derogatory themes presented via a sophisticated narrative structure and formal technique. To this effect, when Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the film they were not affected by its racist content and so the formal structure and narrative style of the film was not obstructed and contributed to their aesthetic theories on film and the development of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories on montage.
Rather than discuss Billy Bitzer’s mobile camera, panoramic long shots, night cinematography, panning shots, soft focus and diffuse lighting techniques, or Griffith’s parallel editing, layered mise-en-scene, the use of the fade out to end a scene, iris shots and close ups in BIRTH OF A NATION, African-American critics aimed their outrage at the content of the film because of the urgency of the political situation that the film was abetting: anti-Negro sentiment in the form of lynchings and as a KKK recruitment tool. In my opinion it was this, important and necessary, outrage at the content of BIRTH OF A NATION that led many contemporary and later African-American critics to conflate classical Hollywood film form with racist film content. As Vincent F. Rocchio asserts in his book,’ Reel Racism,’ concerning his critique of the film,” By subordinating the aesthetics of the film to its rhetoric,” he will,” demonstrate that the film’s participation in racism as a signifying process cannot be made distinct from the film, and that indeed, without its racism, the film would not have the status it has today.”(6) Thus by conflating form with content, African-American critics equated the formal techniques and narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood cinema’s use of the cinematic language with the racist rhetoric of the dominate culture.
In short: How the story is told is as racist as What the story has told; the classical narrative structure is as racist as the story; the cinematic form is as racist as the anti-negro content. The question I am begging here is: Is an art-form racist or is a person racist who uses an art-form to communicate a racist idea? It is imperative, if we as African-American filmmakers and critics want to challenge the realist tendency in African-American film, that we appreciate the difference between the narrative and the story. The narrative is the way that the story has been told. The story is what has been told or simply the content of the narrative. A story in the art form of film can be told in many different ways. It is my contention that African-American film critics, scholars and filmmakers give primacy to the content of the film art and not the formal techniques and narrative structure of the film art and that this critical error began with the important and necessary outrage against D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
The other contributing factor to the near exclusive concern with film content by African-Americans was described in the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, as The Five Errors that Constrict African-American Cinematic Style:
“By far the most important contributing factor, if not the sole factor, is television- particularly network television which we might consider ‘the poor man’s cinema’. Because network television is freely broadcast and readily available to nearly all classes and castes of people, the rudimentary use of cinematic technique in television studio shows, sit-coms, soap operas and weekly dramatic series is generally understood as a standardized technique of cinematic expression. Network television is the baseline through which all other cinematic techniques are measured, by default. “(pgs. 91-92)
Some of the most culturally specific and racially galvanizing content that has garnered the greatest numbers of African-American audiences has appeared on network television. In the early days of the medium there were servant roles like that of Rochester (Eddie Anderson) on The Jack Benny Show and the multiple black actresses (Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers) that tackled the show Beulah about a maid who was “Queen of the Kitchen”. In the 1960’s after almost 5 years of bit parts in Westerns and failed variety shows like The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, the latter half of that decade saw the casting of Bill Cosby in the espionage series, I Spy and the success of Julia and Room 222. Later in the 1970’s there were the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin sit-coms, The Jeffersons and Good Times coupled with other shows like, Sanford & Son,” that, by and large, operat[ed] under the creative control and direction of white studio and network executives.”(7) The 70’s culminated with the production and broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots mini-series which,” brought to millions of Americans, for the first time, the story of the horrors of slavery and the noble struggles of black Americans.” (8) Yet as Herman Gray deftly points out:
” This powerful television epic effectively constructed the story of American slavery from the stage of emotional identifications and attachments to individual characters, family struggles, and the realization of the American dream. Consequently, the social organization of racial subordination, the cultural reliance on human degradation, and the economic exploitation of black labor receded almost completely from the story. And, of course, this quality is precisely what made the television series such a huge success.” (9)
If we continue in succession, the 1980’s gave us among other hit black sit-coms like The Cosby Show and in the 1990’s we had shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Living Single, Moesha and others that represented the,” interiority of black life on American Network Television.”(10) Therefore when I say that African-American critics and filmmakers are fixated on film content, I am really pointing out that they are fixated on black representation on screen; the positive and ideal representations of our race and culture that if not truly authentic in its depth and complexity, then at least these representations conform to what we need to believe is true about our race and our social realities.
If BIRTH OF A NATION implanted a derogatory representation of African-Americans in the cinema at the beginning of cinema history, then network television concerned itself solely with modulating representations of blackness as blacks moved from second class citizenship to equal citizenship through the decades. We can trace these modulating representations of blackness from the servant roles of the 1950’s, to the ‘race neutral’ professionals of the 60’s, to Roots and the bourgeois family ideals of the 70’s to the affluence and ideals of bourgeois self-sufficiency of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Yet, all this is to say that the African-American fixation of racial representation, or filmic content, has obscured the fact that all representation is constructed and that to expose, question, or challenge the ideological, sociological and political forces that affect us- one must deploy alternative formal strategies and non-classical narrative techniques in specific films or television series that encourage the spectators to become critical observers rather than “signifying monkeys” attempting to deceive the lion of the white controlled entertainment industry, but ultimately falling victim to its persuasive power.
The fixation on content or racial representation has standardized African-American film aesthetics in such a way that form is made ‘invisible’ as a means to 1) reach the broadest African-American audience possible (as determined by network television standards) and 2) the representation of race is constructed to optimize maximum audience emotional identification (as determined by both network television and classical Hollywood narration). The overall effect of these means is that through the emotional attachment with individual characters and/or family struggles cinematic form is not used to question, challenge or expose the “American dream” or the ideological, political or social forces that shape these representations and make them palatable to a broad audience. Thus, one cannot question the circumstances as to why,’ The Fresh Prince,’ had to move to luxurious and wealthy,‘ Bel Air,’ from the violent gang and drug infested streets of West Philadelphia, for to do so would ruin the comedy of the situation. Make no mistake, I believe that to broaden the boundaries of ‘blackness’ one has to question the authenticity of the very representations to which we so strongly identify. And the most effective way to question racial representations is through the formal and narrative organization of the film.
I will give a list of these standardized narrative and formal structures and techniques below:
1) The Linear Narrative: In general, a story proceeds from beginning to end in a forward chronological progression. Rarely are alternative narrative strategies deployed in African-American film such as those I detail in my book, Screenwriting Into Film: Forgotten Methods & New Possibilities (2008). The non-linear narrative (moving forwards and backwards in time), Discovery narrative (a ruse played on a character), Seduction narrative (a ruse played on the audience) or Conceptual narrative (a metaphor or allegory that critiques contemporary ruling social, political, racial or ideological positions).(11)
2) Acting is determined by standards of African-American duality (decent/street; hood/bourgeois, etc) and emotional identification is achieved through idealized therapeutic dialogue where characters reveal their emotions or thoughts verbally for the benefit of the expectant audience. The popularity of Tyler Perry’s films is based in no small part on this African-American duality, emotional identification and idealized therapeutic dialogue.
The rest of these standardizations in the use of film form by many African-American filmmakers are listed directly from the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American (pgs. 91-142):
3) The camera must stay on the person who is talking, resulting in an overdependence upon the medium shot for dialogue involving two or more persons and the “dragnet” editorial technique. The medium shot is used to keep all of the dialogue and the performances of the actors intact, like a stage play, and provides an economical way to shoot by reducing the amount of editing needed to put the film together. The downside is that a majority of African-American filmmakers lack a distinctive style when they follow this model. The “dragnet” editorial technique is a technique where the editing is controlled by who is talking and the camera must stay on the face of the talker and not the listener. This editorial technique was described and named by famed editor, Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye 2nd edition.
4) Professional lighting is lighting that is evenly spread out over an entire set or location. A professional technique ‘borrowed’ from studio television where lighting has to kept at a certain ‘broadcast standard’ instead of an artistic standard. When lighting is approached as a means to allow the audience to see every object or person clearly in a scene (pending the story and theme of course) we have effectively rendered lighting mute as a means of cinematic expression.
5) An overdependence on the music soundtrack or music score which ruins pacing and disguises plot holes or story incongruities. Since music is considered African-American’s first art we often expend more time and effort on the selection and production of the soundtrack than we do the story, narrative structure and formal methods of the film. The film art is held in a subordinate position relative to the art of music. The very notion of making a film without music (say as Alfred Hitchcock did with his film THE BIRDS- 1963) would be unthinkable to many African-American filmmakers, if simply because we often use film as a means to hear music as opposed to using music as a means to see what’s not in the film. An example would be Bernard Herrmann’s use of shrieking violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) shower murder scene in which we actually never see a knife penetrate the flesh of the victim, but the music makes us see what is not in the film.
6) A lack of the use of montage [as described and deployed by Russian film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and many other American and foreign filmmakers after him] as an editorial strategy to demonstrate a theme or expand the boundaries of a story. Associational montage where different scenes are intercut together to make a larger commentary within a story is rarely utilized in African-American film aesthetics. In my book I used the example from Francis Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972) where the baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew was intercut with the killing of all of the heads of the five mafia families. It is a sequence that expands the boundaries of the crime story to comment on the fact that mob violence is ritualized violence that must occur,” every five or six years,” to change or consolidate power.
7) An afro-centric refusal to either watch or incorporate the narrative advances and/or cinematic techniques of international film artists past or present. Since film is and has always been an international art form we cannot afford to keep thinking of ‘black film’ as in a vacuum. Our films are watched overseas just as we watch foreign films; ideas are and must be shared. The notion of ‘black elitism’ where the other African-Americans who are not in your present company are somehow stupider than you, is one of the means through which we self-censor our ideas. By believing that ‘other blacks’ won’t get it and since black film only appeals to ‘other blacks’ it’s better to keep ideas, stories, characters, and plots as simple and identifiable as possible to gain the most box office success at the expense of artistic style and integrity.
Yet the question still remains: How do we encourage spectators to become critical observers? By what alternative formal strategies can we encourage spectators to become critical observers instead of becoming emotionally identified with characters and circumstances to the point that they are only signifying that a specific representation appears authentic instead of questioning the social, political or ideological forces that are creating those circumstances? One method through which the encouragement of critical observation can be done is through alienation, distanciation and defamiliarizing techniques and strategies first advocated by German playwright and theater director Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and later transposed and deployed by a variety of different filmmakers like German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, American filmmakers Charles Burnett (THE KILLER OF SHEEP- 1977) and Lance Hammer (BALLAST – 2008). In the following section rather than discuss all of these different techniques and strategies I would like to concentrate on their overall effect which is to ‘defamiliarize’ that which we have come to take for granted in how the world, and by extension our race, is represented on screen.
NOTES
(1)Soviet Realism was a government sanctioned form of artistic censorship beginning in 1929,” which idealized the Soviet experience in order to inspire the masses with the glories of life under Lenin and Stalin,” under this limited ideological perspective,” the genius of the Soviet cinema was devastated, since anything unique, personal, or formally experimental was explicitly forbidden to appear upon the screen.” (194, A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook, 1981, Norton & Company; New York.)
(2) http://www.detnews.com/article/20110814/METRO/108140312/15-shot--including-6-dead--in-Detroit-in-24-hours Detroit News.com download date August 16th, 2011
(3) To be more accurate, we should perhaps start with the killing of the “Cochise” (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) character in Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (1975).
(4) pg. 113, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition by Gladstone L. Yearwood, African World Press: Trenton, New Jersey, 2000.
(5) Pg. 286, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909-1949 by Anna Everett, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
(6) Pg. 30, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture
by Vincent F. Rocchio, Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.
(7) pg. 71, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness by Herman Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Ibid, pg. 78
(9) Ibid, pg. 78
(10) Ibid, pg. xxi
(11) Here are some of the films that illustrate these types of narrative structures: Linear: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989-Spike Lee), VIVRE SA VIE (1962- Jean-Luc Godard; Non-linear : THE LAST EMPEROR (1987 theatrical release- Bernardo Bertolucci), AMORES PERROS(2000- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Discovery Narrative: TRAINING DAY (2001- Antoine Fuqua), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968- Roman Polanski); Seduction Narrative: THE SIXTH SENSE (1999- M. Night Shyamalan), PSYCHO (1960- Alfred Hitchcock); Conceptual Narrative: ENTER THE VOID (2009- Gaspar Noe), TEOREMA (1968- Pier Paolo Pasolini)
The near exclusive concentration on film content (story, characters, stereotypes, structured absence, music soundtrack) in African-American film aesthetics as opposed to film form (narrative style/dynamism, film language, mise-en-scene, editing, shot selection, sound, film score) has two powerful originating factors:
1) The African-American critical reaction against D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
2) Network television shows from the 1950’s (The Jack Benny Show, Beulah), 60’s (I Spy, Julia), 70’s (Alex Haley’s Roots Mini-series, The Jeffersons, Good Times), 80’s (The Cosby Show), and 90’s (Fresh Prince, Living Single, etc).
In one of the earliest African-American critiques of the film BIRTH OF A NATION Lawrence Reddick describes the film’s dissonant duality,” From a strictly artistic and technical point of view,” he writes,” it was a masterpiece of conception and structure. Even today, it is important from this angle.” Nevertheless, Reddick points out,” Birth of a Nation has remained, without question, the most vicious anti-negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”(5) In our abhorrence of the content of BIRTH OF A NATION and its political utility (increasing both KKK membership and lynchings of blacks during and after its initial release) African-American critics and filmmakers were reluctant to appreciate the form of the film as they attacked how the film represented African-Americans. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult to appreciate the form of this film since the content attacks us as a people with its blackface caricatures and its racially derogatory themes presented via a sophisticated narrative structure and formal technique. To this effect, when Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the film they were not affected by its racist content and so the formal structure and narrative style of the film was not obstructed and contributed to their aesthetic theories on film and the development of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories on montage.
Rather than discuss Billy Bitzer’s mobile camera, panoramic long shots, night cinematography, panning shots, soft focus and diffuse lighting techniques, or Griffith’s parallel editing, layered mise-en-scene, the use of the fade out to end a scene, iris shots and close ups in BIRTH OF A NATION, African-American critics aimed their outrage at the content of the film because of the urgency of the political situation that the film was abetting: anti-Negro sentiment in the form of lynchings and as a KKK recruitment tool. In my opinion it was this, important and necessary, outrage at the content of BIRTH OF A NATION that led many contemporary and later African-American critics to conflate classical Hollywood film form with racist film content. As Vincent F. Rocchio asserts in his book,’ Reel Racism,’ concerning his critique of the film,” By subordinating the aesthetics of the film to its rhetoric,” he will,” demonstrate that the film’s participation in racism as a signifying process cannot be made distinct from the film, and that indeed, without its racism, the film would not have the status it has today.”(6) Thus by conflating form with content, African-American critics equated the formal techniques and narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood cinema’s use of the cinematic language with the racist rhetoric of the dominate culture.
In short: How the story is told is as racist as What the story has told; the classical narrative structure is as racist as the story; the cinematic form is as racist as the anti-negro content. The question I am begging here is: Is an art-form racist or is a person racist who uses an art-form to communicate a racist idea? It is imperative, if we as African-American filmmakers and critics want to challenge the realist tendency in African-American film, that we appreciate the difference between the narrative and the story. The narrative is the way that the story has been told. The story is what has been told or simply the content of the narrative. A story in the art form of film can be told in many different ways. It is my contention that African-American film critics, scholars and filmmakers give primacy to the content of the film art and not the formal techniques and narrative structure of the film art and that this critical error began with the important and necessary outrage against D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
The other contributing factor to the near exclusive concern with film content by African-Americans was described in the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, as The Five Errors that Constrict African-American Cinematic Style:
“By far the most important contributing factor, if not the sole factor, is television- particularly network television which we might consider ‘the poor man’s cinema’. Because network television is freely broadcast and readily available to nearly all classes and castes of people, the rudimentary use of cinematic technique in television studio shows, sit-coms, soap operas and weekly dramatic series is generally understood as a standardized technique of cinematic expression. Network television is the baseline through which all other cinematic techniques are measured, by default. “(pgs. 91-92)
Some of the most culturally specific and racially galvanizing content that has garnered the greatest numbers of African-American audiences has appeared on network television. In the early days of the medium there were servant roles like that of Rochester (Eddie Anderson) on The Jack Benny Show and the multiple black actresses (Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers) that tackled the show Beulah about a maid who was “Queen of the Kitchen”. In the 1960’s after almost 5 years of bit parts in Westerns and failed variety shows like The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, the latter half of that decade saw the casting of Bill Cosby in the espionage series, I Spy and the success of Julia and Room 222. Later in the 1970’s there were the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin sit-coms, The Jeffersons and Good Times coupled with other shows like, Sanford & Son,” that, by and large, operat[ed] under the creative control and direction of white studio and network executives.”(7) The 70’s culminated with the production and broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots mini-series which,” brought to millions of Americans, for the first time, the story of the horrors of slavery and the noble struggles of black Americans.” (8) Yet as Herman Gray deftly points out:
” This powerful television epic effectively constructed the story of American slavery from the stage of emotional identifications and attachments to individual characters, family struggles, and the realization of the American dream. Consequently, the social organization of racial subordination, the cultural reliance on human degradation, and the economic exploitation of black labor receded almost completely from the story. And, of course, this quality is precisely what made the television series such a huge success.” (9)
If we continue in succession, the 1980’s gave us among other hit black sit-coms like The Cosby Show and in the 1990’s we had shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Living Single, Moesha and others that represented the,” interiority of black life on American Network Television.”(10) Therefore when I say that African-American critics and filmmakers are fixated on film content, I am really pointing out that they are fixated on black representation on screen; the positive and ideal representations of our race and culture that if not truly authentic in its depth and complexity, then at least these representations conform to what we need to believe is true about our race and our social realities.
If BIRTH OF A NATION implanted a derogatory representation of African-Americans in the cinema at the beginning of cinema history, then network television concerned itself solely with modulating representations of blackness as blacks moved from second class citizenship to equal citizenship through the decades. We can trace these modulating representations of blackness from the servant roles of the 1950’s, to the ‘race neutral’ professionals of the 60’s, to Roots and the bourgeois family ideals of the 70’s to the affluence and ideals of bourgeois self-sufficiency of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Yet, all this is to say that the African-American fixation of racial representation, or filmic content, has obscured the fact that all representation is constructed and that to expose, question, or challenge the ideological, sociological and political forces that affect us- one must deploy alternative formal strategies and non-classical narrative techniques in specific films or television series that encourage the spectators to become critical observers rather than “signifying monkeys” attempting to deceive the lion of the white controlled entertainment industry, but ultimately falling victim to its persuasive power.
The fixation on content or racial representation has standardized African-American film aesthetics in such a way that form is made ‘invisible’ as a means to 1) reach the broadest African-American audience possible (as determined by network television standards) and 2) the representation of race is constructed to optimize maximum audience emotional identification (as determined by both network television and classical Hollywood narration). The overall effect of these means is that through the emotional attachment with individual characters and/or family struggles cinematic form is not used to question, challenge or expose the “American dream” or the ideological, political or social forces that shape these representations and make them palatable to a broad audience. Thus, one cannot question the circumstances as to why,’ The Fresh Prince,’ had to move to luxurious and wealthy,‘ Bel Air,’ from the violent gang and drug infested streets of West Philadelphia, for to do so would ruin the comedy of the situation. Make no mistake, I believe that to broaden the boundaries of ‘blackness’ one has to question the authenticity of the very representations to which we so strongly identify. And the most effective way to question racial representations is through the formal and narrative organization of the film.
I will give a list of these standardized narrative and formal structures and techniques below:
1) The Linear Narrative: In general, a story proceeds from beginning to end in a forward chronological progression. Rarely are alternative narrative strategies deployed in African-American film such as those I detail in my book, Screenwriting Into Film: Forgotten Methods & New Possibilities (2008). The non-linear narrative (moving forwards and backwards in time), Discovery narrative (a ruse played on a character), Seduction narrative (a ruse played on the audience) or Conceptual narrative (a metaphor or allegory that critiques contemporary ruling social, political, racial or ideological positions).(11)
2) Acting is determined by standards of African-American duality (decent/street; hood/bourgeois, etc) and emotional identification is achieved through idealized therapeutic dialogue where characters reveal their emotions or thoughts verbally for the benefit of the expectant audience. The popularity of Tyler Perry’s films is based in no small part on this African-American duality, emotional identification and idealized therapeutic dialogue.
The rest of these standardizations in the use of film form by many African-American filmmakers are listed directly from the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American (pgs. 91-142):
3) The camera must stay on the person who is talking, resulting in an overdependence upon the medium shot for dialogue involving two or more persons and the “dragnet” editorial technique. The medium shot is used to keep all of the dialogue and the performances of the actors intact, like a stage play, and provides an economical way to shoot by reducing the amount of editing needed to put the film together. The downside is that a majority of African-American filmmakers lack a distinctive style when they follow this model. The “dragnet” editorial technique is a technique where the editing is controlled by who is talking and the camera must stay on the face of the talker and not the listener. This editorial technique was described and named by famed editor, Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye 2nd edition.
4) Professional lighting is lighting that is evenly spread out over an entire set or location. A professional technique ‘borrowed’ from studio television where lighting has to kept at a certain ‘broadcast standard’ instead of an artistic standard. When lighting is approached as a means to allow the audience to see every object or person clearly in a scene (pending the story and theme of course) we have effectively rendered lighting mute as a means of cinematic expression.
5) An overdependence on the music soundtrack or music score which ruins pacing and disguises plot holes or story incongruities. Since music is considered African-American’s first art we often expend more time and effort on the selection and production of the soundtrack than we do the story, narrative structure and formal methods of the film. The film art is held in a subordinate position relative to the art of music. The very notion of making a film without music (say as Alfred Hitchcock did with his film THE BIRDS- 1963) would be unthinkable to many African-American filmmakers, if simply because we often use film as a means to hear music as opposed to using music as a means to see what’s not in the film. An example would be Bernard Herrmann’s use of shrieking violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) shower murder scene in which we actually never see a knife penetrate the flesh of the victim, but the music makes us see what is not in the film.
6) A lack of the use of montage [as described and deployed by Russian film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and many other American and foreign filmmakers after him] as an editorial strategy to demonstrate a theme or expand the boundaries of a story. Associational montage where different scenes are intercut together to make a larger commentary within a story is rarely utilized in African-American film aesthetics. In my book I used the example from Francis Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972) where the baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew was intercut with the killing of all of the heads of the five mafia families. It is a sequence that expands the boundaries of the crime story to comment on the fact that mob violence is ritualized violence that must occur,” every five or six years,” to change or consolidate power.
7) An afro-centric refusal to either watch or incorporate the narrative advances and/or cinematic techniques of international film artists past or present. Since film is and has always been an international art form we cannot afford to keep thinking of ‘black film’ as in a vacuum. Our films are watched overseas just as we watch foreign films; ideas are and must be shared. The notion of ‘black elitism’ where the other African-Americans who are not in your present company are somehow stupider than you, is one of the means through which we self-censor our ideas. By believing that ‘other blacks’ won’t get it and since black film only appeals to ‘other blacks’ it’s better to keep ideas, stories, characters, and plots as simple and identifiable as possible to gain the most box office success at the expense of artistic style and integrity.
Yet the question still remains: How do we encourage spectators to become critical observers? By what alternative formal strategies can we encourage spectators to become critical observers instead of becoming emotionally identified with characters and circumstances to the point that they are only signifying that a specific representation appears authentic instead of questioning the social, political or ideological forces that are creating those circumstances? One method through which the encouragement of critical observation can be done is through alienation, distanciation and defamiliarizing techniques and strategies first advocated by German playwright and theater director Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and later transposed and deployed by a variety of different filmmakers like German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, American filmmakers Charles Burnett (THE KILLER OF SHEEP- 1977) and Lance Hammer (BALLAST – 2008). In the following section rather than discuss all of these different techniques and strategies I would like to concentrate on their overall effect which is to ‘defamiliarize’ that which we have come to take for granted in how the world, and by extension our race, is represented on screen.
NOTES
(1)Soviet Realism was a government sanctioned form of artistic censorship beginning in 1929,” which idealized the Soviet experience in order to inspire the masses with the glories of life under Lenin and Stalin,” under this limited ideological perspective,” the genius of the Soviet cinema was devastated, since anything unique, personal, or formally experimental was explicitly forbidden to appear upon the screen.” (194, A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook, 1981, Norton & Company; New York.)
(2) http://www.detnews.com/article/20110814/METRO/108140312/15-shot--including-6-dead--in-Detroit-in-24-hours Detroit News.com download date August 16th, 2011
(3) To be more accurate, we should perhaps start with the killing of the “Cochise” (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) character in Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (1975).
(4) pg. 113, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition by Gladstone L. Yearwood, African World Press: Trenton, New Jersey, 2000.
(5) Pg. 286, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909-1949 by Anna Everett, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
(6) Pg. 30, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture
by Vincent F. Rocchio, Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.
(7) pg. 71, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness by Herman Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Ibid, pg. 78
(9) Ibid, pg. 78
(10) Ibid, pg. xxi
(11) Here are some of the films that illustrate these types of narrative structures: Linear: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989-Spike Lee), VIVRE SA VIE (1962- Jean-Luc Godard; Non-linear : THE LAST EMPEROR (1987 theatrical release- Bernardo Bertolucci), AMORES PERROS(2000- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Discovery Narrative: TRAINING DAY (2001- Antoine Fuqua), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968- Roman Polanski); Seduction Narrative: THE SIXTH SENSE (1999- M. Night Shyamalan), PSYCHO (1960- Alfred Hitchcock); Conceptual Narrative: ENTER THE VOID (2009- Gaspar Noe), TEOREMA (1968- Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Friday, February 20, 2009
Andre Seewood's Latest Mischaracterized
I was truly saddened and deeply offended by Arts & Entertainment Editor, Isaac Elster’s tepid review of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, (“Andre Seewood’s latest disappoints,” in The South End, Jan. 28th-Feb. 3rd 2009). It was a review which deliberately mischaracterized my work by its use of glib and incorrect summaries of my book’s main ideas and major themes and unsubstantiated conjecture. It was clear to me from reading the review that Mr. Elster did not thoroughly read my book nor did he earnestly comprehend its contents.
For one, I do not define independent cinema as,” films that are made with the creator’s singular vision and often are without the backing of major studios,” as Mr. Elster defines it in his piece. Instead, I define the independence of a filmmaker,” by the heretical nature of the content, theme or form of a specific film or body of work that challenges the status quo; that goes against the generally accepted notions… in an effort to augment humanity’s potential for good.” (pg.31) The opening section of my book explores why it is so difficult for African-American independent filmmakers to practice this heretical operation in their independent films.
Secondly, the second section of my book does not,” explore five stereotypes of African-Americans in film,” as Mr. Elster erroneously described. The second section of my book looks at,” five assumptions [about race that] provide a perceptual frame through which the African-American audience view themselves in film.” (pg.37) For the record, I spent 50 pages in my book discussing major films and the historical and social circumstances that have contributed to these assumptions as well as the major films and filmmakers who have tried to debunk these assumptions. What is insightful about this section is how it shows white and African-American filmmakers breaking these assumptions while simultaneously examining the various dramatic and formal strategies employed by these filmmakers in their films.
Thirdly, it was completely unsubstantiated conjecture for Mr. Elster to state that,” probably because he had not written as much as his editors wanted- Seewood goes off on several tangents,” in reference to the three appendices that close my book. The appendices of my book interrelate to the representation of race, class, sexuality in the media and the role of the African-American artist in his or her own community and are not as Elster glibly describes,” tangents.” It was this type of mean-spirited conjecture that reveals that my book was not thoroughly read and further betrays the negative bias of Mr. Elster against my work that prohibited a fair review.
Where Mr. Elster does begrudgingly praise the third section of my book for being passionately written, he immediately poisons that praise by saying that I am making a point that,” many could discover for themselves.” It is just such an attitude of begrudging praise and hateful rejection that I feel poisons a healthy debate about African-American cinema and contributes to the very aesthetic and ideological problems within the African-American community that I discuss in my book. Finally, I do not pick,” bones with Tyler Perry,” as Mr. Elster states, but instead I examine what factors have contributed to African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry’s recent success and what his success might mean for up and coming African-American filmmakers. Readers were also not told where the book could be purchased on-line or the price of the trade paperback. It is for all of these reasons that I have detailed above that I am certain that my book was not thoroughly read, fully comprehended nor fairly reviewed.
In many ways Mr. Elster's review epitomizes a larger problem within the African-American community today that can be summarized as the intolerance of critical thinking and new ideas that critique deeply entrenched social norms. It leads one to suspect that "the mis-education of the negro" begins at home. For instance, Mr. Elster calls much of my book "filler", but what he is really calling filler is my analysis of various important films that either substantiate my arguments or throw light upon dynamic changes within the American film industry. Films like, MISSION TO MARS (featuring Don Cheadle), JACKIE BROWN, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968 version), THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (John Sayles), IDLEWILD, ATL, MALCOLM X, APOCALYPSE NOW, NOTHIN' BUT A MAN, CRASH, MYSTIC RIVER, and others are discussed in my book because they reflect the advances and retrenchments of American cinema as it concerns African-Americans. In looking over my book, there are a few typos (nobody's perfect), but not nearly as many as Mr.Elster intimates in his review. He mentions the fact that I misspelled Will Smith's film IN THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, but must beg for mercy here because that was a computer spell check mistake. I am inclined to believe that because Mr. Elster was either unable or unwilling to comprehend some of the major concepts I used in my book, he used Occam's Razor to cover for his own ignorance and decided that I had misspelled more words than he understood. Concepts like, Cognitive Dissonance and Heresy are explained clearly and relate directly to the themes of my book, but you would never know it from Mr. Elster's review. I have decided to respond to his review because it was so poisonous that I wanted to post an antidote as soon as possible to counteract the negativity. SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film is available at www.amazon.com, www.xlibris.com, www.barnesandnoble.com. The soft cover is $19.99. The book is 202 pages in length.
For one, I do not define independent cinema as,” films that are made with the creator’s singular vision and often are without the backing of major studios,” as Mr. Elster defines it in his piece. Instead, I define the independence of a filmmaker,” by the heretical nature of the content, theme or form of a specific film or body of work that challenges the status quo; that goes against the generally accepted notions… in an effort to augment humanity’s potential for good.” (pg.31) The opening section of my book explores why it is so difficult for African-American independent filmmakers to practice this heretical operation in their independent films.
Secondly, the second section of my book does not,” explore five stereotypes of African-Americans in film,” as Mr. Elster erroneously described. The second section of my book looks at,” five assumptions [about race that] provide a perceptual frame through which the African-American audience view themselves in film.” (pg.37) For the record, I spent 50 pages in my book discussing major films and the historical and social circumstances that have contributed to these assumptions as well as the major films and filmmakers who have tried to debunk these assumptions. What is insightful about this section is how it shows white and African-American filmmakers breaking these assumptions while simultaneously examining the various dramatic and formal strategies employed by these filmmakers in their films.
Thirdly, it was completely unsubstantiated conjecture for Mr. Elster to state that,” probably because he had not written as much as his editors wanted- Seewood goes off on several tangents,” in reference to the three appendices that close my book. The appendices of my book interrelate to the representation of race, class, sexuality in the media and the role of the African-American artist in his or her own community and are not as Elster glibly describes,” tangents.” It was this type of mean-spirited conjecture that reveals that my book was not thoroughly read and further betrays the negative bias of Mr. Elster against my work that prohibited a fair review.
Where Mr. Elster does begrudgingly praise the third section of my book for being passionately written, he immediately poisons that praise by saying that I am making a point that,” many could discover for themselves.” It is just such an attitude of begrudging praise and hateful rejection that I feel poisons a healthy debate about African-American cinema and contributes to the very aesthetic and ideological problems within the African-American community that I discuss in my book. Finally, I do not pick,” bones with Tyler Perry,” as Mr. Elster states, but instead I examine what factors have contributed to African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry’s recent success and what his success might mean for up and coming African-American filmmakers. Readers were also not told where the book could be purchased on-line or the price of the trade paperback. It is for all of these reasons that I have detailed above that I am certain that my book was not thoroughly read, fully comprehended nor fairly reviewed.
In many ways Mr. Elster's review epitomizes a larger problem within the African-American community today that can be summarized as the intolerance of critical thinking and new ideas that critique deeply entrenched social norms. It leads one to suspect that "the mis-education of the negro" begins at home. For instance, Mr. Elster calls much of my book "filler", but what he is really calling filler is my analysis of various important films that either substantiate my arguments or throw light upon dynamic changes within the American film industry. Films like, MISSION TO MARS (featuring Don Cheadle), JACKIE BROWN, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968 version), THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (John Sayles), IDLEWILD, ATL, MALCOLM X, APOCALYPSE NOW, NOTHIN' BUT A MAN, CRASH, MYSTIC RIVER, and others are discussed in my book because they reflect the advances and retrenchments of American cinema as it concerns African-Americans. In looking over my book, there are a few typos (nobody's perfect), but not nearly as many as Mr.Elster intimates in his review. He mentions the fact that I misspelled Will Smith's film IN THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, but must beg for mercy here because that was a computer spell check mistake. I am inclined to believe that because Mr. Elster was either unable or unwilling to comprehend some of the major concepts I used in my book, he used Occam's Razor to cover for his own ignorance and decided that I had misspelled more words than he understood. Concepts like, Cognitive Dissonance and Heresy are explained clearly and relate directly to the themes of my book, but you would never know it from Mr. Elster's review. I have decided to respond to his review because it was so poisonous that I wanted to post an antidote as soon as possible to counteract the negativity. SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film is available at www.amazon.com, www.xlibris.com, www.barnesandnoble.com. The soft cover is $19.99. The book is 202 pages in length.
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