Race Films
Beginning around the same time as Hollywood cinema another industry called Black cinema began with African American filmmakers. These films were called “race films” these movies featured mainly all-black casts and made by black filmmakers. Mainstream American culture helped to inspire race filmmakers to create their own industry of cinema to portray Black life. The industry of Black cinema grew along with the Great Migration when African Americans moved from the South to the North for industrialization and urbanization. “The results were varied and often controversial, but race films shared a fundamental premise: instead of using their black subjects as props or objects of ridicule, these films placed their lives front and center” (Field 2023). The most famous filmmaker of this era of Black cinema was Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux produced more than 40 films over his filmmaking career and would challenge stereotypes of Black people in his films and explored race relations, social justice and contemporary Black life and culture. While doing groundbreaking work, Micheaux has been criticized because many of his films depicted lighter-skinned African Americans as being more heroic, enlightened and intelligent than darker-skinned characters. Showing how colorism and white hegemony still had an influence on Black filmmakers of this time, who were attempting to make progress on the depictions on Black people in film. This is an issue that still exists today in film and will be further explored in this exhibit.
Oscar Micheaux’s film Within Our Gates (1919) is considered to be a direct response and refute of the racist depictions of Black people that The Birth of a Nation (1915) portrayed in its film. Micheaux portrayed Black people in his film as complexed individuals and presented the true reality that African Americans faced when D. W. Griffith who directed The Birth of a Nation chose to ignore to creative the narrative that African Americans were inferior. “Using Griffith’s own language to disprove his racist assertions, Micheaux’s portrayal of a white lynch mob belies Griffith’s depiction of a gallant Klan. As Jane Gaines observes, Micheaux “chooses to show what blacks knew and northern whites would refuse to believe—the total barbarism of the white mob” (Field 2023). Race filmmakers were important to the progress of Black cinema because of their refusal to accept the revised version of history that was depicted in films such as The Birth of a Nation.
Race films showed aspects of African American culture that was never seen before in film before this era of filmmaking. Many of early African Americans films have been lost and the films had very low budgets. Meaning that they very often had to shoot their films outside of the studio and use non-professional actors. Many of the films focused on real people and places. The final item for this exhibit is the the film Two Knights of Vaudeville (1915) that is described as “Two Knights of Vaudeville enacts one of the enduring tensions of race film: its contested forms of exhibition. Comedy was particularly susceptible to critique” (Field 2023). When the film was released it was criticized for its clownish portrayals and usage of racist tropes even with its all-black cast. Race films aimed to positively portray Black people and stray away from the stereotypes of white cinema, but we see with films like Two Knights of Vaudeville the complexity and debate of what is considered acceptable representation. It is argued that the intraracial setting of race films allowed different kinds of representation, such as comedic depictions in Two Knights of Vaudeville that would have been perceived differently if the film was made for a White audience in mind. These items showed how race films began the progress of diverse portrayals of Black lives and expereinces in cinema when films were being created for and by Black people.
Works Cited
Sharman, R. (2020, May 18). African Americans in Cinema. Moving Pictures. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://uark.pressbooks.pub/movingpictures/chapter/african-americans-in-cinema/
Field, A. N. (n.d.). Black Cinema at its birth. The Criterion Collection. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at-its-birth