Black Cinema

African Americans contributed to every aspect of filmmaking and even built an entire industry before being granted full and legal citizenship in the United States. Black cinema in the United States reflected the goals and ambitions of the mainstream film industry while also speaking specifically to African American audiences in the discrete narratives and aesthetic language of various African American communities. However during the silent era, while Black independent filmmaking flourished, Blacks suffered lesser employment in Hollywood as those studios consolidated control of the film industry and allowed for a limited presence of African American actors. In this period, there was also considerable ambivalence about any depiction of racial strife as epitomized by the journey of Richard Wright’s bestselling 1940 novel Native Son to the screen. MGM executives initially suggested to Wright that the film be made with an all-white cast with ethnicity and not race as the source of conflict. When Wright rejected this idea, the film was abandoned altogether by the studio. The film was eventually made in Argentina but was never fully released in the United States despite dramatic editing done in an attempt to satisfy US censors, emblematic of the continuing difficulties facing Black film projects. Still Hollywood studios engaged African American personnel as actors, directors, writers, and skilled tradespeople, even if inconsistently, onward from the era of classic Hollywood (1927–1960s). And despite resistance to screening Black-cast films, films like Cabin in the Sky (dir. Vincente Minelli, 1943); Anna Lucasta (dir. Arnold Laven, 1958); Bright Road (dir. Gerald Mayer, 1953); St. Louis Blues (dir. Allen Reisner, 1958); and Carmen Jones (dir. Otto Preminger, 1954) were made and enjoyed considerable success. As the 1960s ushered in the civil rights era, pioneers like actress Dorothy Dandridge would be joined by Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis, Jr. Sidney Poitier brought a new dignity to the screen and became the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1963 for Lilies of the Field, playing a handyman who aids a group of nuns who are building a chapel. The film Bright Road was based on a short story by Mary Elizabeth Vronman. When she adapted it for the screen, she became the first African American member of the Screen Writers Guild in 1953. However, even with the increasing presence in Hollywood of African American actors, the guilds continued to practice the segregation and discrimination commonplace at the time, thus excluding Blacks from film production roles. The civil rights movement created a demand for new images of African Americans. Actors like Dorothy Dandridge and Sydney Poitier became superstars in limited roles that usually positioned an individual Black character among an otherwise white cast. The increasing demand for innovative Black images would result in two important film movements. The University of California, Los Angeles responded to the Watts Riots by admitting a significant number of African American students to its Film Studies program. This resulted in independent filmmaking that film scholar Clyde Taylor labels “The LA Rebellion filmmakers.” These filmmakers explored every aspect of Black life from Gullah heritage to urban childhood. Equally important was the commercial film movement known as blaxploitation. Blaxploitation began in Hollywood B-studios as a response to the acknowledgement of growing importance of Black audiences and the need for new Black images. Blaxploitation movies were primarily action movies that featured empowered Black men and women fighting for a new recognition as powerful and attractive. When Hollywood realized how lucrative these films were, mainstream studios began to make them as well resulting in a new generation of African American voices both behind and in front of the camera. Hollywood studios realized that they could address newly integrated audiences with films that featured biracial acting teams with film such as 48 Hours (dir. Walter Hill, 1982) and Beverly Hills Cop (dir. Martin Brest, 1984). Independent filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Julie Dash addressed the need for fuller images of Black life, especially in relationship to the biracial buddy film and the developing “hood film” genre. The “hood film” genre reflected blaxploitation’s interest in urbanity and crime and were often also action films. They incorporated the increasingly significant hip hop culture and made superstars of musicians such as O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson and Dana “Queen Latifah” Owens. Contemporary African American film reflects a vast variety of images and practices from commercial narrative cinema produced within the Hollywood film industry to independent documentary and experimental film.