Contemporary Black American Cinema

Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies

Mia Mask, Mia Mask

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136308024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Contemporary Black American Cinema offers a fresh collection of essays on African American film, media, and visual culture in the era of global multiculturalism. Integrating theory, history, and criticism, the contributing authors deftly connect interdisciplinary perspectives from American studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, and Queer theory. This multidisciplinary methodology expands the discursive and interpretive registers of film analysis. From Paul Robeson's and Sidney Poitier's star vehicles to Lee Daniels's directorial forays, these essays address the career legacies of film stars, examine various iterations of Blaxploitation and animation, question the comedic politics of "fat suit" films, and celebrate the innovation of avant-garde and experimental cinema.

1 Paul Robeson and the End of His “Movie” Career

Charles Musser

In just a few hours, I too had become fond of this man. And I felt [Robeson] had left some of his power and strength with me. He had become my hero.

—Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons

Paul Robeson was a towering artistic figure of the twentieth century. Star of stage, screen and the concert hall; at home with both popular and high culture; indeed playing the high–low interface with diabolical cleverness; he moved among the bohemian little theater movement of Greenwich Village, the commercial world of Broadway, the black theater of Harlem and the leftist theater of revolutionary Russia—and was just as comfortable with the correspondingly diverse realms in film. Robeson was also a towering figure politically. As my friends on the West Coast like to say—he was a superstar.¹

Given the time period in which Robeson lived, it is inevitable that film has proved crucial to any serious understanding of Paul Robeson’s career as a performer. Most simply, film serves as an audiovisual record that gives us some general sense of Robeson’s personality, his style of acting—the way he moves and smiles. More concretely we must consider his career in the cinema itself: the ways he used film both artistically and as a cultural intervention. But to examine Paul Robeson’s film career is a complex undertaking. With film as with many other endeavors, Robeson was “the great forerunner,” the powerful black film star who could carry his own pictures—the man to whom Sidney Poitier would later look.² At the same time, Robeson renounced most of his film career—leaving little of it untainted. He never mentioned his first appearance in a feature film, Body and Soul (1925), and he denounced his last, Tales of Manhattan (1942). In between, in 1938, he remarked:

I grew more and more dissatisfied with the stories I played in. Certain elements in a story would attract me and I would agree to play in it. But by the time producers and distributors had got through with it, the story was usually very different, and so were my feelings about it. Sanders of the River, for example, attracted me because the material that London Films brought back from Africa seemed to me good honest pictures of African folk ways.… But in the completed version, Sanders of the River resolved itself into a piece of flag waving, in which I wasn’t interested. As far as I was concerned it was a total loss.

But I didn’t realise how seriously people might take the film until I went back to New York. There I was met by a deputation who wanted to know how the hell I had come to play in a film which stood for everything they rightly thought I opposed.³

Interestingly, when the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at Rutgers and my co-curator, Ed Guerrero, wanted to undertake a full retrospective of Robeson’s film career at the Museum of Modern Art, there was some resistance. From one quarter we were told that certain films were so embarrassing they should not be shown to the general public. These individuals, including Paul Robeson Jr. and members of an outreach board at the museum, expressed concern that we were out to destroy or undermine Robeson’s public integrity. Of course this was not our intention. We were and are interested in understanding this career, and it is my experience as a historian that “forbidden” or neglected areas are always among the most important to such a project. This chapter is a reexamination of Tales of Manhattan, the film that disappointed Robeson so profoundly and threatened his public standing so severely that he renounced it and moviemaking. How can we better understand this picture? What intrigued Robeson about this movie to begin with? Like Robeson, many of the people working on the film were leftists. So “what in the hell” were they trying to do?

APPROACHING ROBESON’S FILM WORK: FOUR RULES FOR ENGAGEMENT

In pursuing a critical engagement with Robeson’s film, I have found four observations to be fruitful in reaching some deeper understanding.

1. My first point has been said before: Robeson criticism (as with discussions of black performance and characters more generally) has focused too much on positive and negative images—on stereotypes. This is not entirely unproductive, but Robeson himself was skeptical about these concerns and often flaunted his disdain for such middle-class moralizing.⁴ Moreover, the resulting “image” has often kept us on the surface, revealing a discomfort—often understandable—with a deeper critical engagement of the works themselves. Sustained textual engagement involves, as Michele Wallace has emphasized, examining historical change rather than frozen categories of “Toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies and bucks.”⁵ Nonetheless, many still find it difficult to credit Robeson and others with working creatively with types and stereotypes, in ways that were theoretically sophisticated. Many still find it hard to consider him more than an unwitting victim of deeply racist culture industries.⁶ Moreover, to move beyond questions of positive and negative images points toward the importance of intertextuality. Robeson’s films become more interesting and more worthy achievements the more we situate them in relationship to other texts.

In his study of African American literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests an approach we can use to understand and more fully appreciate many of Robeson’s films. Gates argues that African American culture has always had an apparent narrowness of theme, a redundancy of subject that takes attention away from the signified and focuses on the signifier. It foregrounds how something is used or reused, reformed or deformed. That is, it focuses on form rather than content. Thus it is the differences—made evident by strong similarities—that are important.⁷ This is perhaps another way of saying the same thing: that intertexts more than self-contained images and characterizations are crucial to unlocking a text’s meaning. At the same time these shifts, at least in the case of Tales of Manhattan, cannot be considered instances of an African American aesthetic at work, but rather of a critical, self-conscious engagement with genre conventions, motifs and ideology. (Nonetheless, Robeson’s initial participation in this project might be understood as an appreciation for its modus operandi—a mode congruent in some ways with his African American sensibility.) This suggests various complex issues that must for the moment be deferred: the relationship between Hollywood pastiche and a black aesthetic as characterization by Gates, Clyde Taylor, Arthur Jafa and others.⁸ Certainly the handful of all-black-cast films made in Hollywood during the first decade of recorded sound—notably Hallelujah (1929) and Green Pastures (1936)—provide a crucial intertextual framework for appreciating Tales of Manhattan.

2. My second observation is this: as scholars we must recognize and pursue the theater–film connection. Theater and film were deeply interconnected within the African American community. For black actors during the 1920s and 1930s, film was only one, and almost never the primary, source of employment. Actors in race films of the 1920s, such as Evelyn Preer, Mattie Wilkes, Lawrence Chenault, Walker Thompson and J. Lawrence Criner, made most of their money in the dramatic theater, often with the Lafayette Players Dramatic Stock Company. Others—including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, J. Homer Tutt and Salem Tutt Whitney—appeared in films but worked in popular theatrical forms such as musical comedy. In larger cities, audiences frequenting high-end race theaters often saw a film on a bill that included a play or revue.

Certainly the mainstream film industry appropriated freely from the stage—adapting plays, hiring actors and directors and, as Gaylyn Studlar reminds us, winning over and reforming its early audiences.⁹ Nevertheless, the relationship between theatrical and film practices was far more fluid, intimate and above all reciprocal in the African American community. Robeson’s first film, Body and Soul (1925), illustrates this point well. Made by African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Body and Soul is difficult to understand as anything more than a sensational and eccentric cultural work unless it is recognized as an engagement with and critique of three plays by white playwrights that were purportedly about the Negro soul: Nan Bagby Stephen’s Roseanne (1923) and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings (1924). Moreover, all three plays had featured Paul Robeson in the spring and summer of 1924. When dealing with African American culture in the period between the wars, looking for likely interactions between theater and film is crucial.

3. A third point simply reemphasizes another underappreciated aspect of Robeson’s film work: we should not lose sight of Paul Robeson’s noteworthy, ongoing career in nonfiction film. This began in 1936 with My Song Goes Forth, a documentary on South Africa, and did not really end until the late 1950s or early 1960s. Of course he has often been a subject of documentaries before and after his death, including St. Claire Bourne’s recent achievement Paul Robeson: Here I Stand (1999). Documentary has enabled filmmakers within black communities to present images of these communities to African Americans and to others at low cost—a more direct if still mediated form of representation. This has given it a particular value in African American culture. For the Robeson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, we discovered his involvement in a number of documentary projects that went unmentioned or unspecified in Martin Duberman’s fine biography of Robeson.¹⁰

4. My final remark is a more broadly based observation: creative work is incredibly difficult. We must try to be generous, and not just to Paul Robeson. This remark raises complex and perhaps underexamined questions about the historian/scholar/writer’s relationship to her or his subject, her or his material. I do believe that deep sympathy and curiosity followed by—that is, alternating with—a level of critical reflection are crucial. This calls for a double perspective—a wish to hold these two positions in some kind of tension. In practice, the process of writing history is more organic and complex. Many of us find ourselves grappling with authors, films, periods and genres that are underappreciated, marginalized and/or seen negatively. Leaping quickly to embrace the other position can be too facile; rather, I find myself working toward a new position. I have concluded that Oscar Micheaux is one of the great feature film directors of the silent era (along with Charlie Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov) and that Body and Soul is an extraordinarily rich achievement. But I could not have written that ten years ago, at least not with the deep conviction I write it today. Yet we must also try to recognize and understand the position of performers, writers and critics such as George Schuyler and Paul Robeson, who vehemently disagreed with Micheaux and disliked the filmmaker’s work. Does one favor Micheaux or Robeson in such encounters, which continue in somewhat different form even to this day? In the end, as scholars we can consider Robeson’s and Micheaux’s achievements—their alternate solutions to the same problems—without condemning one while embracing the other. This pertains to the dialectical movement of critical insight or historical knowledge. If Robeson and Micheaux represent alternate reactions to the social nightmare facing black people in the United States between World War I and World War II, both American and African American culture would be sorely impoverished if either one had not existed (indeed thrived in the face of astounding difficulties). Our appreciation of one artist is necessarily enhanced by our understanding of the other. What we might call “critical sympathy” is a key to recognizing the achievements of Robeson, Micheaux, Edwin S. Porter, Lois Weber and many other artists who have not been canonized within traditional paradigms informed by New Criticism.

TALES OF MANHATTAN: JULIEN DUVIVIER AND POPULAR FRONT CULTURE

All four of these points are crucial for thinking about Robeson’s last fiction film, Tales of Manhattan, which was shot in the final months of 1941 and early 1942 but not released until August-September 1942. This feature fiction film contains six self-contained episodes that are linked together by a dress coat that passes from hand to hand, from one episode or self-contained story to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Paul Robeson and the End of His “Movie” Career
• 2. The Burden of the Beautiful Beast: Visualization and the Black Male Body
• 3. Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness and the Racial Grotesque
• 4. The Measure of Men: Legacies of Poitier’s A Piece of the Action
• 5. Bamboozled: In the Mirror of Abjection
• 6. Between Documentary and the Avant-Garde: Exploring the Visual Poetics of Ruins in Christopher Harris’s still/here
• 7. Who’s behind that Fat Suit? Momma, Madea, Rasputia and the Politics of Cross-Dressing
• 8. Disney’s Improvisation: New Orleans’ Second Line, Racial Masquerade and the Reproduction of Whiteness in The Princess and the Frog
• 9. Shadowboxing: Lee Daniels’s Nonrepresentational Cinema
• 10. “I’m a Militant Queen”: Queering Blaxploitation Films
• 11. Street Girls with No Future? Black Women Coming of Age in the City
• Contributors
• Index