The Subject of Film and Race

Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema

Gerald Sim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623561352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

The Subject of Film and Race is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. In attempting to do more than merely identify harmful stereotypes, research on 'films and race' appropriates ideas from post-structuralist theory. But on those platforms, the field takes intellectual and political positions that place its anti-racist efforts at an impasse. While presenting theoretical ideas in an accessible way, Gerald Sim's historical materialist approach uniquely triangulates well-known work by Edward Said with the Neo-Marxian writing about film by Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. The Subject of Film and Race takes on topics such as identity politics, multiculturalism, multiracial discourse, and cyborg theory, to force film and media studies into rethinking their approach, specifically towards humanism and critical subjectivity. The book illustrates theoretical discussions with a diverse set of familiar films by John Ford, Michael Mann, Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Keanu Reeves, and others, to show that we must always be aware of capitalist history when thinking about race, ethnicity, and films.

1

Key Developments in Critical Race Film Studies

Studying cinema and race requires us to account for both the variables, “race” and “film.” Alongside Anglo-American culture and societies’ long and tortured history with race relations, this complex and often tumultuous period has seen race be redefined, while the socio-economic and political positions of different ethnic groups shifted. We have also witnessed cinema progressing from a technological artifact to a cheap spectacular entertainment for the masses, to a capitalist marvel, to an important ideological and marketing commodity for a global economy. Film scholarship and popular criticism have experienced growth and development as well. Once the domain of cineastes, film criticism and theory’s evolution accelerated when it was introduced during the 1960s into the Anglo-American academy, where all research arguably submits to intellectual trends. During key phases of critical race film studies, what we roughly recognize as poststructuralist theory concurrently exuded a powerful presence. As it were, because much of Anglo-American film studies history overlaps temporally with the rise of critical race film studies, prominent themes in one field are predictably reiterated in the other. The key transition from stereotype analysis to discourse analysis reflects theoretical fashions in vogue at the time.

Critical race film studies conducts its business according to changes in the definition and function of race in the social world. In Robyn Wiegman’s entry on “Race, Ethnicity, and Film” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, she writes that “the study of race and ethnicity in film has taken shape according to the formation of race and ethnicity in US culture more widely.”¹ To be sure, the dominant definition of race in social discourse has shifted. It was once thought to be biologically determined in the way that skin color is. Subsequently over the course of the twentieth century, people gradually accepted that race is constructed in social practice and cultural discourse, which is where the content of one’s character bares itself. It became less about who someone genetically is, and more about what someone culturally does.

Film studies moved as if part of the same constellation. When it became less popular to see race as an inescapable hereditary determinant of character, critical race film scholarship developed a poststructuralist suspicion of essentialism, of cinematic images, and of how they create meaning. Although race began its redefinition decades before the appearance of poststructuralism, similar if not identical political and intellectual tides exerted a force on both race and film. The predictable Marxist thing to say about this evolving landscape is that all politics and theory are intractably governed by economic structural changes, but such materialism is overly convenient and reductive. Nevertheless, how useful is Marxism for explaining these changes? What would Marxians consider to be the consequences of dealing with a film text as an open circuit of fluid discourses? What comes of reforming race into a construct of social discourse? These initial chapters float the possibility that capitalist ideology imposes a measure of its logic and values on this vast network of social and cultural phenomena. More to the point, what is its influence on criticism? The present chapter finds that critical race film studies have marginalized class-based approaches to its analysis, and lays out a prima facie case for Neo-Marxism’s primacy within critical race film studies. It does so by finding a familiar, preceptual critical subject within.

Critical race film studies developed in two distinct stages, separated by crucial theoretical essays articulating seminal and frequently cited ideas that sparked turning points. The “images school” that studies stereotypes represents the first phase.² Its projects assume correctly that cinema is a powerful circulator of racial discourse, relying on classical realism to reinforce racist ideology. Before too long however, Steve Neale’s 1979 essay in Screen Education, “The Same Old Story: Stereotypes and Difference” indicated that the method had run its course, and urged writers to change direction.³ Although brief and lacking specific citations of the literature, Neale’s thesis introduced key ideas to the field that remain trenchant. The new approaches that Neale advocated were more fully realized by Robert Stam and Louis Spence in Screen. Their essay “Colonialism, Racism and Representation” in fact recapitulates Neale’s critique from four years prior.⁴ Instead of a preoccupation with the sign, they paid greater attention to “textuality and intertextuality”—the processes by which film constructs point-of-view using the interaction of images through editing or that between a film and other cultural texts. Stam and Spence were eventually joined by deconstructionists and exponents of reception studies, all of whom wanted to leave simplistic stereotype and “positive image” studies behind.

I refer to that “images school” as the “First Generation” of race-oriented film criticism, and to the works that move ahead with Neale’s propositions as “Second Generation” criticism. The labels serve two purposes: to order the bodies of work according to chronology and complexity. The point is to emphasize how the field has reached an impasse and been stagnant for quite some time. These labels also offer rhetorical meaning. Proper deference should be paid to the importance of “First Generation” race studies, and the term affords that body of writing a foundational and original status. Examinations of pernicious stereotypes contributed much, and present perhaps the clearest picture of cultural codes and the purest reifications of racist ideology. Likewise, the beginning of “Second Generation” study commemorates the conception of new ideas and the advancement of older ones. However, if we take second-generation criticism to have been birthed with Neale’s 1979 essay, I am moved to ask why critics continued to declare image study passé for at least a decade and a half after that. It appears as though the field no doubt progressed rapidly with a burst that lasted through the early 1980s, but has not experienced remotely comparable growth since. With that assessment, I disagree with those such as Wiegman who would argue that we have seen the start of a third generation of criticism, and who consider “the most important critical emphases in the 1990s” to be the study of “whiteness, and ethnicity in the context of global media culture.”⁵ Those that would be third generation are so similar and implicated with “Second Generation” work, that I am reluctant to accept that they represent headway.

First-generation criticism

Before the Anglo-American academy introduced itself to it, an English art critic, Peter Noble, had already identified the issue of ethnic representation in the cinema some 20-odd years earlier. His 1948 book, The Negro in Films, attempts to document a quite comprehensive catalogue of black stereotypes in Hollywood and European films.⁶ Noble contextualizes these depictions using a backdrop of social history, connecting the use and reuse of stereotypes to institutionalized racism in the film industry. This classic positive image study decries the association of blacks with intellectual and cultural primitivism and demands more humane and dignified black characters. At the same time, he attributes positive portrayals of black screen characters when they occurred to the personal and professional victories of industry personnel, and occasionally to the organizational strength of civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Edward Mapp then undertook a similar and slightly more academically oriented project in 1972. In his book, Blacks in American Films, Mapp recognizes a small group of unpublished master’s theses and doctoral dissertations written in the 1960s that examined limited samples of films. He envisioned his contribution as an addition to Noble’s, but without the social history. He compiled another comprehensive list of films that takes particular note of when black actors began to earn leading roles, as well as the professions and personal characteristics of the people they played. Mapp describes his “objective” and “systematic” methodology as one of “informal qualitative content analysis.”⁷ It turns out to be a scientific-sounding euphemism for a catalog.

The first lengthy piece of first-generation criticism to emerge from the academy was Daniel J. Leab’s From Sambo to Superspade, out of research he conducted at Columbia University.⁸ Compared to what Noble and Mapp had done, this work broke little new conceptual ground, but Leab provides a more detailed industrial history of Hollywood’s production and distribution practices. He makes the standard connection between stereotype changes and movements in social mores, and attempts to find empirical causality in the film industry’s machinations and interactions with American politics. Perhaps most significant, it articulates that history using a new vocabulary. Leab displays what is up to this point a much keener analytical eye for mise en scène and narrative structure, a likely result of film studies’ ascension as a university discipline.

First-generation criticism consists of semantic analysis. Its exponents such as Noble, Mapp, and Leab consider characters or images more or less in isolation from the rest of the text, and decipher what they denote. Basically, they hold that cinematic images possess an indexical significatory relationship to reality. Therefore, films deemed guilty of ideological representation directly reflect the presence of racism. First-generation criticism has much less to say however, about the text as a whole. In this regard, Leab’s book stands out to the extent that the author’s analytical method accounts for some of cinema’s formal and textual complexity. Even so, Neale rightly argues in “The Same Old Story” that limiting analysis to images “can easily obscure or even erase altogether those features of a text and its systems which are not only equally pertinent to the analysis but could also open up further areas of enquiry.”⁹ He exhibits poststructuralist instincts in faulting stereotype studies for their “inherent empiricism,” disputing the belief that both reality and the text itself are straightforwardly knowable. Leading with that initial critique, Neale proceeds to find that critics of stereotypes posit an evaluative standard that is contradictory. He observes them to assume two basic positions on any film. The first measures simple legible stereotypes against a reality that in fact encompasses a much greater “heterogeneity and complexity” of individual characters and experiences. In identifying films that come up short, stereot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: What is Critical Race Film Studies?
• 1 Key Developments in Critical Race Film Studies
• 2 Theorizing Race with a Wide-open Text: The Searchers
• 3 Poststructuralism and the Neo-Marxian Subject
• 4 Postcolonial Hazards: Edward Said and Film Studies
• 5 Postmodern Multiracial, Keanu Reeves
• Conclusion: A Materialist Method for Critical Race Film Studies
• Bibliography
• Index