In his essay "Black Silence and the Politics of Representation," Clyde Taylor urges that the time has come for film scholars to directly confront the too often "sidestepped issue" of racism in American cinema via serious critical examination. Taylor addresses the issue through the conceptual lens of "unequal development" which he wryly nicknames "Undie" due to unequal development's "resemblance to those garments that are seldom seen but considered fundamental to anyone's public equipment..." (4). In other words, unequal development or "Undie" is a ubiquitous component of the film industry. In Taylor's use of the term, unequal development denotes a one-sided relationship in which the dominant party invariably "takes" anything it wants or desires from the subjected party, while simultaneously enjoying inherent advantages. Taylor applies this concept to the relationship between the American film industry at large and the fledgling offshoot of black cinema producing "race films." The dominant film industry took and appropriated anything it desired from black cinema, including actors, physical movie screens and theaters for displaying films, and successful genres such as "black comedy," which Taylor likens to the taking and exploitation of "cash crops" (7). The unequal relationship between mainstream and black cinema was so firmly ingrained, that after the backlash against Micheaux's anti-racist Within Our Gates, no other filmmaker even attempted a "major assault on racism...until Melvin Van Peebles in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971," a span of 51 years (5). Nevertheless, despite the resistance to Within Our Gates and the institutionalization of unequal development in the film industry, Taylor suggests that early black filmmakers such as Micheaux actually did address racial issues, albeit through a more subtle approach. Taylor argues that these filmmakers utilized the vehicle of the "young black woman" in film to promote blacks as equal and critique racism in a somewhat covert manner. This agenda was accomplished through portrayal of the young black woman as valued and worthy of protection, in part as a rejoinder to the history of physical and sexual assaults and exploitation of black women. By showing young black women as valued and protected, Micheaux and his ilk implicitly suggested that these historical injustices would no longer be tolerated or accepted as the status quo. Despite a lack of direct confrontation in the films, Taylor argues that the message gets through -- "oblique," but present. As Taylor puts it in his conclusion, "these films have a way of speaking vehemently, even through their veil of silence" (10).
It is difficult to argue the fact that the relationship between the mainstream or "Hollywood" film industry and black filmmakers, both in the "race film" era of Micheaux and today, has been an historical study in "Undie" or unequal development. In fact, you would think it would go without saying, but as Taylor points out, it somehow mostly has. Race and racism is a curiously under developed topic of study in this history of film. Amazingly, even criticism of D.W. Griffith's racist epic Birth of a Nation was originally overwhelmingly positive, audiences of the time frequently applauded, and even subsequent critical examination of the film tended to focus on technical breakthroughs and the aesthetics of viewing as opposed to the blatantly racist propaganda -- but I digress....Returning to Taylor's essay, his argument for the presence of racial undertones personified in the body of young black women is on display in Micheaux's Within Our Gates. Sylvia Landry is shown as a woman of upstanding character who deserves the good fortune that befalls her in terms of befriending an elderly white female patron, raising money for her charitable school, and attracting the affections of Dr. Vivian. Conversely, her numerous personal tragedies -- betrayal by her cousin resulting in rejection by her fiance, being hit by a car, her family being lynched -- are all the fault of others, including relatives and other misguided members of her race, as well as whites. Despite all her trials and tribulations, Sylvia maintains a respectful and respectable character that undeniably reflects well on her race, just as Taylor suggests that Micheaux intended. Of course, a more complete response to Taylor on this particular issue might raise some complicating questions, such as the relevance of Sylvia's relatively "white" appearance and how that might impact viewer reaction, or the feminist response to the whole notion of women needing to be "protected" (which Taylor does acknowledge). Regardless, a case can certainly be made for Sylvia Landry as a mechanism for promoting racial equality.
Questions for Discussion:
1) Serious question:
Taylor suggests that the legal prohibition against miscegenation "silently reinforced the policy of denying directorial roles to Blacks in the industry" (5). While miscegenation laws clearly codified inherent and socially acceptable racism in virtually every aspect of life, what factors or circumstances denote a specific link to directorial roles in film, as opposed to discrimination in any other articulable arena? In other words, he's certainly right about this, but why would miscegenation laws have affected directorial opportunities for blacks more or less than anything else?
2) Less serious, but also potentially somewhat serious question:
Does a person's youthful affinity for a genre of movies that Taylor indicts as an appropriated "cash crop" genre of New Jack gang-banging movies (such as New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, etc, etc) make them tacitly complicit to some degree in the unequal development derided by Taylor? Are there any facts that might mitigate this latent guilt, such as the relative prominence and freedom of expression of black filmmakers, actors, directors, etc?
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ReplyDeleteWell my last post got accidentally erased so I will try this again! So I am responding to your first question about filmmakers and miscegenation threat. One thing that comes to mind is the idea of visibility. In addition to the "sexual censorship" in movies that Taylor mentions, there is also the idea that any black filmmaker could have posed a threat to whites by simply depicting blacks and whites sharing the same public spaces in films. To do this was potentially injurious for whites because it disrupted the ideology of white dominance that functioned to prevent race-mixing through keeping blacks and whites separate. Thus, perhaps Undie worked hard to lessen any chances blacks may have had to disseminate any works that featured blacks and whites together. I was also interested in the questions you raised about Sylvia's lightness. Taylor points out that during Micheaux's career, he "was even accused of trying to 'pass' one of his films as a 'White' film with actors so light and the story so general that a White audience might take it for a typical Hollywood product" (5-6). What to make of this?
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