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A history of the early 1900s southern-born, white filmmaker and the silent films he created for black audiences. In the early 1900s, so-called race filmmakers set out to produce black-oriented pictures to counteract the racist caricatures that had dominated cinema from its inception. Richard E. Norman, a southern-born white filmmaker, was one such pioneer. From humble beginnings as a roving “home talent” filmmaker, recreating photoplays that starred local citizens, Norman would go on to produce high-quality feature-length race pictures. Together with his better-known contemporaries Oscar Micheaux and Noble and George Johnson, Richard E. Norman helped to define early race filmmaking. Making use of unique archival resources, including Norman’s personal and professional correspondence, detailed distribution records, and newly discovered original shooting scripts, this book offers a vibrant portrait of race in early cinema. “Grounded in impressive archival research, Barbara Lupack’s book offers a long overdue history of Richard E. Norman and the filmmaking company he established early in the twentieth century. Lupack’s ability to describe Norman’s films—and the work that went into their production—reanimates them for readers and stresses their role in shaping early African American cinematic representation.” —Paula Massood, author of Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film “Thoroughly researched and crisply written . . . The first book-length work on Norman, Lupack’s monograph clearly delineates the Norman Company’s importance . . . [Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking’s] most profound contribution lies, perhaps, in how it illuminates the fraught economics of race filmmaking.” —Journal of American History “Lupack’s book provides a wealth of archival information about this vibrant moment in film history . . . [This] is a solid contribution to regional film studies and race film business practice, and will appeal to scholars, students, and film-buffs alike.” —Black Camera
How did the US South contribute to the development of film? And how did film shape the modern South? In Fade In, Crossroads, Robert Jackson tells the story of the relationships between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era through the golden age of Hollywood. Jackson reveals the profound consequences of the coincidence of the rise and fall of the American film industry with the rise and fall of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation. He considers southern historical legacies on film, from popular Civil War films and comparably popular lynching films emerging in a time of prolific lynching in the South, to the resilient race film industry whose African American filmmakers forged an independent cinematic movement in defiance of the racial restrictions of both the South and Hollywood. He also traces the influence of film on future participants in the Civil Rights Movement, from prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall to film-industry veterans like Lena Horne and Paul Robeson to the millions of ordinary people, black and white, who found themselves caught up in the struggle for racial equality in the modern United States.
The early years of the twentieth century were a formative time in the long history of struggle for black representation. More than any other medium, movies reflected the tremendous changes occurring in American society. Unfortunately, since they drew heavily on the nineteenth-century theatrical conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the "Uncle Tom Show" traditions, early pictures persisted in casting blacks in demeaning and outrageous caricatures that marginalized and burlesqued them and emphasized their comic or servile behavior. By contrast, race films—that is, movies that were black-cast, black-oriented, and viewed primarily by black audiences in segregated theaters—attempted to counter the crude stereotyping and regressive representations by presenting more authentic racial portrayals. This volume examines race filmmaking from numerous perspectives. By reanimating a critical but neglected period of early cinema—the years between the turn-of-the-century and 1930, the end of the silent film era—it provides a fascinating look at the efforts of early race film pioneers and offers a vibrant portrait of race and racial representation in American film and culture.
This indispensable collection offers 51 chapters, each focused on a distinct American independent film. Screening American Independent Film presents these films chronologically, addressing works from across more than a century (1915−2020), emphasizing the breadth and long duration of American independent cinema. The collection includes canonical examples as well as films that push against and expand the definitions of "independence." The titles run from micro-budget films through marketing-friendly Indiewood projects, from auteur-driven films and festival darlings to B-movies, genre pics, and exploitation films. The chapters also introduce students to different approaches within film studies including historical and contextual framing, industrial and institutional analysis, politics and ideology, genre and authorship, representation, film analysis, exhibition and reception, and technology. Written by leading international scholars and emerging talents in film studies, this volume is the first of its kind. Paying particular attention to issues of diversity and inclusion for both the participating scholars and the content and themes within the selected films, Screening American Independent Film is an essential resource for anyone teaching or studying American cinema.
"See yourself in the movies!" Prior to the advent of the home movie camera and the ubiquitousness of the camera phone, there was the local film. This cultural phenomenon, produced across the country from the 1890s to the 1950s, gave ordinary people a chance to be on the silver screen without leaving their hometowns. Through these movies, residents could see themselves in the same theaters where they saw major Hollywood motion pictures. Traveling filmmakers plied their trade in small towns and cities, where these films were received by locals as being part of the larger cinema experience. With access to the rare film clips under discussion, Main Street Movies documents the diversity and longevity of local film production and examines how itinerant filmmakers responded to industry changes to keep sponsors and audiences satisfied. From town pride films in the 1910s to Hollywood knockoffs in the 1930s, local films captured not just images of local people and places but also ideas about the function and meaning of cinema that continue to resonate today.
Oscar Micheaux—the most prolific African American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period—has finally found his rightful place in film history. Both artist and showman, Micheaux stirred controversy in his time as he confronted issues such as lynching, miscegenation, peonage and white supremacy, passing, and corruption among black clergymen. In this important collection, prominent scholars examine Micheaux's surviving silent films, his fellow producers of race films who alternately challenged or emulated his methods, and the cultural activities that surrounded and sustained these achievements. The relationship between black film and both the stage (particularly the Lafayette Players) and the black press, issues of underdevelopment, and a genealogy of Micheaux scholarship, as well as extensive and more accurate filmographies, give a richly textured portrait of this era. The essays will fascinate the general public as well as scholars in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and African American history. This thoroughly readable collection is a superb reference work lavishly illustrated with rare photographs.
The early years of the twentieth century were a formative time in the long history of struggle for black representation. More than any other medium, movies reflected the tremendous changes occurring in American society. Unfortunately, since they drew heavily on the nineteenth-century theatrical conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the "Uncle Tom Show" traditions, early pictures persisted in casting blacks in demeaning and outrageous caricatures that marginalized and burlesqued them and emphasized their comic or servile behavior. By contrast, race films—that is, movies that were black-cast, black-oriented, and viewed primarily by black audiences in segregated theaters—attempted to counter the crude stereotyping and regressive representations by presenting more authentic racial portrayals. This volume examines race filmmaking from numerous perspectives. By reanimating a critical but neglected period of early cinema—the years between the turn-of-the-century and 1930, the end of the silent film era—it provides a fascinating look at the efforts of early race film pioneers and offers a vibrant portrait of race and racial representation in American film and culture.
In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.
In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.
African American westerns have a rich cinematic history and visual culture. Mia Mask examines the African American western hero within the larger context of film history by considering how Black westerns evolved and approached wide-ranging goals. Woody Strode’s 1950s transformation from football star to actor was the harbinger of hard-edged western heroes later played by Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher provided a narrative helmed by a groundbreaking African American director and offered unconventionally rich roles for women. Mask moves from these discussions to consider blaxploitation westerns and an analysis of Jeff Kanew’s hard-to-find 1972 documentary about an all-Black rodeo. The book addresses how these movies set the stage for modern-day westploitation films like Django Unchained. A first-of-its kind survey, Black Rodeo illuminates the figure of the Black cowboy while examining the intersection of African American film history and the western.