THE GOLDEN AGE OF BLAX :

Getting Whitey : "The white is being paid back for years of portraying blacks in movies as simple, shiftless, and stupid, although occasionally faithful and brave as well" (David Denby, August 1977, Atlantic Monthly)

The eagerness of urban black audiences for movies with black casts, stories, and themes, and particularly for black heroes, exemplars of racial pride, has created the first situation of guaranteed profit for commercial film makers since the 1940s. Recent genres like the youth film, the drug-addict cycle, and the revisionist Western have failed after a few box-office successes, or failed altogether, but at the moment, any film which shows blacks facing down whites in violent confrontations (the more corpses the better) is going to do quick and heavy business in the big cities. From large studios like MGM to fly-by-night outfits that barely exist on paper, everyone is struggling to get a few black movies into the theaters before the bottom falls out of the market; within the next year as many as two dozen features for the black audience should be released-some directed by whites, but most of them made by young blacks experienced in stage and television directing, still photography, film acting, and documentary. [...]

What has already appeared is of immense importance in the history of mass culture, even if it is aesthetically null. The film makers, whether white, or black, have sensed the audience's rage and its mood of revolt against insulting images of blacks in past movies and against the white man in general. The black cinema has discovered the profitability of revenge: the desires to make money and to erase a legacy of racial humiliation coincide perfectly in a cinema whose moments of purest audience joy consist of black men and women responding to white racism by killing oppressors. Movie audiences always wanted heroesfor fantasy release or just the basic pleasure of watching beautiful physical action, but this may be the first time an audience has demanded physical heroism in order to confirm an emerging sense of identity. The mood in the theaters is festive, alternating between admiration and mockery. If a white person wanders into one of these movies, he will have the novel experienceof complete exclusion...

Saw the movie Soul Man in a theatre where I was the only pigmentally-challenged viewer. C. Thomas Howell dresses up in black face to get into Harvard as a minority. At one point he gets on an elevator and an older white woman, the only other person on board, visibly panics and clutches her purse to her bosom. Folks started shouting at the screen: "That happens! That's happened to me!" The crowd reactions ended up being better than the film.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 29, 2002 12:17 PM