Black Cinema

Early Hollywood

In the early years of Hollywood, the representation of African Americans descended from theatrical representations that themselves were reflections of negative attitudes derived from a system of slavery. Enslaved Africans were representational scapegoats who allowed the White man to further his superiority. Though Blacks were represented on film and archived in U.S. history, their visibility came at the expense of their humanity and integrity. In fact, in the early years of cinema, as in Uncle Tom's Cabin, many of the roles for Blacks were played by Whites in blackface playing out their racial phobias in comic depictions of Blacks. Donald Bogle has described the representation of African Americans in U.S. cinema as the preserve of the “coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal Black buck,” in short, all characters designed to bolster the representational superiority of the Whites and entertain with the inferiority of the Blacks.

The archive of racial representations on film documents the racism of Hollywood, providing visual evidence of a history of racial mistreatment that might otherwise be lost and forgotten. The Birth of a Nation is considered the first feature film and the earliest exemplar of the art of filmmaking; however, it also chronicles the institutionalization of racism in Hollywood. It is an archive of the fears of White Americans about African American emancipation and sexual contact with White women, fears that shaped subsequent representations of African Americans. At the time, many saw The Birth of a Nation as the historical truth about African Americans, whereas today, the film is generally understood within its ideological context, as presenting White fears about the emancipation of a brutally subjugated people.

Black cinema continually refers back to this origin story of Black representation, one that is founded in stereotype and has produced the major types and figures of Black media representation. Black cinema emerges from divergent cinematic histories, one represented by The Birth of a Nation and other films of the era, like The Wooing and the Wedding of a Coon (1905), and another tradition that contests this legacy of subjugation and stereotype. These two poles represent a constant struggle in the cinematic representation of African Americans.

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