written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

The problem and notion of “Black” cinema and what “Black Movies” are and who makes up its history, and its present, is quite often not only infuriating when dealing with the tentacles of the establishment, but downright insulting.

Fugazi articles about fugazi events – such as the September 8, 2022 New York Times article by Manohla Dargis on the “Black Cinema” exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles are not only dishonest but all too frequently un-critical.  Of anything.

Dargis contends that this exhibition on Black moviemaking and the struggle, specifically, in the mainstream industry of motion pictures  - does not fairly express the problems and courage experienced and possessed by the Black image-makers of the first half of the twentieth century.  And she is absolutely correct. More than one filmmaker I respect confirmed this. 

But I don’t care about some corporate museum display designed to pat Blacks on their head or regurgitate well-worn tropes. The next time a writer or exhibition mentions Birth of a Nation in reference to Black cinema I am going to personally strangle them with CLR James’ essay on the film.  That should at least begin to steer things in the right direction. Birth is an important film. And for all the wrong reasons: it is a racist masterpiece.  And not one intelligent curator or film writer in the United States has ever projected the movie in a program entitled “The History of White Cinema.”  (Why not?  Think about it.)

Dargis states:

It is not shocking that such mediocre writing masquerading as “criticism” fills the pages of the NY Times.  It is in sync with the rest of the zeitgeist and cultural wasteland regarding the arts.  For it’s not that there aren’t decent works of art being made, it’s that no one knows how to write about them, pro or con.  And this is certainly the problem now concerning the Neo-Liberal flag waving “Woke Culture” and identity politics obsession.  Mainstream arts and culture critics are like the race hustlers on CNN or female pimps who feign feminism but are in reality nothing but enablers of the patriarchal (and racist) status quo.

Full of the typical, forced intellectual parallels of DuBois’ “Double Consciousness” – now in vogue in white Liberal publications that constantly try to prove their moral knowledge and radical insights into “Blackness'' as opposed to genuinely view cinema through a DuBosian lens (part of how my own approach to film criticism was developed), Dargis’ tries to be pleasant about what is probably a sterile, staid and stereotypical “Black” movie history exhibition. 

The well-worn inclusions of the personas and works of living Black artists such as Theaster Gates and Kara Walker prove this. Walker herself is highly problematic. Unlike D.W. Griffith she is not a genius, nor is she a white racist.  She could be worse:  a talented Black person who is using their wares to capitulate to and titillate white people’s fetishistic sexual fantasies (look her up if you don’t know her) or provide safe pat “Black” art that references the gleefully conflicted sexual deviancy of the antebellum South and is constantly on the verge of being included on some new book cover of “RACE IN AMERICA” or “BLACK ART” that is “controversial.”  Since when did derogation of sex and race and class status amount to avant-garde?  It’s beyond offensive. Walker and Broadway Theater director Robert O’Hara (Slave Play) should get married. They both indulge in the same jester game for the White audience, winking coyly at them through the prism of the white gaze. It’s obscene.  We have come a long way from Black artists and performers criticizing Louis Armstrong (Sammy Davis, Jr., Miles Davis) as being a sell-out to…sell-ing ourselves so we can buy into a system that is pathologically contemptuous of Black people.  The entertainment industrial complex will always be what it is: a vaudeville minstrel show insistent on owning the reflections and reverberations on Black Americans.  This is part of the reason why the Luminal exists and why Wavelengths was created, specifically, to give critical voice to the marginalized edges of the Black gaze and what those of us out of bounds, notice and observe…

(If someone reading this actually feels that Kara Walker and Robert O’Hara are transmitting through any aspect of the of Black gaze, then please explain to me what I am missing and I will certainly write a retraction.)

This brings us to the question Dargis should want to ask her smug readers: If an image in cinema (visual arts) could be deemed controversial – to WHOM is it controversial for?  WHO is the audience? When will Black cinema as art or mere entertainment be valued or written about, even generally, with OURSELVES in our sights?

Dargis’ coda is even more ridiculous as she concedes that the exhibit certainly doesn’t know how or can’t accurately confront the racism of Hollywood’s image-making (a euphemism for white racists; remember there is no HOLLYWOOD.  There’s the White House and the Great White Way.  There is a Holly-weird that is composed of some of the most venal, hateful and wealthiest white people in the last 200 hundred years. That’s all it is, folks.)

Part of this problem regarding Hollywood and “representation” in mainstream movies and TV and media and corporate America is wrapped up in Black Americans’ own abandonment of camaraderie as a result of integration at the end of the sixties.  The Negro Actors Guild, founded in 1937 by the wonderfully underrated actress Fredi Washington (Imitation of Life, 1934) deserves ample acknowledgment for all she did for the image of Black people and for the dignity of the Black performer.  It’s tragic that such a guild does not exist today, but how could it?  Black performing artists are not the varied, yet tight-knit group they once were.  In fact, in 2022, an unknown independent film director writing a unique part for a uniquely established competent actor is forced to go through ten white people before speaking to that actor – if they even get that far.  Black artists rarely work together the way we once did and if we do now it is usually considered something to do to “pass the time” or just one of those “things” one has to do as they work their way up the ladder…What ladder?  Whose ladder?  Can you imagine any of your favorite musicians behaving in such a manner?  As aloof and overwhelming and mainstream as Prince was – I highly doubt he would ever obfuscate a songwriter’s attempt to send him something. Black Hollywood actors are known for being gnarly to Black screenwriters and directors who don’t have clout or, in the very least, a great deal of money.  It’s why you will never see a poor auteur rubbing shoulders with Anthony Mackie or Viola Davis.  When I say poor - I don’t just mean financial class.  I mean to them, these are “the poor” as in simply not one of the anointed.  Black Hollywood is the corporate visual component of the new Black bourgeoisie. And everyone knows that group is just dangling on strings, as puppets often do… 

Light enough to pass as white, Washington scoffed and spat on any notion of denying who she was or her African ancestry.  She never once enabled the notion that Blacks were inferior and was insulted when asked why she never chose to abscond her race’s suffrage. 

Dargis and critics of her ilk (this is not an excoriation of her, but rather an uppercut to all the critics who think they actually have something to offer us in the realm of “art and race”) should have decried that every mildly intelligent person knows that without a constant genuflection towards America’s racist past that we will never get into the future.  There is something creepily existential and scientific about all this.  But even when you take Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into account (which one has to), the matter is even more complex.  I may feel we are going backward or in stasis, you may feel we are progressing forward at lightning speed.  But perhaps we are both wrong.  Perhaps “Hollywood” and “Race” and “Representation” are indoctrinated iron maidens - a present tense we cannot escape.  

Dargis ends her article “the exhibition tends to invoke racism in generalized terms and as a widely understood problem, leaving too many specifics of Hollywood’s foundational role in reproducing that racism to your imagination and the catalog. I can’t wait to read it.”

Both she, and if this is also their intention the exhibit’s curators Doris Berger and Rhea L. Combs, have all lost their minds.  This trivializes and creates a bizarre salivation for what exactly?  And why in the world should your imagination be utilized to unearth and read between the lines of Hollywood’s racism in order to assess its impact on the greater society, in how racism played out on screen, airwaves and the cotton fields of Mississippi to the concrete of Union Square in New York?  She reminds her readers that it is “inspiring to see a wall filled with glossy, glamorous headshots of Black stars like (Lena) Horne, Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington,” etc.

 No, no, no Manohla.

What would be inspiring is to see an exhibit that traces Horne’s career, the impact of her persona, her ideology and her experiences as a woman, Black person, American – all in one.  THEN, the next room would not be some preposterousness by more paid shills like Gates or Walker but a room that explored the tragic dimension of Paul Robeson’s first political enemy:  the movie camera, before he wrestled the United States Government and HUAC.

For the movie camera was ever more elusive and almost just as cruel to Robeson.  For it could not and would NOT fairly regard or consider Robeson and this is the fundamental reason why Ruby Dee always said, with deep regret, that while she adored Robeson the performance artist – she could not watch any of the movies he ever appeared in. The tragedy here is that the giant talent of Robeson the singer and actor was all but diminished – castrated – by the white man’s movie camera in their attempt to “capture” him.  Well they captured him alright and they used his own image against Blacks quite well.

“Hollywood leaves out blunt truths on racism” – which are what??  Dargis doesn’t answer the question.  A twelve-year-old reading the article will be left scratching their head. Dargis claims the museum skirts the issue, but so does she.

 Robeson, arguably both the most radical artist and mainstream performer of the 20th century (the only artist I can think of who held radical beliefs, deep concern for the oppressed and yet was commercially successful or acknowledged by millions of beloved fans was the Italian radical filmmaker Pasolini!)  was destroyed with the motion picture camera.  The white gaze turned him into a moronic, imbecilic, stereotyped Buck who possessed none of the insights, sophistication, wit, or soul that his live performances rendered.  The white man’s camera got their revenge on his image…and later McCarthy and Cohn got their revenge on the man.

Robeson, to his dying day, was plagued by guilt, frustration and terror that he could not collaborate with someone to make a film that he could really be proud of.

In a beautifully written and urgent remembrance of her grandfather, Susan Robeson devotes an entire chapter of Robeson’s artistic and political misfortunes in cinema in her book The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson (1981, Citadel Press).  It is a powerful, indicting, and rigorous excavation of Robeson’s conflicted cinema work and career.  Although he has appeared in interesting movies – namely Oscar Michaux’s Body and Soul (1924) a silent film in which he plays a crooked preacher and Song of Freedom (1936), a British film in which Robeson plays Zinga, an opera star in the West who comes to discover that he is of royal African ancestry – Robeson’s cinematic output is fraught with stereotypes, racist tropes, and colonialist thinking all enmeshed in the White Western world’s patronizing and demeaning view of the “other,” the exotic, the “African.” Robeson was often betrayed by the white filmmakers he worked with and if there is one unfortunate collaboration that never took place it would have been between him and the great Russian revolutionary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein; the left-wing radical humanist to D.W. Griffith’s festering American racism. Robeson and Eisenstein discussed doing a film about Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary who fought Napoleon, but it never transpired of course.

 In a courageous act of transparency, analysis, and critique Robeson himself declared in a 1937 interview: “Films make me into some cheap turn…You bet they will never let me play a part in which the Negro is on top.”  Robeson was gravely disappointed that he could not manage to overwhelm the medium of film in his own way; the chauvinism of the movie camera, it’s singular and specific point-of-view being something he as an actor and Black conscious man - could not wrangle control out of the hands of the whites who sought to control him in celluloid. And since he lacked the gift and eye for filmmaking, he was always at the behest of his director. The sad case for many brilliant performers, regardless of color, who simply couldn’t “register” on screen. 

 Any article championing the cliché importance of Theaster Gates, Kara Walker or Ava DuVernay is not worth taking seriously. What IS serious is noting WHY Birth of a Nation is and will always be, unfortunately, relevant?

And what prevented Robeson from never making a movie as good as he was as an actor?

 The tragedy of performers like him and Zero Mostel, for example, is that performers who are “big” and earthy, actors who suck out all the air of a theater and breathe it right back into you, are often diminished on screen. Very few of the “life force” actors (“over-the-top” as American critics sometimes deride them) like Jimmy Cagney and Al Pacino have been so brilliantly captured as they have on screen.  It takes two to tango, but it’s rare.   It is a terrible dilemma aesthetically - for some actors never adapt to the cinematic form; Orson Welles, a gargantuan persona on stage and screen once claimed that one of the greatest actors of the Italian stage  – Eduardo de Fillipo -   was absolutely nothing on camera. In Welles’ words: “In movies he just ceases to happen.”*  Sometimes the je ne sais quoi does not translate to screen.  Fine. It can happen, it’s not always a nefarious plot.

But what happens when it is neither a limit of the actor, nor the director - but just a severe unconscious desire to negate a performer’s power?  What is paranoid about this?  If the same white world decimated countries in Africa wouldn’t it certainly know how to do the same for one of its greatest descendant performers?

This cannot be more important to address or dissect - politically - than for the African-American actors principally, who soared and roared like eagles on stage…but were reduced to turkeys when in front of the camera. 

The major difference between theater and film is that cinema is a director’s medium.  It just means that the performer has no control in what then becomes an alchemical and mechanical process; a synthesis of phases and moving parts.  Performers own their moments.  Directors own their “captured energy.”

And if the performer understands the recorded medium so well as to eclipse a producer (Stevie Wonder, Prince making their own records for example) how does a performer make their own films?

 Most performer-directors fail in other directors' works. Why?

 (Why has no no other director been able to successfully apply and use the proclivities of actor-filmmakers Robert Townsend or Wendell Harris in their own films?)

Cause they are being asked to avail themselves in a different way.

And sometimes that's impossible. But often for Black performers - the real elephant in the room is one's relationship to the camera. 

Until the mainstream critics like Scott and Hoberman and Dargis at the NY Times cease using their self-satisfied knowledge about historical racism in Hollywood, how “difficult” things are for Blacks, etc – we must consistently inject our point-of-view into the ether. We are not invisible.  Our perceptions are just constantly marginalized. 

Remember:

 The Jews of the early 20th century inherently understood propaganda instantly when the Nazis rose; they knew HOW all would be contorted to conform to a singular and hateful vision by airwaves and cinema. Those in Hollywood already knew nearly a decade before the term Nazi became a household word and which is why they made sure their alliance to WASPS was clear from day one. 

IMAGINE: The Museum of the American White Actor in the Moving Image:

It will begin and end with Al Jolson.  The second part of the exhibit will be D.W. Griffith’s belongings, letters, films…his eventual fall from grace - lingering and clawing all over the walls.  Of course, I will be the only Black man involved in this exhibit, I shall be the proprietor, etc.  I shall do concessions and judge at the same time. The audience will be forced to not only re-enact every Jolson blackface routine, but in order to get back out they will have to write a defense of “Birth of a Nation”.  If they don’t, they have to burn it.  Which, in Hollywood, is worse than burning the American flag.

We need White Cinema History exhibits and we need “White” Studies immediately.  The beginning of the end can be traced back to 1927’s "The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson.  Now ask yourself, honestly, are you shocked that Capitol records put out new-wave minstrelsy hip hop in the form of Artificial Intelligence?

May all those who strive to be authentic in this inauthentic world retain some kind of sanity.  Bless you all. Keep moving.

“I thought I could do something for the Negro race in the films: show the truth about them and about other people to.  I used to do my part and go away satisfied. Thought everything was okay. Well, it wasn’t…One man can’t face the film companies. They represent about the biggest aggregate of finance capital in the world: that’s why they make their films that way. So no more films for me.”

-        Paul Robeson, London Interview, 1937

*For more on Orson Welles’ thoughts and impressions about actors on stage and screen, refer to “This is Orson Welles” by Peter Bogdanovich, an exhaustive and fascinating interview with Welles about his art and career and nearly every aspect of filmmaking.