Early Black Films
Black films from the 1920s, 1930s, a
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Black films from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were produced by black filmmakers for a black circuit and were rarely seen by white audiences. So-called blaxploitation films from the late 1960s and early 1970s were produced by white filmmakers for a largely urban audience, and these films were shaped for white audiences as well as black. The black films from an earlier era showed a wide range of subject matter, with the mass of films emulating white genres such as detective stories, westerns, comedies, domestic dramas, crime dramas, and so on. The blaxploitation films of the 1970s were much more limited, being primarily crime and action films featuring drug use, violence, sexual situations, and so on, creating an image of blacks that was limited and, in the eyes of many critics, degrading. It would be wrong to argue that the black films of the 1930s were high artistic achievements, for overall they were not, but they did offer a more varied view of black life than could be found in the studio-financed action fantasies of the sixties and seventies. Between those films and the exploitation works of the 1960s there is a void as far as films made by blacks for blacks are concerned, and blacks in films in the interim were all reflections of white views of blackness. The exploitation films of the 1960s and early 1970s were a different sort of white image of blacks. It would not be until after the large-scale success of the Civil Rights Movement and accompanying sh
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le says this reflected a new social order that was beginning to discard many of the old racial proprieties:
Imitation of Life was an outgrowth of this new conscious liberal spirit. It prided itself on its portrait of the modern black woman, still a servant but now imbued with dignity and a character that were an integral part of the American way of life (Bogle 57).
Bogle says that Louise Beavers as Delilah "was a combination of tom and aunt jemima" (Bogle 59) who expressed a Christian stoicism that made audiences believe in her and that helped "elevate" the black character in films "by endowing him with Christian goodness far exceeding that of any other character" (Bogle 59). This was in keeping with the belief that black characters had to be far better than white in order to achieve the same level in the eyes of viewers, but there was another consequence as well:
Of course, the irony of this stoicism was that it made the Negro character more self-effacing than ever and even more resolutely resigned to accepting his fate of inferiority (Bogle 59).
THE 1960S
In the 1960s, Hollywood found itself responding to shifting political and social attitudes, and the response was not as complete or effective as it could have been. I
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Ronald Green, INTRODUCTION Black, Leo Frank, Rights Movement, Beavers Delilah, CONTEMPORARY FILMS, Imitation Life, Stanley Kauffmann, Images Blacks, Song Shaft, black film, black films, oscar micheaux, boyz hood, university press, 1930s 1940s, blaxploitation films, york routledge, washington post july, white filmmakers, films produced, boyz hood washington, post july 12, july 12 1991, hood washington post,
Approximate Word count = 3456
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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