Black Films, Black Filmmakers
Black films from the 1930s and 194
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Black films from the 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. The all-black film movement started in the silent era with the Lincoln Motion Picture company in Los Angeles in 1916, a black-owned and operated film corporation (Sampson 27). The most successful of all black-owned independent film production companies was the Micheaux Film and Book Corporation, later known as the Micheaux Film Corporation. This company was founded in 1918 and would continue produ
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ms as Harlem on the Prairie (1938) and Bronze Buckaroo (1938). Herbert Jeffrey was the hero of the latter musical-western. There really were black cowboys in the West, but these films were not attempts to set the record straight. Instead, they were black fantasies taking place in an all-black West rather than a realistic rendering of the world of the black cowboy. Such films had the effect on the one hand of showing blacks in role they could never have in white films. However, these films did have a political side that reflected some of the same prejudices as white films. In Bronze Buckaroo, Jeffrey and Artie Young, the heroes, were light-skinned blacks and were thus actually white figures:
Jeffrey's light skin classified him as a hero for ghetto audiences. Conversely, the supporting players, the comic, eye-rolling Dusty and the sinister villain,w ere played by the dark actors Lucius Brooks and Spencer Williams (Bogle 109).
Thus these films reflected certain prejudices even as they extended the range of roles for blacks and allowed black audiences to see other blacks operating successfully in an all-black community.
BLAXPLOITATION
The blaxploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s included both independent black films
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Approximate Word count = 2586
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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Black films from the 1930s and 194
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