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The Black Image on the White Screen: Representations of African Americans from the Origins of Cinema to The Birth of a Nation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2016

BEN URWAND
BEN URWAND*
Affiliation:
Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Email: urwand@fas.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, American cinema played a major role in transforming what George Fredrickson has called “the black image in the white mind.” This transformation began with the invention of cinema and climaxed with The Birth of a Nation, a film whose appeal derived not from its content, but rather from D. W. Griffith's ability to seize on this content to provoke an intense emotional response in his viewers. This essay begins by examining some of the first images of African Americans captured on camera. It then turns to Griffith's innovations in the one- and two-reelers he made at the Biograph Company. Finally, and on the occasion of the film's hundredth anniversary, the essay provides a detailed analysis of how Griffith achieved his effect in The Birth of a Nation. What the essay shows, ultimately, is that whereas the earliest depictions of African Americans relied on audience foreknowledge, the arrival of American narrative cinema led Griffith to create new kinds of black characters. Griffith's use of the close-up, the point of view, the shot/reverse-shot pattern, and parallel editing enabled him to convince his audiences of a “black menace” that threatened white America.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 45 - 64
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Benbow, Mark E., “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 9, 4 (Oct. 2010), 509–33, 520CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Rogin, Michael, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, 9 (Winter 1985), 150–95, 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Voters Pick the 100 Best American Movies,” New York Times, 17 June 1998, E3.

3 Cripps, Thomas, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 46–51, 40Google Scholar. Other important works from this period include Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York: Viking, 1973)Google Scholar; Silva, Fred, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971)Google Scholar; Franklin, John Hope, “ The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” Massachusetts Review, 20 (Autumn 1979), 417–33Google Scholar. For a purely descriptive formal analysis of The Birth of a Nation that ignores the film's racism see Cuniberti, John, The Birth of a Nation: A Formal Shot-by-Shot Analysis Together with Microfiche (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1979)Google Scholar.

4 Rogin, 150, 154, 170–71.

5 Gunning, Tom, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, 8, 3–4 (1986), 63–70 Google Scholar; Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith's Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Winter 1981), 11–25 Google Scholar; Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Other significant works in film history from this period include Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, Volume I, The Emergence of Cinema (New York: Scribner, 1990)Google Scholar; Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

6 A few recent examples include Yumibe, Joshua, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Askari, Kaveh, Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Combs, C. Scott, Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

7 Williams, Linda, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Courtney, Susan, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time,” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an approach to the film under the rubric of “whiteness studies” see Bernardi, Daniel, “Integrating Race into the Narrator System,” in Geiger, Jeffrey and Rutsky, R. L., eds., Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: Norton, 2005), 58–73 Google Scholar. For a study of African Americans’ relationship with early cinema that includes analyses of some of the first representations of black people see Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

8 Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)Google Scholar.

9 Rogin, 158.

10 A Morning Bath (Edison Mfg. Co., 1896).

11 Musser, Charles, Jeffrey, Thomas E. and Jenkins, Reese V., eds., A Guide to Motion Picture Catalogues by American Producers and Distributors, 1894–1908, A Microfilm Edition (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Frederick, 1985)Google Scholar; Musser, ed., Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 250 Google Scholar.

12 Cripps, 13.

13 Musser, History of the American Cinema, Volume I, 148.

14 Kern-Foxworth, Marilyn, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 46–48 Google Scholar.

15 The Pickaninnies (Edison Mfg. Co., 1894).

16 Watermelon Contest (Edison Mfg. Co., 1896).

17 Goings, Kenneth W., Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 37–40 Google Scholar. See also Patricia Turner, A., Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 15 Google Scholar.

18 What Happened in the Tunnel (dir. Edwin S. Porter, Edison Mfg. Co., 1903).

19 Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 39.

20 For the history of blackface minstrelsy see Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991) 115–32Google Scholar; Mahar, William J., Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

21 The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mt. Express (dir. Wallace McCutcheon, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1906).

22 Niver, Kemp R., ed., Biograph Bulletins 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), 251–52Google Scholar.

23 Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 6–7.

24 The Valet's Wife (dir. D. W. Griffith, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1908). A version of the same joke appeared in the 1989 comedy Parenthood.

25 Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 250, 234.

26 The Girls and Daddy (dir. Griffith, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1909); Bowser, Eileen, ed., Biograph Bulletins, 1908–1912 (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 59 Google Scholar. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 31, points out that the film codes the black intruder as a mulatto character (even though the Biograph description does not).

27 Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 282.

28 Ibid., 275–76, 97–129.

29 Uncle Tom's Cabin (dir. Porter, Edison Mfg. Co., 1903). Miriam Hansen offers a similar interpretation of the film in Babel and Babylon, 45–46.

30 His Trust (dir. Griffith, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1911).

31 His Trust Fulfilled (dir. Griffith, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1911); Bowser, 265.

32 Bowser, 265.

33 Dixon, Thomas Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970; first published 1905), 290, 292Google Scholar.

34 Fredrickson, 275, 276; Dixon, 294, 304.

35 Fredrickson, 256–82.

36 Dixon, 313–14.

37 The Birth of a Nation (dir. Griffith, David W. Griffith Corp., 1915).

38 Dixon, 207–8.

39 Ibid., 268.

40 Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 179.