English 380-001
Media and Society: Representations of Race in Early American Cinema
Instr: Jay, Gregory
Office: GAR 324; 229-6327
e-mail: gjay@uwm.edu
Office Hours: TBA
Course Information: T&R; 11:00-1:50pm; CRT 104
Course Description
Representations of race played a key role in the development of early American cinema. Images and narratives from the history of slavery and the wars against the Indians were among the first stories brought to the screen, popular both for the aesthetic possibilities they gave to the silent screen as well as for the ideological work they accomplished with American audiences (including the large numbers of ethnic European immigrants who crowded the theaters). Previous popular cultural forms such as vaudeville and the Wild West Show had already formulated some of these stories for the emergent visual culture of American nationalism. These forms were quickly adapted to the new medium in silent short films of the first decade of the 1900s, such as Edison's Uncle Tom's Cabin and D. W. Griffith's Indian melodramas. Griffith's controversial, if not infamous, Birth of a Nation used a pro-Ku Klux Klan novel to fashion what many consider the movie that gave birth to the genre of the American feature film. Here we will look especially at the emergence of "whiteness" as at once an aesthetic and ideological formation, and one crucially linked to the "star system" representing idealized white women. A substantial portion of the course will examine Griffith's Indian films and Birth, as well as his Orientalist masterpiece Broken Blossoms. Griffith's work was answered by black pioneer filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose 1919 Within Our Gates depicted racism, lynching, and rape as the true if repressed history of America's post-Civil War rebirth. We will also analyze a number of additional African American films from 1918 to the 1930s, including Body and Soul and The Veiled Aristocrats. Among the issues raised by these films are the impact of racism on the film production industry, the technical and aesthetic differences involved in filming black bodies, and the relation of these films to African American literary and cultural developments of the era. We will also look at Scar of Shame, a 1927 film about color and class, and The Silent Enemy, an extraordinary 1930 epic of the Ojibway that manages to avoid many of the racist clichés of the Western film. Screenings will be accompanied by readings in American social history, film criticism and theory, and critical race studies
