Nina Mae McKinney in King Vidor’s 1929 “Hallelujah.”
➤ BLACK ACTRESSES, from p.24
Black women performers.”
The festival’s line-up is appreciably
wide ranging. Recognition
from the Hollywood establishment
is the logic underlying the programming.
The festival opens with
“Carmen Jones,” the 1954 musical
starring Dorothy Dandridge in
the role that received the first Best
Actress Oscar nomination for an
African-American performer, and
closes with “Monster Ball,” whose
female lead, Halle Berry, was the
first Black actress to win the Oscar
in that category.
Featured are celebrated blacktresses
through the decades: Dandridge,
Berry, Lena Horne, Josephine
Baker, Diana Ross, and
Whoopi Goldberg to name only a
few. There are also the lesser sung
pioneers, such as Nina Mae McKinney
(1912-1967), who stars in the
first all-sound, all-Black feature
film, “Hallelujah,” with the marvelous
character name of “Chick.”
McKinney was widely celebrated
as the first African-American bona
fide movie star. She signed a fiveyear
contract with MGM studios,
which ended up not bearing much
fruit since there were such few
roles for which melanated women
would even be auditioned. Determined
to share her talents, McKinney
expatriated to Europe, where,
according to her biographer, British
writer Stephen Bourne, she
performed on the BBC and starred
as the wife of an African chief opposite
Paul Robeson in “Sanders
of the River” (1935), a film set in
British colonized Nigeria. (Unbeknownst
to the actors, the movie’s
script was changed post-production
FILM FORUM
to support an imperial worldview,
and Robeson did his best to
block its release.)
Reflecting on McKinney’s life and
career is particularly important at
this time when Black Hollywood is
dealing with the controversy surrounding
the casting of Black British
actors and actresses in roles
that some prominent figures in
the industry such as Samuel L.
Jackson say should have gone to
US-born actors. The only Black
performer nominated for a 2020
Academy Award in the major categories
is native Londoner Cynthia
Erivo as Best Actress for her role in
“Harriet” as the African-American
abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman,
a casting decision that drew
a great deal of negative comment
on social media.
So-called “race films” were movies
produced exclusively for African
American audiences, roughly
between the years 1915 and 1952.
They were financed and produced
by mostly white-controlled operations
outside the Hollywood establishment.
Significant in this era
was Oscar Micheaux, the African-
American director and producer
behind some 44 films who was responsible
for launching the careers
of Black performers like Robeson
who went on to mainstream recognition.
Micheaux’s “Within Our
Gates” (1920), the oldest surviving
feature-length film by a Black
director, stars Evelyn Preer as a
woman reeling from a broken engagement.
Themes of romantic discord took
a turn toward women’s empowerment
during the Blaxploitation era
of filmmaking in the 1970s, overlaying
influences of Black Power
and racial uplift themes. Representing
this period in the “Black
Women” festival are such classics
as “Foxy Brown” (1974), starring
Pam Grier who fights back against
forces of both gender and racial oppression
in the seedy underbelly of
urban ghettoes.
The “Black Women” festival pays
de facto tribute to prominent members
of the guild who passed away
in 2019 by including their acting or
directorial work. Diahann Carroll
can be seen in “Claudine” (1974), in
her Oscar-nominated role, as can
the work of the late John Singleton,
“Poetic Justice” (1993), which
gave singer Janet Jackson her
screen debut.
The line-up’s use of Hollywood
as a compass — “The experimental
cinema is not strongly represented
in this go-round!,” explained Archer
— shows up the intersectional
gaps in the history of Black women’s
cinematic representation and
the extent to which those challenges
remain. Lesbian representation,
namely, is modest, seen most outwardly
in “The Watermelon Woman”
(1996), director Cheryl Dunye’s
comic narrative that infuses,
in the words of reviewer B. Ruby
Rich, “film history, African-American
culture, dyke attitudes, race
relations, and the mysteries of lesbian
attraction” and in “Set it Off”
(1996), with the lesbian character
of Cleo, played by Queen Latifah.
Off-script, openly bisexual Billie
Holiday is afforded a full tribute
that collects her film and television
appearances.
The experiences of Black trans
women is not included in the lineup.
“I cannot think of narrative
fiction depictions in this period
range,” Archer said.
The future of Black women’s
representation on and behind the
camera will be determined, as it
always had been, by a series of factors:
the availability of platforms,
the strength of voices, the training
of vocations. The Devil, we must
remember, is in the details.
BLACK WOMEN: TRAILBLAZING
AFRICAN-AMERICAN PERFORMERS
& IMAGES, 1920-2001 |
Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. |
Jan. 17-Feb. 13 | $15 at fi lmforum.
org
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