Clinton
Street Theatre
2522 SE Clinton
St.
7 and 9:15 pm
nightly, plus 2 pm Sundays. Call
238-8899 for up-to-date information.
More than 1,000
African-American films were produced between 1895 and 1959.
Aug. 4: "The
Black Experience in the '60s"
Aug. 5: Sheba,
Baby
Aug. 6: The
Scar of Shame
Aug. 7: Hypnotized
Aug. 8: "Little
Rascals Revue"
Oscar Micheaux. Lorenzo Tucker. Edna Mae Harris. Spencer
Williams. Mantan Moreland. Nina Mae McKinney. There aren't
too many people left who remember these names, or the people
attached to them. In an era when black actors like Denzel
Washington are nominated for Academy Awards, Chris Tucker
gets paid $20 million for his latest film and Will Smith
saves the world, it's hard to believe there was once a time
when African Americans in film were actually portrayed by
white actors in blackface. Forgotten and faded from the
pages of American cinematic history, the Micheauxs, Morelands
and McKinneys are among the stars of the "separate cinema"--films
produced by black filmmakers for black audiences during
a time when America was still for "whites only."
Beginning Aug. 4, the Clinton Street Theatre presents a
month-long series of one-night screenings featuring the
black image in film. Spanning nearly eight decades, the
films run the gamut from early black-produced films like
1932's Ten Minutes to Live to Hypnotized (1933),
featuring the Black Crows--white comedians George Moran
and Charlie Mack in blackface--to the '70s classic Shaft's
Big Score. The series only begins to scratch the surface
of African-American involvement in film, which dates back
to 1888 when Thomas Edison and William Dixon, his black
assistant, created the kinescope.
By the time D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation premiered
in 1915, more than 100 short films had been produced featuring
blacks, capturing everything from the all-black 9th and
10th Cavalries during the Spanish-American War to watermelon-eating
contests. Griffith's film revolutionized narrative filmmaking
while simultaneously inflaming audiences with its pro-Klu
Klux Klan story and blackfaced white actors. As a direct
response to Nation, black actor Noble Johnson and
the Lincoln Motion Picture Company produced the feature
film The Realization of the Negro's Ambition (1916),
following in the already established tradition of such short
films as William Foster's Pullman Porter (1910) and
the 1913 works of Richard Hudlin, great-grandfather of House
Party director Reginald Hudlin.
Galvanizing around the negative images that appeared in
films like Birth of a Nation, black filmmakers began
producing "race films" boasting "all-star colored" casts--films
like Ten Minutes to Live, which starred Lorenzo Tucker
(billed as the "Black Valentino," he appeared in 16 films).
Ten Minutes was directed by the enterprising Micheaux,
whose prolific career resulted in more than 30 films, including
Paul Robeson's first starring vehicle, Body and Soul
(1924). Micheaux wrote, produced, directed and distributed
his movies, traveling from city to city with film prints
in the trunk of his car.
Because audiences were segregated at the time, the race
films were often screened at churches, on the sides of barns,
or late at night in otherwise white-only theaters--earning
them the name "midnight rambles." As early as 1929, Hollywood
had begun to see the money potential in black films, and
white directors such as King Vidor were turning out films
like Hallelujah.
By the late '30s, race films were on their way out. Replacing
them was Hollywood's white-created "black cast films." Films
such as Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky (1943)
and Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) were produced
by the studios to capture the box-office dollars of an audience
that was still denied access to many theaters.
Race films were a distant memory by the late '50s and early
'60s, and black cast films were also on their way to extinction.
Hollywood was no longer concerned with capturing exclusively
black audiences. Instead the studios began producing films
that could be marketed to more liberal audiences--"integration"
films--which featured black performers in key roles. Whether
it was Woody Strode in Sergeant Rutledge, Jim Brown
in The Dirty Dozen or Sidney Poitier in any number
of films, the cinema of this era was produced primarily
to make liberal white people feel better about their "progressive"
views on Negroes and to capture the money of black audiences
starved to see themselves on screen.
Following the sweeping changes that came during the civil-rights
movement of the '60s, a new breed of black film--which included
Shaft, Cotton Comes to Harlem and Foxy
Brown--strutted into theaters during the '70s with Afros
and attitude. The new black films came to be known as blaxploitation.
The images of super-bad soul brothers and gun-toting soul
sisters were a universe away from the polite Negroes and
dedicated domestics who populated films a decade earlier.
Blaxploitation films helped to change forever the way African
Americans would be viewed in film and television.
The Clinton Street Theatre's series starts with "The Black
Experience in the '60s," a program of short documentaries
including Gordon Parks' still photography-driven Diary
of a Harlem Family (1968) and Bill Cosby on Prejudice
(1970), a surreal performance-art piece featuring the famed
comedian in grotesque makeup spewing racial slurs. These
one-night-only engagements offer an eclectic mix of films--many
of which are unavailable on video--ranging from 1927's Scar
of Shame (a silent film produced by the Colored Players
Film Corporation of Philadelphia) to Pam Grier's pistol-packing
detective vehicle Sheba, Baby. "The Little Rascals
Revue" offers a rare chance to see a collection of Little
Rascals shorts starring Buckwheat and Stymie that have
long since been yanked from syndication due to material
that many today would consider racist. The Monster Walks
(1932) features a performance by Willie Best (a.k.a. Sleep
'n Eat), a contemporary of Stepin Fetchit who appeared in
more than 100 movies. Other films in the series include
'70s blaxploitation classics Gordon's War (1973),
directed by Ossie Davis and starring Paul Winfield as a
Green Beret leading a war against Harlem dope dealers, and
J.D.'s Revenge (1976), a supernatural thriller co-starring
Lou Gosset Jr.
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