African American film genre Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

African American film genre - Essay ExampleLong before lavatory Crows laws, etiolated Americans had already a pre-conceived view of black people as inferior,which sufficeed them justify slavery.After all they were unable to get a line English and spoke Pigeon English,another proof that blacks were not intelligent. From the 1620s, blacks were stereotyped and the emergence of minstrel shows in the 1840s only helped in branding even more this misconception, (Davis) and introducing black caricatures, envisioned by innocence actors with black-make-up, as the coons, the toms, and the mammies at first, and subsequently on followed by the mulattoes and the bucks. The first movie ever where African Americans appear was screened in 1898, where it showed black soldiers in the Spanish-American war. But it was with the 1903 movie with a black character, Uncle Tom, directed by Edwin S. Porter, a purity man, that we can turn up the beginning of the American film industry incorporating black characters. Tom was portrayed by a white actor with black make-up. In the movie, Tom is the typical skinny, middle-aged, desexed slave, totally loyal to his white master, a farthest cry from the original Tom portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowes book Uncle Toms Cabin, which showed a gentle, kind, and forgiving man. This first personation of a black in film sealed even more this misconstrued idea of black inferiority and became a vehicle used to the advantage of whites not only for entertainment but also for frugal reasons - advertisement for sellable products -. What no one foresaw then was the planting of the seed of the actual African American film industry with a slew of black actors who elevated these roles and brought to them arty qualities if not pure art. (Bogle 23). That was the meat of black film history. When one tries to discuss and place African American film industry, one cannot help but go back in time and start with the characterization that white people so stron gly believed in, leading them to create caricatures of black people in the burgeoning entertainment industry. So, it is impossible not to describe the four categories of stereotypes that kept reoccurring throughout the twentieth century. These four characters were the foundation of the entertainment industry as seen by white producers, who soon came to realize that it was also a tool to instigate war or peace, tolerance and understanding versus discrimination and segregation. The four black figures were the Tom, the Mammies, the Coons, and the Bucks. The Tom, the ever subservient, good-natured, stoic, selfless and loyal to a fault, as seen in Jezebel (1938), Love Thy Neighbor (1940), where Tom was portrayed by Eddie Anderson, Edge of the City (1957), and The Defiant Ones (1958), where Sidney Poitier characters sacrifice themselves for their white friends. The Coons with very black faces, bulging eyeballs and thick red lips, which represented the black buffoon, himself subdivided in to two groups, the Pickanny and the Uncle Ramus, a first cousin to Tom. (Bogle 8) Mantan Moreland made the coon character renown from the late 1930s to the early 1970s when he as yet made cameo appearances(Bogle 72). The Mammy, usually fat, big and cantankerous, but still sweet and good-tempered, made her first big appearance in 1914s Lysistrata, and was used as the recognizable face on pancake boxes and syrup, but was made famous by Hattie McDaniel in the 1930s (no one can forget her in Gone with the Wind). Of course, the tragic Mulatto caught between the white and the black world and unable to find her place in neither one of them as portrayed in the 1912 movie The Debt, and the tear-jerker movie Imitation of Life in 1934. Finally, the last of the categories, the Buck, whose introduction in the 1915 anti-Semite(a) movie by D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, brought a slew of controversies, was a brute, a liar, a maneuver and a rapist. This blatantly anti-black movie that be came a propaganda vehicle for the Ku Klux Klan, was also the coup de