Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film

Allyson Nadia Field, Marsha Gordon, Allyson Nadia Field, Marsha Gordon

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781478004769
  9781478004141
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478005605
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it.

Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Note on the Companion Website
• Foreword. Giving Voice, Taking Voice: Nonwhite and Nontheatrical
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Vanishing Race”?: The Native American Films of J. K. Dixon
• 2. “Regardless of Race, Color, or Creed”: Filming the Henry Street Settlement Visiting Nurse Service, 1924–1933
• 3. “I’ll See You in Church”: Local Films in African American Communities, 1924–1962
• 4. The Politics of Vanishing Celluloid: Fort Rupert (1951) and the Kwakwaka’wakw in American Ethnographic Film
• 5. Red Star/Black Star: The Early Career of Film Editor Hortense “Tee” Beveridge, 1948–1968
• 6. Charles and Ray Eames’s Day of the Dead (1957): Mexican Folk Art, Educational Film, and Chicana/o Art
• 7. Ever-Widening Horizons? The National Urban League and the Pathologization of Blackness in A Morning for Jimmy (1960)
• 8. “A Touch of the Orient”: Negotiating Japanese American Identity in The Challenge (1957)
• 9. “I Have My Choice”: Behind Every Good Man (1967) and the Black Queer Subject in American Nontheatrical Film
• 10. Televising Watts: Joe Saltzman’s Black on Black (1968) on KNXT
• 11. “A New Sense of Black Awareness”? Navigating Expectations in The Black Cop (1969)
• 12. “Don’t Be a Segregationist: Program Films for Everyone”: The New York Public Library’s Film Library and Youth Film Workshops
• 13. Teenage Moviemaking in the Lower East Side: The Rivington Street Film Club, 1966–1974
• 14. Ro-Revus Talks about Race: South Carolina Malnutrition and Parasite Films, 1968–1975
• 15. Government-Sponsored Film and Latinidad: Voice of La Raza (1971)
• 16. An Aesthetics of Multiculturalism: Asian American Assimilation and the Learning Corporation of America’s Many Americans Series (1970–1982)
• 17. “The Right Kind of Family”: Memories to Light and the Home Movie as Racialized Technology
• 18. Black Home Movies: Time to Represent
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index