Fear of the Dark

'Race', Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema

Lola Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415097093
• eBook ISBN: 9781134862153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Studies of the portrayal of black people in film have tended to be studies for the ideological correctness of the depictions of black people and the extent to which they rely on stereotypes. By closely examining films such as Sapphire (1959), Leo the Last (1969), Black Joy (1977), Playing Away (1986) and Mona Lisa (1987) and situating them in their historical and social context, Fear of the Dark develops a particualar critical perspective on the film portrayal of black female sexuality and questions the extent to which black film makers have challenged stereotypes.

Chapter 1

Themes and issues

The aim of this chapter is to indicate the major theories and concepts which have informed the textual analyses which follow. To this end, it begins with an examination of some of the literature concerned with representations of ‘race’ and racial issues in the context of North American popular cinema. I will argue that underpinning much of this material is the contention that the black people in these texts are inaccurately represented. There follows a schematic account of theories relating to ideology and realism which serve to problematize the position which considers black people to be ‘misrepresented’ in mainstream cinema.

This study draws on insights developed by black and white feminists: I will refer to these analyses under the general heading of ‘Feminist Issues’. This is followed by a more specific consideration of feminist film scholarship and its relationship to racial issues. Subsequently, I will examine some of the work which draws on psychoanalytic theory for an understanding of racial difference and the links with sexual and racial anxiety, dwelling in some detail on the concepts of Otherness and ‘difference’ in psychoanalytic discourse.

‘RACE’, COLONIALISM AND REPRESENTATION

The question of images—their construction and their histories—and the meanings which accrue to them is central to a discussion of any visual text: when it comes to carrying out work which involves representations of black people, the analysis of images has a heightened political inflection, since representations of black people are always deemed to ‘mean’ something, to be laden with symbolism in regard to ‘race’ in racially stratified societies.

A great deal of critical work has been concerned with representation and the relationship between the external reality referred to and the image constructed of it. This relationship is problematic if it is implied that there is some direct transfer of material reality from the object to the image. It is a difficult and complex subject which extends and problematizes debates about producing positive images or combatting stereotypical imagery.

First published in Screen in 1983, and concerned with moving beyond the ‘negative/positive’ images debate, Robert Stam and Louise Spence open their analysis of colonialism and representation by highlighting some of the problems associated with previous studies of racism in the cinema (Stam and Spence, 1985:632). As Stam and Spence point out, texts such as Slow Fade to Black (Cripps, 1977), From Sambo to Superspade (Leab, 1975), and Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mulattoes and Bucks (Bogle, 1991),¹ have in the main limited their analyses to discussion about the degree of correspondence of the images to their referents through the examination of stereotypes. In these studies it is assumed that stereotyping is an inherently negative practice.^{2 3}

Stam’s and Spence’s essay demonstrates the shortcomings of earlier efforts to understand the complex articulations of racist and colonial ideologies in film. They reject texts which put the ‘emphasis on realism’ and betray ‘an exaggerated faith in the possibilities of verisimilitude in art in general and the cinema in particular’ (Stam and Spence, 1985:637). These films, they argue, avoid ‘the fact that films are inevitably constructs, fabrications, representations’ (ibid.: 637). Nonetheless, Stam and Spence are prone to this tendency to desire some correspondence with reality themselves. This is illustrated by the comment:

Countless safari films present Africa as the land of ‘lions in the jungle’ when in fact only a tiny proportion of the African land mass could be called ‘jungle’ and when lions do not live in the jungle but in grassland.

(ibid.: 637)

This may be read as theoretical inconsistency, but it may also be seen as an unconscious acknowledgement of the investment that audiences have in realist texts and it is not as easy to dismiss the potency of such a desire as perhaps Stam and Spence would like to believe. The desire for ‘authentic’ representations which depict life ‘as it really is’ is strong and it is a desire encouraged by the continued use of those forms of realism which purport to be a ‘window on the world’.

Stam and Spence warn of the dangers of overemphasis on the study of the images themselves, which they claim may lead to:

both the privileging of characterological concerns (to the detriment of other important considerations) and also to a kind of essentialism, as the critic reduces a complex diversity of portrayals to a limited set of reified stereotypes. Behind every black child performer, from Farina to Gary Coleman, the critic discerns a ‘pickaninny’, behind every sexually attractive black actor a ‘buck’ and behind every attractive black actress a ‘whore’. Such reductionist simplifications run the risk of reproducing the very racism they were initially designed to combat.

(ibid.: 640)

It is important to argue for complexity rather than over-simplification, and there is a problem with continually labelling particular images as ‘pickanniny’ or ‘whore’ without regard to their historical and cultural specificity: however rather than considering this identification of particular images to be a reification of stereotypes, it might be thought of as the identification of tropes which have evolved out of the ‘master’ discourses of colonialism. It is argued here that it is imperative to trace the development of these images, to place them in their historical context and to question whether it is possible to identify shifts in the reworking of the themes and metaphors. Indeed, there is an implicit admission of this in Stam’s and Spence’s comments regarding The Birth of a Nation, for their description of Gus as ‘the sexually aggressive black man’ (my emphasis) suggests an acceptance of the ‘brute, black buck’ stereotype elaborated on by Donald Bogle, amongst others (ibid.: 644).

In asking that ‘the analysis of stereotypes must also take cultural specificity into account’ (ibid.: 640), Stam and Spence are actually referring to a national specificity, since they consider stereotypes as they relate to the beliefs and attitudes of different countries. The cultural specificity of groups within, for example, the USA does not seem to be an issue.

There is also evidence of a reluctance to recognize the implications of their statements about reductionism and essentialism. For example, they write of how a North American spectator taking a different reading from the text’s preferred meaning is deemed to have misread a scene from a Brazilian film, rather than to have made sense of the scene in terms of their own cultural context. This is inconsistent with their use of the more favourable, more academic term ‘aberrant reading’ to refer to Latin American audiences’ interpretations of a Hollywood text. This latter point indicates the tendency to consider audiences in an undifferentiated manner, as in the statement regarding point-of-view conventions in images of encirclement in Western films. Stam and Spence claim that the ‘spectator is unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective’ (ibid.: 641). However, it is doubtful that audience identification is so uniformly achieved as suggested here. It may well be the case that such texts attempt to position the spectator on the side of the colonizer—to interpellate the viewer thus—but meanings are unstable and cannot easily be controlled. Even though the ‘colonizer’s’ perspective is foregrounded, any number of spectators may consciously choose to side with those Indians located as exterior to the besieged white Europeans.

Stam’s and Spence’s basic aim is to attempt to construct a critical methodology which must:

pay attention to the mediations which intervene between “reality” and its representation. Its emphasis should be on narrative structure, genre conventions, and cinematic style.

(Stam and Spence, 1985:641)

In regard to this study, such a methodology is inadequate without a historical perspective on the representation of reality: any such endeavour should be concerned with the historicity of cinematic representation.

Another important point which is raised by Stam’s and Spence’s work is, to what extent is the North American experience of racial differentiation applicable elsewhere, and in particular to Britain? To refer back to Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mulattoes and Bucks (Bogle, 1991): some of Bogle’s memorable list of black stereotypes are specific to North American experiences of slavery and its consequences. Although there are many similarities, it is important to remember that British experiences were dissimilar in important respects and colonialism and imperial conquest have operated quite differently from the USA. I draw on that which is applicable from the USA whilst recognizing the specificity of British cinema, society and history, and conceptualizations of racial difference.

Having worked on North American racial imagery in the cinema (Pines, 1975), Jim Pines engages with racial difference in British cinema (Pines, 1981). His essay examines black people’s positioning in British cinema, and there is an explicit comparison made to images of blackness in North American popular cinema. The essay is not solely concerned with film as Pines discusses documentary television too: the comparison of themes and textual strategies across the media is interesting but serves to gloss over the specificity of cinematic discursive practices. Unlike much of the black critical writing on film of the 1970s and early 1980s, Pines’ work is clearly informed by structuralist and semiotic analyses such as those which developed in the pages of Screen during the 1970s.

Another point which marks out Pines’ contribution from that of other black male critics writing during this period is his indication of the importance of gender issues. Although this aspect of his essay is underdeveloped, he does at least acknowledge that black women and men are differentially inscribed in films such as Sapphire (1959) and Flame in the Streets (1961). Pines also indicates the problematic cinematic identification of white women as irrational, racially prejudiced white people in these two texts but does not develop this aspect of his analysis. He identifies the extent to which black young men’s experiences are foregrounded in black-focused texts such as Pressure (1974), Black Joy (1977) and Babylon (1980). These themes—the place of black women in cinematic representations, the textual status of white women, and the privileging of young black male experiences—suggested briefly by Pines in his essay are all further developed during the course of this study.

Chris Vieler-Porter recognizes Jim Pines’ critical contribution when he suggests four categories of mainstream cinematic representations of black people in British cinema, since ‘colonial-based’ and ‘ethnic’ dramas are categories suggested by Pines (Vieler-Porter, 1992:238), although of Vieler-Porter’s nine bibliographic references, only one refers specifically to British cinema.⁴ The full list of categories are as follows:

1 Colonial-based dramas: these are films which are located ‘out there’ in the colonies and serve to reinforce notions of white and/or British cultural superiority.

2 ‘Race-based’ dramas: these are racial problem films mainly made in the 1950s and 1960s.

3 ‘Race’ assemblage dramas: Vieler-Porter places the films in this category into three sub-categories. The first category of films is where the black presence is simply a backdrop for white centred dramas. The second is where black people are there to provide the source of comic action. His third sub-category is where blacks are used as a marker for racial difference within the team of the male action adventure.

4 ‘Ethnic’ dramas; the most opaque of the categories described since it is not clear what criteria is used to identify films included here.

The examples Vieler-Porter gives cover a wide range of settings, genres, themes and subjects, and under the heading of ‘ethnic drama’ he juxtaposes such diverse texts as Burning an Illusion (1981), Countryman (1982), My Beautiful Launderette (1985) and Mona Lisa (1986). There are films which do not fit easily into any category, those which appear to be in the wrong category and some which straddle categories. Such a schema is no substitute for serious study of individual texts and their relationship to others across different periods. One of the major drawbacks of this type of analysis is the concentration on the surface content for the purposes of categorization. This form of taxonomic reduction is only helpful in so far as it is not considered binding and is used as a starting point for consideration. To be fair to Vieler-Porter, it is offered as an outline, a tentative contribution to an underdeveloped area of study and appears in a low key BFI publication.

Although John Hill’s book-length study of 1950s and 1960s films contains some interesting material on moral authority and patriarchy, and the role of the family and racism especially in Sapphire and Flame in the Streets, the primary emphases of his work are signalled by the title, Sex, Class and Realism (Hill, 1986). His unproblematized use of the term ‘half-caste’ is worrying and because he discusses so many films, those which are directly concerned with racial issues do not receive much attention. However, his methodology provides a useful model in terms of its theoretical eclecticism. The combination of the latter and his location of the films in their social and cultural context means that this work is more constructive than a collection of textual analyses of films which have been abstracted from their conditions of production and consumption.

FEMINIST ISSUES

The arguments and observations offered come from a feminist perspective which sees it as essential to identify the extent to which gender and sexuality may be seen as racialized discourses in the cinema: a major concern throughout is to draw attention to both the presence and the absence of black women and to try and account for these instances of visibility and invisibility. The ways in which texts by both black and white film-makers indicate contrasting notions of black and white femininities and masculinities are also analysed.

During the 1960s and 1970s, white feminists made claims for an undifferentiated international sisterhood in the name of women’s liberation (Friedan, 1963; Mitchell, 1971; Millett, 1972; Oakley, 1974). This approach failed to realize its potential as a mobilizing, revolutionary force, partly due to its lack of racial awareness, and the conscious and unconscious racism within the movement which undermined the notion of a universal women’s program for liberation. While insights into patriarchal systems were developed, the potential for examining racism in the same moment was not exploited.

Publicly exposing these issues within feminism absorbed the energies of many African-American and black British female writers who concerned themselves with examining the racially defined aspirations of black women living under both patriarchy and racism. Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class (1981), is a key text: it was an early piece of African-American feminist criticism which sought to establish as a field of study the interplay between ‘race’, gender and class. This was one of the primary texts which helped black women to make sense of their predicaments as a doubly oppressed group but although her remarks on ‘race’ and feminism are wide in scope, taking a historical perspective on contemporary issues, Davis does not explore representation, or engage with cultural/theoretical positions on these issues. It is a substantial empirical work about the material effects of racism and the implications for European and African-American feminism.

The extent to which African-American feminism is applicable in a British context is dependent on how far it is possible to generalize from the particular predicaments of African-American women (Wallace, 1979; hooks, 1982; hooks, 1989). The class system in Britain has developed differently: it is far more institutionalized than it is in the USA, and closely connected to notions of community and national identity. Also, historically, the way in which social and sexual relations and hierarchies under slavery were organized differed in significant ways and legislative aspects of the control of black sexuality have not been enacted in Britain.⁵ Nonetheless African-American feminism has had a substantial impact on the analysis of racism and sexism in Britain. One of the key texts here is a black British feminist perspective proposed by Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar in ‘Challenging Imperialist ...

Table of contents

• Fornt Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Themes and issues
• 2 Notes on the discourse of ‘race’
• 3 Imperial culture: the primitive, the savage and white civilization
• 4 ‘Miscegenation’ and the perils of ‘passing’: films from the 1950s and 1960s
• 5 Family life
• 6 Representing reality and ‘the black experience’ in 1970s Britain
• 7 British cinema into the 1980s
• 8 ‘Race’, identity and cultural criticism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Films cited
• Index