Real Men

This new book from David A. Gerstner takes up a vital area of study only beginning to open itself out to queer inquiry: early cinema. In Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema, Gerstner brings into dialogue an impressive array of figures—ranging from Walt Whitman in the 1850s to Vincente Minnelli in the 1930s—to explore a vision of "American art as a masculine and moral gesture of national creativity that breaks from European tradition" (51). His abiding subject is "a national Anglo-Saxon, hetero-masculine aesthetic" that has found for itself varied modes and styles of cinematic (and protocinematic) expression (119).

Gerstner begins his story in 1849, on the night of the Astor Place Riot, in which devotees of two competing Shakespearean actors, the English William Mac-ready and the American Edwin Forrest, took violently to the New York streets in an event Gerstner reads as "a contest over the terms for masculine and American democratic art" (1). The nativist working-class Irish who championed Forrest, Gerstner argues, did so in large measure because his virile corporeal style set itself in winning contrast to the self-conscious delicacy and refinement of Macready's performances. Thus was enacted a version of American aesthetics as free from the taint of Europe: as manly, virile, "realist" not least in the sense of being unmarred by Old World pretension, and boasting an organic connection to the natural, one made legible in the career-making portrayals of American "savages" that found Forrest cannibalizing the native "Other" the better to produce a white American masculinity at once redeemed from the "over-civilization" of Europe and in touch, through that native presence, with "an American sublime" (29).

Considerations of the provenance of American realist aesthetics brings Gerstner to an account of the 1915 film The Battle Cry of Peace, an antipacifist polemic based on Hudson Maxim's book Defenseless America and directed by English-born J. Stuart Blackton, cofounder of the American Vitagraph movie studio. Gerstner reads the film as a reflection of Blackton's relation to none other than Theodore Roosevelt, whose "treatises on virility and nationalism" (68) demanded an appropriately "realist" national aesthetic, one that would serve the purposes of patriotic uplift. Because it promised to level "the divide of high and low by forging an equal partnership between artists and artisans" (64), cinema seemed an ideal medium. The aesthetic politics of uplift grow more complicated, though, in the works of Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African American filmmaker and entrepreneur who also, as Gerstner shows, found a complex kind of inspiration in Roosevelt's aesthetics, in particular his "commitment to the industriousness of the frontier individual" (86). Gerstner reads Micheaux as partaking in the masculinist exclusions of both national realist and racial uplift projects, but as also inhabiting those potentially restrictive projects in surprisingly capacious ways: "The trickster playing the master," he claims, "is precisely the aesthetic strategy at hand" in Micheaux's works no less than those of Zora Neale Hurston, another artist troubled by the fractured inheritances of "realism" and the politics of racial uplift (116).

Gerstner turns then to early cinema's entanglement with avant-garde modernism, telling the story of "painters-photographers" Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, and of their 1921 film Manhatta, through their relation to Alfred Stieglitz and his circle (122). He describes the film as a curious kind of self-portraiture: a narcissistic portrait of the artist as city, that intends, à la Stieglitz, to align cinematic art with both "noble-savage primitivism" and "machine-culture modernity" (135). Gerstner continues with an examination of Minnelli's 1943 film version of the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, originally directed for the stage by George Balanchine. Examining the overlapping milieux of the auteurs, Gerstner understands the film "to elaborate the interrelationship between white, queer, and . . . 'New Negro' modernisms," presenting "a modernist fusion of queer and African American international folkism" (191, 204). In contrast to Forrest's incorporation of the native body he self-aggrandizingly impersonates, Minnelli...