Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (review)

Anna Everett's explicit aim in Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 is to preserve and position "the history of black film criticism . . . alongside the canonical histories of white critical writing on cinema." In Returning the Gaze, Everett achieves this goal by retrieving and presenting a rich archive of writing about film published in popular Black journals and newspapers at the beginning of the 20th Century. Placing these publications within a wider history of influential African American socio-cultural trends and movements, Returning the Gaze highlights the importance of cinema to the formation of an African American collective political consciousness and demonstrates the centrality of "race" to American film history. At times, however, the requirements of Returning the Gaze's explicitly historical project blind it to the challenges its archival material might pose to the existing theories and criticism that inevitably inform film histories. Nonetheless, Returning the Gaze makes an important contribution to film scholarship by bringing this previously overlooked archive to critical attention and by arguing persuasively for its importance to the study of film.

Returning the Gaze is organized chronologically. The first chapter astutely situates the birth of American cinema and of African American film criticism within the socio-historical context characterized by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessey v. Ferguson that established the constitutionality of "separate but equal" facilities and services, thereby inaugurating legalized segregation. By situating the emergence of American film and American film criticism within the context of post-Reconstruction America, Everett reminds us that early cinema's regime of representation is inherently political and she calls attention to that regime's role in sustaining America's racist social and economic order. Writing about "turn-of-the-century African American cultural critics," for instance, Everett claims that "from their often 'messianic' writings, it becomes apparent that many of these black intellectuals understood clearly W.E.B. DuBois' (1926) statement that 'all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists'" (14). Foregrounding the political dimension of early Black film criticism, in the first chapter, Everett also raises the complicated question of African American film spectatorship by drawing attention to the popularity of the early film exhibitions among African American spectators. The tension between cinema's racist regime of representation on the one hand and its popularity among African American audiences on the other is one that Everett follows throughout her discussions of numerous articles and columns about film published in the black press.

In her discussion of early film criticism, Everett is careful to present a heterogeneous Black American population whose responses to and interactions with the fledgling film medium were not uniform. Emphasizing primarily the philosophical and class differences apparent in writing about film in the Black press prior to 1949, Everett identifies and describes those approaches to and salient issues regarding race and cinematic representation that she understands to be characteristic of Black film criticism in particular periods. She thereby challenges existing film theories and histories to recognize the complexity of the socio-cultural matrix in which questions of race and representation have been posed. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the second chapter, "The Birth of A Nation and Interventionalist Criticism: Resisting Race as Spectacle."

In that important chapter, Everett refutes the traditional American film historical narrative that includes an African American audience only as a reactionary formation against D.W. Griffith's innovative and controversial 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. Everett connects the movements in opposition to Birth of a Nation to prior battles against the stage version of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (the novel from which The Birth of a Nation was adapted) and against blackface theatrical minstrelsy in general and she indicates how articles appearing in the Black press influenced public discourse about the film. Taking particular issue with Thomas Cripps' commonly accepted assertion that, "Blacks . . . saw...