Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers

4. Breaking the Chains of History and Genre

131 4 Breaking the Chains of history and genre But culture, a true culture, a democratic culture can heal society by juxtaposing two histories of a people. that’s why African Americans are continually struggling now to have their sense of history, their own history , told to their own children. Because they realize their children cannot transform or go forward without this fundamental requirement of human nature, the history of a people. —haile gerima, 1994 Considering the influence of early novels on historical films such as The Birth of a Nation and the various film versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, translating written language for private consumption into a publicly consumed visual language historically limits black representation. It also inspires intertextual discourse between African American novelists and filmmakers. As theater and performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan explains, “Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.”1 In theater and cinema, literary master narratives become completely overpowering because of their perceived reality, particularly with historical narratives. Performative indigenization presents various possibilities for challenging the authenticity of the historical master narrative, especially in theater. As an act of protest and agency, performative indigenization infuses counteractive memories into the unconscious memory where they also “elude regulation and control.” Performative indigenization is particularly potent when unspoiled by containment strategies: requisite master narrative form and content, 132 BLACk PAthoLogy SELLS [BookS ANd FiLMS]? cinematography and editing to shift focus away from the typically isolated black character to the white character (usually the male hero), and censorship through limited distribution. Performative indigenization on and off the set can also challenge the status quo, which is so frequently reinforced by period films that feature critical moments of black history. This chapter focuses on three films that challenge the limitations imposed by the master narrative upon African American films. These black literary adaptations failed economically in comparison to higher grossing master narratives, cinematic adaptations of black women’s literature, and original films, yet they offer important lessons for African American filmmaking. Like the examples in previous chapters, stylistic devices in source texts have the potential to resolve apparent problems in cinematic versions of each story. The offscreen circumstances surrounding their perceived failures also reinforce the necessity of proactive, collective strategies for representing history in African American adaptations and original films through targeted, consistent use of intersectionality and intertextuality. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Melvin Van Peebles’s Panther, and Clifton Taulbert ’s Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored succeed as literature, confronting cultural trauma and the collective memory of slavery for black Americans.2 But the cinematic adaptations of these works failed to produce competitive film revenues in spite of their cultural resonance. Such noncommercial genre films typically earn lower box office revenues than commercial genre films regardless of the cast’s racial composition. In general, historical dramas don’t tend to yield the huge box office of popular commercial genres such as action, adventure, thriller, science fiction, horror, comedy, and romantic comedy. As screenwriter and author Stephen V. Duncan observes, “The list of produced films between 2000 to 2007 reveals that nearly all fell under the categories of popular genres; few were pure dramas.”3 As in the case of Precious and The Color Purple, dramas tend to fare better with festival and Academy nominations and awards. These and other noncommercial African American films with similar economic outcomes further contribute to the perceived failure of African American film even though predominantly black casts are less a factor than genre. Genres generally refer to classes or types of films categorized according to shared narrative , visual, and/or sound conventions. Racial genre labels only apply to films with nonwhite casts, thereby reinforcing whiteness as the norm. In other words, “black” is treated as a genre while white is not. The examples discussed in this chapter help demonstrate how black perspectives are revising and reformulating existing genres to create ones that significantly contribute to cinematic vocabulary, particularly in regard to historical dramas. BREAkiNg thE ChAiNS oF hiStoRy ANd gENRE 133 Holding History Hostage through Distribution Cultural trauma significantly influences representations of history in...