Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (review)

In a 1986 essay, Jane Gaines introduced the stunningly obvious, but until then remarkably unexplored, thesis that "white privilege" operates in the "looking relations" of cinema. In an essay the very next year, she examined how "race movies"—films made for, and often by, African Americans—have worked to counter the white privileges of mainstream cinema. In the space of two short years, then, Gaines opened up the theoretical analysis of the racialized gaze and the historical analysis of American film history from the perspective of "race movies." Some fifteen years later, Gaines brings together the two historical and theoretical sides of her earlier work on race and race movies in Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, a rich, complex, erudite, remarkably well-researched book full of wonderful insight. If Fire and Desire is also unwieldy and too multifaceted, it is always a compelling read.

Fire and Desire is not an auteur study of Oscar Micheaux, yet Micheaux's films are the primary texts examined here. It is not a study of black spectatorship, though the issue of black reception of both Micheaux's and D. W. Griffith's work is central to it. Fire and Desire is about how the dialectic between white and black produces a complex mix that is never just an easy blend. Race movies, for Gaines, offer an opportunity for a two-pronged challenge to concepts of pure whiteness and blackness. In the introduction, Gaines describes Fire and Desire as a book in which "the gaze" and the "looking" side of things have been complicated, and in some ways even supplanted, by the racial and sexual "relations" side of who looks and who gets looked at.

Fire and Desire asks what "we want from a theory of film that takes race into account," a question that has barely been broached, and if Gaines does not answer it fully, she should be given enormous credit for asking it at all. The fact is, we don't know what it means to pose such questions; we don't know what we want, and we don't even know who "we" are who want it. Fire and Desire is, indeed, the first book in cinema studies to offer a sustained theoretical and historical meditation on that question. It would seem, however, that we know better what to expect from a history of film that takes race into account than we do from a theory that does so. In racial history we want to learn about films, filmmakers, production companies, and audiences whose history has been occluded. Gaines has more than done her homework on this score, and in "A Short History of Race Movies" she briskly surveys the early films of Bill Foster, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, The Colored Players of Philadelphia, and in a discussion of Micheaux's lost film The Homesteader, sets the stage for her subsequent readings of his work. Although she has dug up some great finds, Gaines is not primarily "doing" excavational history. As her chapters on Micheaux's films demonstrate, she is more interested in how a few of his silent films, read in relation to Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and as emblematic of "race movies" in general, allow us to explore the ongoing Hegelian dialectic of self and other, of black and white, in American identity. Gaines does not hold up Micheaux's films as examples of an "authentically black" cultural representation, or as experiments in an African American avant-garde form. Rather, she keeps coming back, theoretically and historically, to the mixed nature of these films, to the basic fact that the light-skinned heroes of these films are only black by virtue of the positive application made by race movies of the same "one drop rule" that elsewhere in the culture is...