Black Movement Impolitic: Soundies, Regulation, and Black Pleasure

Soundies, three-minute musical films from the 1940s, have remained on the fringes of black cinema history although many prominently featured black musicians and dancers, distributing them to viewing machines situated in drugstores and five-and-dimes nationwide. More than Hollywood’s underinformed black “scenes,” these films drew performers and aesthetics from Harlem nightclubs. In their embrace of the blues song’s “low-down” sensibility (at once an affective, sexual, and racial designation), they pictured the vivid grit and crassness but also the candor and excitement of black urbanity. The Soundies both projected African Americans into a surreal, casual world and also produced a cinematic discourse on African American freedom unique in its moment.