Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film

2. Harlem is Heaven: City Motifs in Race Films from the Early Sound Era

Harlelll is Heaven: City Motifs in Race Filllls frolll the Early Sound Era The day of "aunties," "uncles," and "mammies" is . .. gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on. ... The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts. -Alain locke (1925)1 frican American film production dates to 1912 and the release ofthe Foster Photoplay Company's The Railroad Porter, but African American subjects and subject matter can be traced back to the beginnings of American filmmaking. As early as 1895, Thomas Edison and his assistants filmed and projected the first images ofAmerican blacks on the screen in a variety of shorts. Featuring titles such as Watermelon Contest (1899), The Gator and the Pickaninny (1903), Ten Pickaninnies (1904), and The Wooing and the Wedding ofa Coon (1905), the films continued the treatment of African American subject matter that had first appeared in literature and in the theatrical genres of vaudeville and minstrelsy.2 This practice further expanded with the development of film narrative in the multiple adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the early years ofAmerican filmmaking, and most notoriously in D. W. Griffith's infamous Birth ofa Nation (1915). 45 Copyrighted Material 46 Chapter 2 During the early years of filmmaking, African American filmmakers realized that the emerging American film aesthetics and politics were such that their involvement would be minimal and that the treatment ofblack stories would be distorted at best. As early as the first filmic inscriptions of Uncle Tom and Topsy, there were corresponding protest movements among African Americans, who voiced concern and outrage over the images they were witnessing on screen. As part ofthe marches and boycotts that accompanied the release of Griffith's film, a group of entrepreneurs and political figures literally picked up the camera and began making their own films, most specifically the ill-fated Birth of a Race (1918), which fell victim to a shortage of funds and competing political visions. From the very beginnings of its existence, therefore , African American film production had a liminal relationship to the American film industry, existing independently of what would quickly become a centralized and streamlined group of businesses located first on the East Coast and then in Hollywood. Born of social protest and a desire to provide an antidote to already inscribed stereotypes, African American filmmaking has roots in a comparative discourse often determined by an anxiety over the images manufactured by mainstream filmmaking. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of early African Amer-ican filmmaking, covering silent film production from the 1920s to the transition to sound and the development of a cross-section of genre films in the mid-to-Iate 1930s and early 1940s. I focus in particular on this latter stage of filmmaking, the post-Depression, preWorld War II moment during which producers of films geared toward an African American market changed their theme and focus in order to compete with Hollywood. Rather than concentrating on uplift, the sound-era race film producers adapted popular genres like the gangster film and the Western. More important, during this time, which ran currently with Hollywood's production of all-black musicals, African American city spaces, especially Harlem, appear for the first time as cinematic tropes in the films. Furthermore, these realizations ofurbanity exist independently rather than in relationship to more idyllic rural spaces, which so often dominated the narratives of Hollywood films. What developed in this latter stage of race film production, therefore, is a Harlem chronotope, a contemporary, although often symbolic city space connoting African American modernity. Copyrighted Material Harlem is Heaven: City Motifs in Race Films from the Early Sound Era 47 liThe Realization of a Negro's Ambition": Early Race Films and the Politics of Uplift In the decade following the establishment of the Foster Photoplay Company, many other production companies incorporated with the intention of making race films-films intended for all-black audiences, starring all-black casts and featuring black subject matter. Often, but not always, the companies were aided by whites, whether for financing or technical advice, an involvement that would lead some film historians to discount them from being considered "black independent films" on the basis that they were not exclusively made by African American filmmakers and technicians. On the opposite end ofthe spectrum stood a figure like Oscar...