![]() ![]() Still, like other black actors of the era, Poitier tended to play asexual characters and he was often featured saving white characters or playing by the rules of white society. Poitier’s characters were departures from typical black roles in that his characters were competent, dignified, intelligent, and articulate. This trend of realistic dramas led to the emergence of Sidney Poitier - the first star whose popularity crossed over to white audiences - in such popular films as Edge of the City (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958), for which he became the first African American actor nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. After the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the Classical Hollywood era that sustained Americans through the Depression, the American public clearly now demonstrated an appetite for films that grittily explored real issues. Movies such as Stanley Kramer’s Home of the Brave, Alfred Werker’s Lost Boundaries, and Elia Kazan’s Pinky tackled themes like racial passing and racial self-loathing and were huge successes with critics and audiences alike. Rising liberalism led late-1940s Hollywood to begin producing “social problem films” that examined the social inequality of American race relations among other issues. Unfortunately, despite Micheaux’s initial success (and his now legendary status) the Depression and other factors ended the era of Black independent film and most Black control over representation. Oscar Micheaux, a well-known black novelist, made the first feature-length film to employ African American actors (as opposed to whites in blackface) in a story about African Americans, The Homesteader (1919), and followed that with many others including Within Our Gates and The Brute (both 1920). As early as 1910, Black filmmakers made independent movies like The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916) and The Trooper of Company K (1916) as an alternative to the racist comedies made by white producers like Thomas Edison’s Ten Pickaninnies (1904) and Sigmund Lubin’s “Sambo and Rastus” series (1909-1911), which featured degrading Black stereotypes. We celebrate the 30th anniversary of this red-letter year for Black cinema and examine its legacy within the history of African Americans in film.Įarly and Classical-era Black film Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones (1958) United ArtistsĪfrican Americans have long struggled against the practices of Hollywood studios to articulate their own stories and to wield more control over their representation. These films also celebrated African American love and joy and introduced white audiences to the cultural diversity of Blackness, which had often been represented one-dimensionally. But the movies weren’t all doom and gloom. ![]() during an era of crisis for African Americans who faced the failed promises of the Civil Rights movement, worsening inner city conditions, a hostile media that trafficked in harmful stereotypes, a crack cocaine epidemic, and a political climate that insisted that all Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, regardless of how unequal their socio-economic status. Black representation evolves then devolves – 1960s to 1980sįilms of the New Black Cinema, including Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, often painted a dire picture of Black life in the U.S. ![]()
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