Black and White Film
By Daily Bruin Staff
Feb. 15, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Illustration by CLEMENT LAM/Daily Bruin
By Dave Holmberg
Daily Bruin Contributor
Do not believe everything you see in the movies.
Historical representations in film are a particularly dangerous
arena, where the lines between fact and fiction are purposefully
and repeatedly blurred.
When heated issues of the past are approached in the cinema, the
result is often controversial.
The Civil Rights Movement was just as divisive for the nation as
the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period. Films
dealing with these periods of national strife often enter risky
territory.
In D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”
(1915), African Americans of the South are depicted as demonic
figures, while the Ku Klux Klan rides gloriously in to save the
day.
“It gives a horrible representation of African Americans
in the Reconstruction period,” said Edmond Keller, a UCLA
political science professor and Director of African Studies.
“Essentially it says that we really weren’t ready for
integration.”
Since the inception of motion pictures, African Americans have
continually been misrepresented on screen. Examples include the use
of actors in black face and the marginalization of African
Americans by white filmmakers.
As citizens began challenging the injustice of U.S. legislation
in the late 1940s and 1950s, however, racist portrayals began to
change.
“The issue began in film in the late ’40s and early
’50s, mainly with issues of black and white relations,”
said Jonathan Kuntz, a UCLA film and television professor.
“”˜Homicide’ and “˜No Way Out,’ both
with Sidney Poitier, were part of this liberal Hollywood
portrayal.”
Although it took time to make the transition, by 1962 there was
a significant change in Hollywood with Robert Mulligan’s
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” based on the novel by Harper
Lee.
The film, set in a 1930s Alabama town, follows the story of a
white lawyer defending an innocent African American man accused of
raping a white woman. Race is the focal point of the drama, as no
one believes the African American man over his white accusers.
What is on trial is not just one man against the law, but all
African Americans against the injustice of a racist society.
Another film that depicts this struggle is the 1988 Alan Parker
film, “Mississippi Burning.” The movie is based on the
events surrounding the disappearance of three civil rights
activists, one an African American, in a small Mississippi town in
1964.
The film was particularly controversial for what many critics
considered gross misrepresentations of the truth.
Ultimately, two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of
the civil rights workers must seek to breach the conspiracy of
silence in the town.
In the movie, the legal system comes to the rescue of the
African American community.
“They are the victims and sometimes the heroes, but the
white law officers are at the center,” Kuntz said. “The
defense then comes though the legal system.”
Hollywood movies portraying whites saving African Americans from
prejudice is a problematic issue, according to Kuntz.
Films showing powerless African Americans rescued by a
predominately white system reflects the fact that part of the Civil
Rights Movement itself sought equality through the same legislative
system that had oppressed African Americans.
“Although recent representations have been more sensitive,
they still show non-African Americans trying to rectify the
wrongs,” Keller said.
According to Keller, the film industry is a business based on
selling a product, and even now films about civil rights are
becoming less prominent.
“How about African Americans who push themselves?”
he said. “We see Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
portrayed, but what about the non-household names?”
The Civil Rights Movement, however, was not a failure in
film.
“The events leading up to the Civil Rights Movement is
where there is real visuality,” said UCLA theater professor
Beverly Robinson. “The television news of the time and
documentaries, such as Henry Hampton’s “˜Eyes on the
Prize,’ visually supported the first war on TV in the
South.”
Robinson also recognized some of the more accurate
representations in cinema. “Later independent filmmakers
showed the real conditions of what was going on,” Robinson
said. “Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 film, “˜Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,’ defined the era because
it was about the contempt for white social order, and it called for
mobilization of all urban African Americans.”
Although Hollywood has come a long way in its portrayal of
African Americans on screen, historical accounts on film still blur
the line between fact and fiction.
