the NEW NEGRO on screen

...The Negro policeman at the station house in Detective Story (1951) was correctly presented as just another cop...

...The changing images of American Negroes in the movies are also integrally related to changes in the portrayal of a homeland: the assimilated homeland of the southern United States...

...As would be expected, native reversions to savagery are both bitterly condemned and sensationally exploited, as in films treating the Mau Mau and similar terrorists—for example, the British Simba (1955), featuring Earl Cameron as a European trained native doctor...

...Mussolini, according to Lo Duca in his Histoire de I'Erotisme, used pictures of undraped Negresses to make propaganda for his war against Ethiopia...

...A film such as Lydia Bailey (1952), laid in Haiti during the Negro revolt at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, would have appeared impossibly courageous before the war—although the revolution itself is still primarily a background for an old-fashioned costume romance...

...Its confusion of sub-plots and running themes may be even further from reality, but there is no denying the significance of the elements...

...And yet, these are only provisional—and may remain so until Africans themselves create their own movies...

...Again, the movies both symbolize and effectuate a revolution in the imagination and in behavior...

...This, in the film, the Africans do come to understand...

...But that these subjects should be raised at all illustrates the force of the push to foregrounds of concern—as does the appearance of colored performers Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge on levels of importance with established stars such as James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Michael Rennie, and Stephen Boyd...

...Films since 1950 increasingly reveal a sense—informed by modern anthropology but enforced by contemporary politics—that indigenous African beliefs have at least relative validity, even when confronted with the missionary certainties of Europeans...

...A beginning towards the desegregation of the history of the West on screen may be seen in John Ford's sometimes labored Sergeant Rutledge (1960), with Woody Strode as "Top Soldier" of an outfit of the Negro "Buffalo Soldiers" who served for so long against the Indians...

...See "The Search For Africa," The Progressive, August 1960...

...Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), from Alan Paton's bitterly lyrical novel—and featuring the young Sidney Poitier as an Episcopal chaplain—came as a shock to people accustomed to Hollywood or travelogue stereotypes of African Negroes on screen...

...The metamorphosis has been long and relentless, albeit by no means consistent...

...In the British Tiger Bay (1959), the seediness of the waterfront district of Cardiff is established not only by shots of the run-down buildings, but of the Negroes who share them...

...memoirs, collections of memorabilia and manufacture of replicas without number...

...In telling of the odd but credible struggle of a Scottish sailor and a French trollop to create a farmstead in the unfamiliar land, the film at least begins to take into account the attitudes of Africans being introduced to unfamiliar ideas of settled agriculture and of farming for cash rather than for immediately useful food...

...Significantly, scenes showing the familiarity of white men with those colored people who happen to be women, as in The Wages of Fear (1953), set symbolically on an edge of civilization in Central America, have been excised before distribution in sensitive areas, including the United States...

...Whether the representations are for purposes of promoting realism, tourism, or a condescending racism more often than not depends only upon the viewpoints of audiences...

...Each film, however, attempts to relate the atavistic violence to quite modern forces of African nationalism—arguing, in fact, for the idea that the continent is by now the homeland for white men as well as Negroes...

...In The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), from the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the men being lynched may be white men—who happen to be innocent...

...And while agonizingly slow in terms of the passing of generations, the process may be seen as a relatively instantaneous recapitulation of the arduous advance of actual Negroes over the centuries, from slaves to servants and citizens, employes and masters of destiny...

...The historical importance of Griffith's epic is unassailable, leading to a certain peculiarly but vigorously unpersuaded defense of its content on the part of some historians of cinema and of popular culture...

...French films, notably those laid in the cosmopolitan Parisian underworld, often include Negroes—as a matter of local color...

...Deep significances and apparent turbulences were always involved...

...As the South and Southerners have altered in shape and size, as the conventionally romanticized magnolias and Grecian porticos came into new perspectives, the ubiquitous darkies took on different dimensions of character—along lines of development deeply rooted in the history of dramatic art, as well as in the endless dynamics of society as a whole...

...As Negroes are projected from backgrounds to foregrounds of concern and power, in widely separated areas of the world, changes of focus on screen are inevitable...

...A poster over the entrance appropriately, if pathetically, proclaimed some of the advantages of segregating the races in education, as it asked the crucial question: "Will Intergration Succed (sic) in the South...

...But the leader of the party, fanatically insistent upon the justice of violence, is an embittered ex-Confederate officer...

...Even when not actually in focus in the foreground, the new images of Negroes could not but be conspicuously new, for the old backgrounds had so manifestly changed...

...One devastating evidence of its vitality, during the mid-century agonies over the treatment of Negroes, on and off screen, was its run at a theater in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957...

...a tribute to a fiercely humanitarian Jewish doctor in the slums of Brooklyn: The Last Angry Man (1959...

...The acceptance of even proportionally representative realism in the popular arts takes time...

...In the sixty-odd years of cinema, as has been noted, the images of Negroes on screen have been changing— from clowns to comedians to integral characters and even heroic protagonists...

...His significance is underlined not merely in his affectation of his old uniform, symbol of the society that now was only a lost cause, but by the presence of a Negro preacher...

...After the obscene falsities of travelogues and jungle epics without number, the Belgian-made documentary, Masters of the Congo Jungle (1959), presents the most sensitive and beautiful appreciation in the history of cinema of the organic balance of the African land and seasons, animals, and indigenous mankind...

...Taking place in a fictional composite of the British West Indies, the story of the film contains two separate interracial love affairs—manifestly requited but cin-ematically still unrevealed...

...After almost ten years, it was in many ways more shocking to see again on screen the conditions of misery, violence, tribal and family disorganization, and all but hopeless existence in the native slums of Johannesburg, in Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa (1960...

...The British Ivory Hunters (1952) dramatizes the efforts of game wardens to enforce laws—the reasons for which the natives sometimes have difficulty comprehending, since their abundant land never needed them before...

...Considerations of purpose or propaganda aside, the bare necessity of credibility in the most unrealistic fictions called for awareness on screen to match the new awareness of audiences...

...The development of cinematography, within the following thirty years, came to fruition by punctual coincidence during the very decade when the last equalities gained by Negroes in the Civil War and Reconstruction were forced or legislated into desuetude or discard...

...From the first films to tell a story, common folk have been cast as heroes and heroines—while aristocrats, of course, have been brought within the reach of the mass imagination...

...The Negro, the last, lowest commoner of all, had been raised from chattel bondage in one of the great revolutions of that century, a conflict that in one sense was one of landed versus commercial and industrial power, continuing the process in modern history of the gradual attrition of localized feudalism and the rise of national authority...

...The new roles took over from the popular drama of the revolutionary Nineteenth Century the new status given to orders of society that since ancient times had been represented in the theater chiefly as varlets or buffoons...

...The narrative confusion hardly hides the equivocations over miscegenation and even politics...

...Amid the continuing flow of stereotyped melodramas, however, a modest work, The Naked Earth (1958), stands out as relatively honest...

...Here were inexhaustible lodes of subjects for romances and histories...

...a murder and detailed police investigation...

...How different the Africans' images of themselves may be from even the most sympathetic ones held by white men may be hinted at, albeit only slightly and vaguely, in studying works of modern African imagination...

...For example, few Negroes appear in pre-1960 Western melodramas—for no reasons, surely, having to do with historical fidelity...

...By the late 1950s, when the film came into the repertory of television, popular imagery of the South and Southerners was being so profoundly revised that many found the point an anticlimax—and some, especially among the young, did not recognize it at all...

...The Editors...

...The lowliest gun-bearers in white hunter or safari films, such as The Macomber Affair (1947), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)—both from Ernest Hemingway stories—or the British-made Elephant Gun (1959), now carry themselves with evident dignity and sense of professional comportment...

...By still more punctual coincidence, the new cinematic art, industry, and universalized drama arrived at maturity, some twenty years later, with D. W. Griffith's classic production, The Birth of a Nation (1915...

...record albums of readings of wartime oratory, marches and camp-fire songs—and, of course, movies and cycles of movies, apotheosized in David Selznick's production of Margaret Mitchell's thick fiction of embattled Georgia, Gone With the Wind (1939...

...Pressures of politics and flights of imagination have never allowed any abatement of popular interest in the ante-bellum South, the Civil War, and the period immediately thereafter...

...The changing background of the mother continent of Africa, particularly since the war, has made profound differences in the images of Negroes projected on screen...

...The more realism, intended, the more Negroes had to be dramatically integrated—as in such varied examples as an expose of racketeering in a Southern locale: The Phenix City Story (1955...

...The film may be somewhat confused in form between documentary and fictional narrative...

...The most popular of the popular arts created in the rise of common people to economic, as well as political, sovereignty, the movies carry on the long popular revision of classical, aristocratic entertainment...

...But The Birth of a Nation is not yet a merely magnificent artifact for archaeological study in film societies...

...But even this more often than not is done in the spirit of describing just one more of the inhospitable forces of nature in the jungle...

...The information and entertainment films of World War II, inescapably training and propagandizing for the times to follow as well as for the conflict at hand, had made audiences accustomed to seeing Negroes—apparently counted to represent their proportion of the population—in all sorts of movie scenes, excepting, usually, those involving sex and violence...

...and several other story threads, all shadowed or permeated by the problem of color in a society moving away from white domination...

...It is difficult to find comparable sensitivity and truth in fictional films about Africa...

...The reasoning is dissipated by emotional elements and flourishes, intended to sell the films to white audiences primarily—except for The Mark of the Hawk, made under religious auspices to promote financial support of missionary activity and the adoption of religious toleration instead of violence...

...That the argument is made at all, of course, is a striking indication of the movement of African concerns away from backgrounds of unawareness, paternalism, and disparagement...

...Racial tensions involving West Indians in London provide both background and plot motivations in the murder mystery, Sapphire (1959...

...The revealing irony is that such artful understanding should have come so late—in time to illuminate an Africa never grasped before by white men, and passing even as the film unreels...

...and the American Something of Value (1957), with Sidney Pokier as a man embittered by white violence into joining the Mau Mau...

...These latter, of course, are instantly recognizable—complete with slow drawl and quick temper, ceremonial adulation of respectable women and disparagement of the uncivilized, including workingmen and immigrants, as well as Indians and Mexicans...

...In The Roots of Heaven (1958), from the novel by Romain Gary, the preservation of elephants from slaughter by an improbable visionary is made into a parable of the struggle to preserve life itself in an age of incipient destruction...

...n the American films of the 1950s, the imported Africans were increasingly depicted as unequivocally, and even uniquely, American—at the very least essential, carefully placed figures of background detail...

...in particular, attitudes towards Negroes were inevitably implicated, even when invisible...

...and The Mark of the Hawk (1958), starring Poitier, Eartha Kitt, and Juano Hernandez...

...The hunters themselves have come to be affected by a deep love of the land, reflecting the now desperate concern of conservationists over the preservation of the riches of the jungle and savannah...

...This film, based upon one of the most bitterly partisan novels about the Reconstruction era, Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, offered naive but immensely influential propaganda on behalf of the myth of Negro inferiority...

...Dworkin, a distinguished student of the movies, will appear in the December issue...

...The beginnings of the new visibility of Negroes in the movies during the war, however, could arrange at least a tentative confrontation...

...That it was made and how it was made not only indicts the forces determining the life of Negroes in South Africa, but the vast proportion of what has been passed off as African on screen...

...In general, it is the tentative, usually superficial, often meretricious— but nevertheless significant—attempts to represent Africans in their own terms that distinguish the films of the 1950s from almost all made earlier...

...The movies made by Europeans and Americans in recent years, however, offer sufficient evidence of changes in the popular awareness of Africa...

...a bitter election campaign between a white planter and a colored labor leader...

...Some of the perennial Tarzan movies may still treat native warriors as the enemies to be guarded against and defeated...

...But the victories are by no means unequivocal—due in large measure, perhaps, to narrative unclar-ities and inconsistencies that may be significant in themselves...

...And, the saving of life in Africa may indeed mean the saving of life in the world—although hardly in any manner suggested in the film...

...Crowds in city streets, railroad stations, subways—even college football rallies, as in one including Bing Crosby as an aged freshman in High Time (1960)—show a colored face or two as a matter of routine realism, sometimes too ostentatiously to be unnoticed...

...The exotic possibilities of Paris, as well as of more or less tropical areas, are commonly emphasized, on screen as in novels, by the traditionally erotic presence of Negresses of presumably or obviously easy virtue...

...The perfected techniques of documentary or journalistic realism required a reasonable faithfulness in even casual scenes in American cities, with their enormously expanded colored populations...

...The ironic message, even then, could be recognized as self-conscious and overdrawn...

...But while Negroes rarely appear in traditional Westerns, auras of darkies on old plantations accompany the almost invariably present Southerners...

...Both Catholic and Protestant Christianity gain triumphs of conversion, in The Nun's Story (1959), and The Sins of Rachel Cade (1960), respectively...

...The political and social ferment in the modern West Indies is the setting for Island In The Sun (1957), that is at least as far from Lydia Bailey as that film is from pre-war Hollywood productions...

...Apart from what several critics thought is a sometimes self-conscious artiness, its faults may actually be in themselves significant, as the film had to be made under very difficult conditions, in a semi-clandestine manner, in what is surely a police state...

...The Civil War, significantly, was the first to be fully recorded by means of photography— the new technical means for the dissemination of authentic representations of events, places, and people...

...The images on screen often provide ominous commentaries upon events and the attitudes of the people about whom and for whom the films are made...

...and a melodrama of the efforts of a multiracial conglomeration of driftwood to raise a talented boy out of the lower depths of Chicago: Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960...

...But his appearance at that time could not but catch the eye as evidence of change, assuming meanings concerning which the feelings take sides...

...British and French films, too, were reflecting at least a minimal awareness of the presence of colored men in the white man's cities, everywhere...