Week 3 - Confronting stereotypes: Race Movies-Good/Bad Girls Flashcards
Stereotypes have been a staple of entertainment films since
earliest days of cinema
First racist films
Actualities, i.e. edison
Stereotypes in the movies often serve as indicators of the values, prejudices and desires of a particular cultural-historical period.
***********
No answer
Edison peep show dance & race + 2 ex.
were often pseudo-ethnographic studies of exotic “native peoples.”
The Pikaninnies Doing a Dance (1894) and Negro Dancers (1895).
what effect did racist actualities have on long term effect on film industry? used as?
setting the cultural tone of black racial representation, used as comic motifs
techniques of racism in white acting
white actors using burnt cork or black-face
Situations of racist actualities
shorts were largely set in racially and socially segregated situations
Birth of a Nation setting
American Civil War
First “race” film made by?
Emmett J. Scott, personal secretary to Booker T. Washington
Scott’s film
The Birth of A Race
Where did The race films of the 1920s and 1930s emerged from?
out of the Harlem Renaissance
race films rose simultaneously w/
“race records” (black music produced for a black market)
race films a reaction to
reaction to Birth of A Nation and widespread segregation within the Hollywood film industry
the most prominent producer of race films
Oscar Micheaux
The Homesteader, over 30 race-film companies were formed and hundreds of race films were shown in black-owned theatres around the country
***************
films featured all black casts and advanced themes of education, upward mobility, race, pride, social achievement and patriotism as a natural part of black character and black community life.
No answer
Goddess like/perfect women characters
Pillar of Virtue – played by Lillian Gish, Doris Day, Julie Andrews - types.
Sexy/rich/fabulous women characters
Glamour Girls – sex goddesses and femme fatales like Mae West, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe.
Dramatic women characters
The Emotive Woman – the sexually frustrated Rosalind Russell in Picnic or Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Strong women characters
The Independent Woman – Kathrine Hepburn, Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl, Jane Fonda in Klute.
four types of female roles can be seen as
variations and subsets of the basic good girl/bad girl dichotomy
viable reconciliation of the basic good/bad dichotomy can be seen in
female characters who are able to rise above imposed gender roles and combine sexuality and intellect to control their fates.
4 types of women characters appear when?
This type of character will first appear as a significant female role model in the films of the 1960’s.
in 50’s Films aimed their cameras at
problems of American life
examples of problems of American life
attacking racism, McCarthyism, and yellow journalism, as well as examine drug addiction and abortion
Why didn’t films attack similar topics before?
They were banned from film
In the box-office heyday of the 40s and 50s, the term “_________” or “message” film was conventional in its usage among the film industry and the public.
social problem
McCarthy & Committee
In the 1950s McCarthyism, in the form of the House Un-American Activities Committee, dampened some of Hollywood’s enthusiasm for left-leaning critiques of American society, but the genre continued nonetheless over the next two decades.
Example of social film director
Stanley Kramer’s exposés of racism — “The Defiant Ones”, “Pressure Point” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” — became synonymous with the genre.
Michael Wood critique of social problem films
charged that Hollywood’s most significant contribution to the myth of the Social Problem “is that there is only one problem.” All social problems are treated in the same way in these films. REDUCED to the simple
In a social film what is disturbed?
The disturbing and disruptive problem in these films is [usually] within the family, and the structuring absence in these films relates to the structure of this family institution.
orientation implicitly masculine, of what?
SOCIAL FILMS: since, until the advent of the contemporary women’s movement in the 1960s, women’s problems were not considered social problems.
On top of only one social problem there is also only one _________
SOLUTION:
Although the male must remain separate and capable of individual action, he and his “problem” exist within a social grouping; he and his problem are domesticated. The solution – the riddance of deviancy – inevitably results from his individual actions and includes reintegration into the domestic-civilized order.
3 things that describe film gris
Film gris: crime, critique and Cold War culture in 1951.
some of the most significant cinematic achievements of the filmmakers blacklisted in the late 1940s and early 1950s known as
the Hollywood Ten hearings
Anderson coined film gris based on?
as an offshoot of film noir characterized by leftist criticism of American society
what happened to many social filmmakers
blacklisted out of hollywood, genre began to dissappear
Film gris optimistic?
No, pessimistic
Film Gris displayed a bitter consciousness of poverty and class conflict, and showed "the unreality of the American dream." ****************
n/a
social pessimism in the United States generally was a response to
- the end of wartime unity,
- postwar economic problems,
- and the beginning of the Cold War and
- a host of anti-communist government and industry organizations, including the HUAC motion picture hears
Social critique in film gris focuses on the critique of
the law as a boundary dividing society into a good, legal world and a bad, illegal world
Andersen suggested that Hollywood leftists sensed their days in the industry were numbered, and film gris may have been an attempt by some of them to make the most of their remaining time there. Andersen makes two additional arguments about film gris:
- First - “The crime movie had often been a privileged genre for social commentary.”
- Second - the films represent the social causes of crime, such as unemployment, materialism, and class division.
n/a``
