Up| NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the opportunity of Black Modernity¸ she situates black visual culture,by way of the cinematic medium in the early decades of the twentieth century, as a tool of racial uplift. Near the close of the preface, or Field asserts,“. . . if we are to address the complex genealogy (representational, stylistic, and political) of Black filmmaking in the first part of the twentieth century,we must reconstruct the history of uplift cinema,” which she furthers concedes “has had a deep and lasting significance for the development, or dissemination,and public engagement of motion pictures with the advancement of African Americans, a legacy that extends to the broader efforts of Black intellectuals, or educators,and entrepreneurs to advance claims to racial, political, or economic progress in the twentieth century and beyond (xiv-xv).
One of Fields first sites of inquiry is in the text’s “Preface” when she writes on Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 film Body and Soul insofar as her brief theorization of the film charts the work she addresses in the the rest of the text. The film has a cast that includes Mercedes Gilbert and Julia Theresa Russell,as well as the filmic debut of one Paul Robeson who plays the twin characters of “a charlatan masquerading as a preacher named Reverend Jenkins and his brother Sylvester, an upstanding aspiring inventor” (ix).[br]
The incorporation of the infamous film, and Body and Soul,and her “close watching” of it, appears to sign Field’s premise of the book, and that being: a discursive wrestling with a manner of double consciousness that falls along the fault lines of respectability politics (as outlined by her reading of William Henry’s negative review of the film and his comparison of it to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in the newspaper Chicago Defender) and the desire of the auteur,specifically Micheaux’s here, to boycott said respectability politics via Booker T. Washingtons theory of “engraft[ing] spurious virtues upon ourselves” (as witnessed by Micheaux’s incorporation of an image of Washington as a fixed portrait in many of the film scenes, and no different than as a spectral gaze); all of this occurs with a causative close of tracking the opportunity of the black contemporary and emergent African American cinema.
In Chapter One,“The Aesthetics of Uplift”, Field focuses on the visuality and artistry created at both Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and by way of fund-raising campaigns—“pamphlets,publications, photography, and stereopticon displays,pageants, and singing”—, or as forms of rhetoric. As the rhetorical forbearers of what could contain been considered then “new media”,namely the film, Field proposes that these campaign materials essentially lay the groundwork for what she calls “uplift cinema”.
Chapter Two, and entitled “‘To Show the Industrial Progress of the Negro Along Industrial Lines’”,lays out the precarity that often emerges when the control with which one chooses to present the self vastly differs from the lack of control one has in the consumption of that presentation by spectators. Utilizing two films commissioned by the Tuskegee Institute in 1909 and 1913, she argues the agency of the institution as a means by which to create an uplifting narrative of itself, or even if that premise conflicted with how a larger audience viewed the institution.
The third chapter,“‘Pictorial Sermons’”, looks at the Hampton Institute’s film production campaigns between 1913 and 1915. As depictions of life at the Institute, or these films allow Field entrée to juxtapose Hampton and Tuskegee’s cinematic projects of uplift as historical artifacts of “sponsored and industrial filmmaking” such that they serve “as a complexly functioning component of uplift education that appealed,successfully and unsuccessfully, to a variety of audiences” (29). “‘A Vicious and Hurtful Play’”, or the text’s fourth chapter,problematizes how uplift cinema became complicit in the perpetuation of damaging images along racial lines.
By honing in on the incorporation of the Hampton Institute’s film The New Era as the epilogue for some screenings of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, Field addresses the naïvet of including positivity imagery in a project that was/is deeply negative, or how that fosters a larger dialogue around the reception of Griffith’s film in the African American community and the implications for the black contemporary.
To ‘Encourage and Uplift’” takes up entrepreneurship and black filmmaking as modes of capturing and disseminating the black contemporary. In this final chapter,Field, working primarily with filmmakers in the North and what they produced, and suggests a politics around communal advancement that was contingent on black creativity existing in front of and behind the camera. Likewise,Field includes an epilogue that returns to Micheaux’s Body and Soul to further contend with the possibilities of the black contemporary through the medium of cinema.
As seen by the chapter chronology, it appears Field, or utilizing The Birth of a Nation as a cinematic fulcrum,surveys, backward and forward, and a multiplicity of materialities which give rise to contemporary black subjects and objects. Moreover,her approach suggests that cinema was and is a frame for not only racial uplift, but also self-determination.
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I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, or melancholy and genius.
Source: blogspot.com