The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man

Film

Introduction: Nothing But a Man and the Question of Black Film

David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin

THE QUESTION OF WHAT PRECISELY CONSTITUTES BLACK FILM is a vexing one. Even the way the question is worded can affect how we might frame our considerations and come to our conclusions. What is black film? is, after all, a very different question to "what is a black film? In considering this critically important issue, it might seem odd to turn to the work of two white filmmakers but, in many ways, a black film" made by whites serves as a peculiarly productive point of departure. In view of that, this volume concentrates on a classic of American independent cinema, Michael Roemer and Robert Young’s Nothing But a Man (1964). It is an extraordinary film that is, at one and the same time, a romantic melodrama, a neorealist expression of the class struggle, a radical examination of racial subjectivity, a celebration of the nuclear family, and a dissertation on black masculinity. It reveals a complicated concatenation of racial and cultural discourses that weave through the film and swirl around its production, dissemination, and consumption.

That a category such as black film should exist is itself testament to the volatility of those systems of knowledge that structure American discourses of race. From its earliest inception, American film was implicitly and explicitly raced as white. The repertoire of black caricatures, stereotypes, and distortions that cavorted across the landscape of nineteenth-century American culture made an almost seamless transition from stage and page to celluloid. One of the earliest narrative black representations on screen was a twelve-minute version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) made by Edwin S. Porter, and it should come as no surprise that the black characters were all played by white actors in blackface. Comic shorts were especially popular and catalogs of available films were replete with titles such as Watermelon Contest, A Nigger in the Wood-pile, Prize Fight in Coon Town, and The Gator and the Pickaninny.¹ Thus, reflecting and reinforcing the extant vectors of racial representation, early film played a profoundly important role in articulating a normative whiteness to a mass audience.

Though it was clearly already a ubiquitous feature of early silent film, the ineluctable linkage between the language of American race and the language of American cinema was only fully forged in D. W. Griffith’s epic Birth of a Nation (1915) where, as James Snead has it, film form and racism coalesce into myth.² In short, as it established itself as a formalized system of economic and artistic production, Hollywood became institutionalized as white. Any black presence was relatively minor and mostly confined to acting in a service capacity within the industry or by performing those roles – servant, mammy, laborer, comic relief, etc. – that cemented a cinematic grammar of blackness designed to validate the extracinematic hierarchy of race for white audiences.

One of the consequences of white Hollywood’s refusal to allow black Americans to play any significant part in the nascent film industry was the development of a parallel industry of race movies, produced specifically for black cinema-goers and featuring productions with largely all-black casts and frequently black-themed stories. Though Birth of a Nation became the cinematic Ur-text to which black film had to respond, African American filmmakers had been working since the earliest days of cinema, producing movies that covered the full spectrum of black social experience. Film companies came and went, sometimes making only a single feature before disappearing, while others, such as the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and the Foster Photoplay Company proved more durable. Oscar Micheaux, one of the most well-known and prolific black filmmakers of the early period, managed to sustain a career – albeit frequently patchy at best – from the silent days through the emergence of sound and into the 1940s.

Though the aesthetic quality of race movies was both derided because of, and explained away by, a lack of time, resources, and money, it is worth bearing in mind Clyde Taylor’s argument in respect of contemporary black film that the triumphs of independent cinema must be appreciated within their ‘imperfections,’ even because of them, as they stand opposed to the ‘perfections’ of Hollywood.³ Not least of these perfections imagined by Hollywood was that of an untrammeled and inviolable whiteness. Responding to the paucity and nature of the roles offered to black actors in Hollywood, race movies allowed African American performers to play parts routinely denied them in mainstream cinema. And it needs to be stated that race films were also able to tackle issues that Hollywood would have deemed unacceptable. Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), for instance, was a deliberate response to Birth of a Nation and, through its mix of melodrama and romance, served as a powerful critique of racial prejudice.⁴ Frank Perigini’s The Scar of Shame (1927) is a similarly compelling examination of the politics of skin color within the African American community. Accepting Marc Ferro’s definition of these wholly independent productions as "the first historical counterfilm in American cinema"⁵ would seem to offer us a straightforward point of departure for a definition of black film. Yet the history of these movies is complicated by the fact that so many of them were either financed by white companies (sometimes under the guise of black ownership) or produced and directed by whites who simply saw the African American market as a way of making money. There were also those white filmmakers, such as David Starkman and Richard E. Norman, whose commitment to race films was charged (at least in part) with a broader political commitment to antiracism.

This raises some complicated issues all of which are key to our understanding of Nothing But a Man. First, it underscores the profound importance of the material conditions of a film’s production and the direct affect they have on both distribution and definition. Second, those material conditions are structured by a set of power relations outside the text that are themselves deeply embedded in broader ideological discourses. Third, it demands that we carefully consider the cultural labor undertaken by the text as it plays its part in the social and cinematic constitution of the spectator/subject. After all, the filmic text is always situated culturally. This is not only an issue of context but of understanding the ways in which those registers of meaning demarcate lines of authority and suasion that structure the visual and discursive economies of race. No image is innocent (notwithstanding the implicit claims of whiteness to the contrary) and cinematic images of blackness carry a powerful charge. Fourth, while the race of those involved in a film’s production does not necessarily determine how that text might be defined, the power relations that exist outside the text have to be acknowledged and so, in that sense, we cannot ignore the race of the filmmakers. Filmmakers are historically situated and culturally constructed just as their films are. This not only emphasizes the significance of race but also points to its febrile unreliability as an all-encompassing category of explanation. Fifth, American film exists within a system of knowledge that is shaped by ideologies of race and cannot be understood outside of its visual grammar. Regardless of the racial subjectivity of the filmmaker, the text might reinforce the dominant structures of race, or engage, contest, and problematize those cinematic and extracinematic codes. It may sometimes do both things simultaneously.

In Redefining Black Film, Mark Reid insists on a clear distinction between what he calls black commercial film and black independent film. He argues that even with a significant black involvement in their production, commercial movies simply do not allow for a black perspective that acknowledges differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.⁶ He defines black independent film, by contrast, as that which focuses on the black community and is written, directed, produced and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Africa.⁷ In indicating that a black commercial presence does not sui generis confer a black perspective, Reid seems to highlight the nonutility of any kind of essentialist identity politics. In view of this, then, his definition of independent film seems oddly reductive. Certainly in the context of American cinema, it is hard to conceive of any film – commercial or independent – that could possibly be in its entirety written, directed, produced and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Africa. This proscriptive definition would exclude almost every classic of black American film including Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), and, indeed, Spike Lee’s entire oeuvre. It would also suggest that a commercial film such as Lee’s Malcolm X, for example, contained no possibility of a black perspective that acknowledges differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

A definition of black film that unequivocally demands black directors and/or producers would render films such as John Sayles’s Brother from Another Planet (1984) and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) essentially meaningless. Its coherence as a conceptual framework would further collapse in the face of having to then accept an Ernest Dickerson–directed episode of Law and Order, for instance, as an example of black film to sit alongside Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979) or Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). In Black Film as Genre, Thomas Cripps suggests that identity analysis is in effect a zero sum game that would ultimately leave us to argue forever over who has the right to dance on the head of a pin.⁸ And yet he has a similarly reductive definition of black film: those motion pictures made for theater distribution that have a black producer, director, and writer, or black performers, though he does concede that on occasion the category must embrace film produced by white filmmakers whose work attracted the attention, if not always the unconditional praise, of black moviegoers and critics.⁹ Mark Reid elsewhere offers a slightly more nuanced definition in distinguishing between African American film . . . directed, written, or co-written by members of this community and black-oriented film made up of black-focused films whose directors and screen writers are nonblack.¹⁰ This notion of black-oriented film appears to allow us space to imagine a text that thoughtfully attempts to present itself from and through a black perspective regardless of the racial subjectivity of the filmmaker. But reserved as it is only for nonblack filmmakers, this categorization remains indebted to racial subjectivity as the determinant factor.

In Black Film as Signifying Practice, Gladstone Yearwood points out the inadequacy of indexical theories as an acceptable means of defining black film precisely because it would dismiss "a film by a white director such as Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man."¹¹ He continues, what is most important about the film is the film itself. The operators (producer, director and writer) are properly part of the pre-text, in that the text is a product of their work and they exist prior to the text. While their contribution to the making of the text is undeniable they – in and of themselves – cannot fully define the film they produce. Tommy Lott goes further in asserting that, biological criteria are neither necessary nor sufficient for the application of the concept of black cinema because of the ambivalence engendered by having to place biological over cultural criteria in deciding questions of black identity.¹² Rather, Lott is concerned with what he calls the complexity of meanings attached to the politics of race and their iterations in film. Black film is not an inviolate form of nature and in considering the multiple ways in which it might be constructed, we must allow for those constantly moving and dynamic iterations to be both critically confirmed and contested. Situated within what Elia Shohat and Robert Stam refer to as an orchestration of ideological discourses¹³ film forms part of an intellectual economy of race that inevitably shapes – and is shaped by – its on-screen significations. It is, then, precisely because of the film’s cultural situatedness that Young and Roemer’s whiteness has to be acknowledged in any discussion or consideration of Nothing But a Man, but it is that same situatedness that also allows the film to constitute a significant contribution to black American cinema notwithstanding the racial identity of the filmmakers themselves.

Shot in black and white with no extradiegetic soundtrack and dealing with the harsh realities of black working-class life in the Deep South, Nothing But a Man was, as Robert Young acknowledges in his narrative of the film’s production, heavily influenced by the work of Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rosselini. The film’s neorealist sensibility speaks to its origins in an award-winning documentary called Sit-In that Young made for NBC in 1960. That Nothing should have its origins in documentary is not insignificant, for this too inescapably implicates its constructions of race in wider representational strategies that consistently link blackness with poverty and privation. In the context of American culture, even the most apparently innocent black image is freighted with a history of representation that has ubiquitously offered a pathologized black subject as the object of scopophilic pleasure for the white spectator. In this sense, then, even the most well-meaning progressive and liberal representation can never fully escape the seductive entreaties offered the white gaze by the spectacle of the damaged black body. Similarly, even the most concerted and sincere corrective to stereotypes may fail to acknowledge a broader system of discourses that privileges whiteness as a structural element of its own existence.

However, while it is important to acknowledge these issues it is also critically important to avoid the kind of relativism that sees no categorical distinctions between sets of representations or, indeed, to fall backward into the quagmire of identity politics. The fact that all visual representation is a process of construction such that the broader consequences of race must always be kept in mind, should actually strengthen the impetus to make sense of the qualitative distinctions between responsible efforts to critically engage with the dominant structuring discourses of race and those efforts that seek to revalidate the privileges of whiteness. Clearly there is a distinction to be made, for instance, between the serious attempt to understand history in a documentary series such as Eyes on the Prize (1987) and the egregious misrepresentations of history in a film such as Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) (though neither would match Reid’s definition of black film.) We would argue that Nothing But a Man is very much located with the former. It is an intervention in the politics of race as they existed in the early 1960s and a deliberate attempt to speak to the most urgent and significant issue of its moment. There is no mistaking the liberal politics of the filmmakers or indeed the film itself. That the film’s representation of race is problematized by its own progressive whiteness so to speak is evidence of the multivalence of the text. Subsuming a clearly articulated political critique within a domestic narrative allows the film to articulate a politics of race that is implicit in character and action without ever becoming hectoring or didactic. Nothing But a Man attempts to resolve its tensions by emphasizing the expressive and affective fundamentals of narrative and character thus representing the human experience of characters who are black rather than laying a claim to representing the black experience.

As a number of the pieces in this collection point out, Nothing But a Man is clearly about race and civil rights and yet makes no allusion or reference to the civil rights movement. The volatile context of racial crisis is made profoundly significant by a textual absence that can never be complete. For, though the film does not explicitly situate the characters historically, contemporary audiences would have been acutely aware of the immediate political context for the film’s excoriating indictment of white prejudice. In this way we see that meaning is brought to the cinematic text as well as riven from it and the complex relationship between the racial subject and the material conditions of the film’s production is echoed in the processes of its consumption. Yearwood’s notion of the pre-text points us toward the ways in which the text exists independently of its producers. As a consequence of this independence, the meaning of the text is not reliant upon, or determined by, its producers but by a negotiated settlement of meaning established through the film’s signifying codes as they are dialogically encountered by the spectator/viewer. As Stephen Heath puts it, meaning is not just constructed ‘in’ the particular film, meanings circulate between social formation, spectator and film; a film is a series of acts of meaning, the spectator is there in a multiplicity of times.¹⁴ As film is not only the producer of meaning but also the site and recipient of meanings projected back onto it,¹⁵ the spectator’s role in the production of meaning becomes crucial. Not only is the viewer inevitably interpolated through the social vectors of race, but that same viewer may also have no knowledge of the conditions of the film’s production or the racial identity of the film’s producers. That knowledge – as it dialogically encounters the viewer – may then change the entire meaning of the film. What might appear to be a black film in the most obvious and straightforward way might possibly, for that hypothetical spectator, become something very different indeed.

We do not make films innocently and neither do we watch them in that way. We are inescapably drawn into an ongoing process of discursive engagement rather than simply the critical assessment of an object entirely external to ourselves. Our relationship to, and membership in, the discourse communities that surround the production, dissemination, and consumption of film mean that we play a crucial role in the constant generation of meaning. We must both assert and accept that a key register of meaning, especially in looking at a text such as Nothing But a Man, is that of race. We need to understand race within the film as spectacular performance but also that we carry with us the weight of history from outside the frame. The complicated and fluid relationship between the audience and the cinematic text plays its part in individuating us as social, cultural, and ideological beings for, as Teresa de Lauretis says, We intersect the text as the text intersects us.¹⁶

While acknowledging the persuasive importance of de Lauretis’s notion of intersectionality, it needs to be underlined that film itself is always making certain categorical claims on us. The classificatory processes that shape the way film is situated in the world mean that, notwithstanding the fluidity of the discrete relationship between viewer and text, we are always bringing ourselves to an object that is making a prior assertion as to its own identity. Indeed, the fundamental structures of Hollywood genre rely on this almost entirely. Defining a film by genre or type is the first critical stage in its marketing and will attach to the movie a whole set of significations designed to shape the spectator’s understanding before a single frame of the film itself has been experienced. Movies do not occupy definitional categories by nature or acts of God but as a consequence of the myriad of social and cultural discourses surrounding them. Designations are choices made and the way a film is marketed will frequently play a profoundly significant role in determining not only where it might be seen and by whom it might be seen but – and perhaps most importantly – how it might be seen.

It is neither insignificant nor wholly surprising that Nothing But a Man was marketed for the most part as an independent art film.¹⁷ Having had its American premiere¹⁸ at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1964, it began a run at New York’s Sutton Theater. Like many independent films of the era, its relatively short theatrical release has been followed by a peripatetic life of three or four decades of film festivals and university film studies courses. But in being designated as an art film, Nothing But a Man was encoded with a set of significations designed to legitimize its difficult subject matter and ensure that its audience was largely literate, college-educated, middle-class, liberal, and white. Indeed, exactly the kind of audience for whom this film would perform a particular type of cultural labor. The concept of the independent art film is shaped by unorthodox themes, unorthodox structure, a pushing of the boundaries of form, and the presence of political and social issues beyond the scope of mainstream Hollywood film. In this respect, it is perhaps odd to think of Nothing But a Man as an art film. In many ways it is a very traditional realist romantic drama focusing on the crises within a heterosexual relationship that are resolved through the restitution of the family unit. What Gary Morris refers to as the ‘sanctity’ of the linear narrative¹⁹ is left very much intact. Even odder, however, is to consider that, as a consequence of the film industry’s concerns over whether films about ‘the race issue’ were best sold as prestige problem pictures or as exploitation items,²⁰ Nothing But a Man was often marketed as an exploitation or grindhouse movie. Christopher Seiving suggests that this is in no small part due to the fact that both the art-house and exploitation markets were better defined and certainly better understood by distributors than was the African American audience.²¹ All this notwithstanding, and though utterly traditional in its formal properties, the film is deeply unorthodox in its representation of black characters, as was much independent film of the period from Cassavetes’s Shadows (1958) and Ed Blands’s The Cry of Jazz (1959) to Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1958) and Shirley Clarke’s Cool World (1964). This is not to say that the film’s politics of racial representation are neither complicated nor frequently contradictory, but that it purposely and purposefully avoids descending into the caricature and stereotyping so generally prevalent in mainstream films of the period.

Films change dramatically over the years with their definition, reception, status, and meaning contingently dependent on multiple contexts that are themselves constantly shifting. Hollywood films now considered classics such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), Psycho (1960), and even Citizen Kane (1941) were not greeted with the untrammeled universal approbation with which they have been subsequently regarded. Canon formation is a febrile and dynamic process and films once dismissed or entirely forgotten are frequently rediscovered as classics for many and various reasons. Indeed, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, thought to be lost until a damaged and incomplete print was discovered in Spain in the 1980s,²² is an instructive example to consider. This volume is part of an increasing body of work in relation to Nothing But a Man that is playing its part in marking the film as a serious and worthwhile object of study within the history and tradition of black cinema. It is evidence of a coalescing of discourses that embeds film within certain historical trajectories that then serve to shape and maintain a canon. There is a crucially important, and often symbiotic, relationship between the university and outside organizations and institutions, especially as regards the arts, that frequently merge to act as the arbiters of what should or should not be included in that canon. Scholarship, along with companies such as Criterion and Milestone, plays an important role in making films serious and can confer a gravitas perhaps hitherto ungranted. And, as mentioned, the editors’ selection of Nothing But a Man is in itself a deliberate gesture toward, and considered assertion of, the historical and cultural significance of the film. We cannot escape the ideological implications of our own work although, as thoughtful critics, we should be aware enough to acknowledge their presence and to understand our own positioning of the film accordingly. The film’s showing as part of the 2012 golden jubilee celebratory repertoire of the New York Film Festival is yet another way in which the film is being integrated in the various ordering discourses of meaning within the history and tradition of American film. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process but its contingency needs to be constantly invoked (as does the problematizing of terms such as classic and canon) to ensure that we do not naturalize those definitions and demarcations arrived at as a consequence of our own choices and interests.

For such a significant film, however, there seems to have been a comparatively small amount of significant