A Texas find quickens interest in black film history
They paused for only a moment, most of them, in those dim, drafty, primitively equipped studios on the far fringes of the motion-picture industry. They did their gigs, these black performers, without hope that they might somehow break through to the great white audience or achieve the dream of immortality. Their pressing concern was whether the producer's minuscule check was going to bounce. They passed into history not as indelible screen images but as fond, fading, sometimes discomfiting memories shared by a minority audience or, in a few cases, as distant rumors of great talent whispered in the ear of the unheeding American majority.
Bessie Smith sang for those cameras, and Josephine Baker danced for them. Dizzy Gillespie bopped there, and the novelist Richard Wright played his own creation, Bigger Thomas, in the film version of Native Son. Taken together, this body of film is a priceless record of the styles and manners, aspirations and attitudes of black America between 1920 and 1950, when these little pictures (they usually cost about $20,000) made their way along the circuit of more than 600 theaters, segregated either formally or de facto, that served the black community.
The world of black cinema is a virtually lost one, ignored by both film historians and black-culture researchers. That is why such intense scholarly and media attention is being paid to a stack of old film cans found in a Tyler, Texas, warehouse and acquired by G. William Jones, director of Southern Methodist University's Southwest Film/Video Archives. Not yet fully examined or catalogued, the collection may not be quite the "treasure trove" that it was originally thought to be, but it contains upwards of 20 "race movies" (as they were once called), including some "lost" films and excellent prints and negatives of other movies that will give scholars and the public a chance to see them fresh, free of the murk of age and bad dupes. In addition, Jones has ambitious hopes for circulating the pictures, perhaps even on television.
Though most of the films were designed as escapist fare, they still carry moral and intellectual values that may trouble blacks today when they are exposed to films made for earlier generations. Like their Hollywood counterparts, these movies often traffic heavily in racial stereotypes—Big Mommas ruling their matriarchies with flying skillets, lazy males shuffling off to drink and gamble away the rent money, tight-skirted temptresses with whiplash hips luring the pious into evil ways.
There are other problems. Black movies tended to imitate the white genres, right down to westerns with such unlikely titles as Bronze Buckaroo. They were almost all without militancy, and at every turn of the plot endorsed the go-along-to-get-ahead values of the black bourgeoisie of that time, including its color caste system. The hero and heroine tend to be lightskinned, the villain and the comic relief darker. Says William Greaves, a film maker who began his career as a stage actor who worked in black films: "The Hollywood films were an environmental factor; they created certain expectations in the audience that black film makers felt they had to fulfill."