Selma (original) (raw)

Hollywood films reflect the racial order in which they are made. The sociological significance of understanding racial representations within films is highlighted in this study as it recognizes that films offer a useful site for contentious views of the racial order—colorblind and colorconscious—to be played out. Focusing on films with an African American actor and/or actress, this study will highlight how actors and actresses in these films demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial inequality, as well as how the films still maintain a colorblind framework. Although the colorblind framework persists, acknowledging the presence of colorconscious themes is a new perspective that can help challenge the colorblind framework.

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

To begin with, I do not use the phrase “race traitor” in its negative or pejorative sense, but instead I use it as an emblem of a certain kind of selfless artistic heroism that honors an individual white filmmaker’s sacrifice of immediate commercial interests in the effort to shift narrative focus from whites to African-Americans within a film. In the analysis that follows I am primarily concerned with white filmmakers who have taken it upon themselves, so to speak, to explore universal humanist themes by shifting narrative focus from whites to African-Americans. This deliberate choice that goes beyond the commercial considerations of the film reveals that the auteur of the film is using the work as a means of personal expression and not just as a means of generic entertainment. Moreover, in my analysis of the form of the films we will see that how these filmmakers break familiar and conventionalized film grammar is how they actually establish their authorial voice and express themselves within the medium of film beyond just the content and the shift of narrative focus from whites to African-Americans. Two films from two White filmmakers will be the major focus of this study: John Cassavetes' SHADOWS (1959) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WHITY (1970). I will also discuss perhaps the first genuine race traitor filmmaker in American Film History, King Vidor and his film HALLELUJAH, as well as, a more recent race traitor filmmaker, Lance Hammer and his film BALLAST (2008). Yet the overall aim here is not to separate out friend from foe in regards to racial sympathies throughout the canon of highly regarded auteurs, but rather to examine the strength of particular auteurs to surmount certain ideological, political and financial obstacles as they made the narrative shift of racial focus. This is a chapter from my book: Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Ed.

Critical reflections on concepts of falsified history and authenticity versus strategies on dramaturgy in history as drama in Mississippi Burning and Selma