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A great many movies have been made about race relations, or with a strong racial theme over the last century, from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit (2017) [1]

Early Years (1915-1960)

D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation set the precedent of heavily racialized stereotypes of black Americans (many played by white actors in blackface) as clowns or predators, and cast the Ku Klux Klan as the saviours of white America. [2] Later films like Dark Command (1940),[3] Song of the South and Gone With the Wind (1939) repeated some of those stereotypes.[4]

Other films, like the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races and Hellzapoppin' showcased early black performers like Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Slim and Slam.[5] With Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959) Hollywood put George Gershwin's and Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway shows - that reworked Jazz performances for white audiences - on screen with stars Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge.[6]

Race films were marketed to black audiences, like Hi-De-Ho featuring Jazz performer Cab Calloway.[7]

The quintessential American film, the western was often about implicitly about race, since it described the westward journey of colonists into the lands of Native Americans.[8]

Civil Rights Era

With the growth of the Civil Rights movement Hollywood was on the whole on the liberal side, with films like To Kill a Mockingbird, West Side Story, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heart of the Night looking at race prejudice critically.[9]

Blaxploitation and Gangsta films

With the rise of the Black Panther Party Hollywood tried to stay relevant with Black Power-themed films like Shaft, Superfly and Foxy Brown, which became known as Blaxploitation films. Still, the new genre was an opportunity for director Melvin van Peebles and actors including Richard Rountree, Pam Grier and also for musician Curtis Mayfield whose sound track accompanied the hit Superfly.[10]

Though Blaxploitation genre is in the past, filmmakers have excited black and white audiences with stories of gangs and crime that tread a fine line between glorifying and vilifying gangsters, such as New Jack City, South Central and Juice. Rap music, too, has given a new dimension to black gang films, with All Eyez on Me about the life and death of Tupac Shakur and Notorious about the killing of Notorious B.I.G..[11]

Race revenge fantasies

In the 1970s and 1980s a backlash against Civil Rights was met by more films about black criminality threatening white communities. In Sudden Impact Clint Eastwood's character Harry Callahan goads a black rapist holding a woman hostage, 'go ahead, make my day' - meaning, 'shoot her, so I can shoot you.'[12] The Dirty Harry series of films, like the Death Wish one appealed to a reaction against Civil Rights with fantasy violence against black and other criminals.

Another way that films titillated white audiences was with fantasies of black people rising up against white society. The British film Zulu showed a small platoon of Redcoats fighting against thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift at the end of the nineteenth century. Later John Carpenter achieved a similar effect surrounding a police station with a coalescence of Puerto Rican gangs in Assault on Precinct 13.[13]

Historical Civil Rights, Jim Crow era, Civil War and Slavery films

By the 1990s American attitudes on race were becoming more liberal and a new wave of films looked back at the Civil Rights era as history, beginning with Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning of 1989 right through to Ghosts of Mississippi in 1996[14] More recently Ava DuVernay's film Selma has shown there is much more in the Civil Rights era. The Civil War also got a different historical treatment in the film Glory about black Union troops.[15] Civil War dramas like Lincoln (2012) and The Free State of Jones. Historical dramas proved a rich seam for Hollywood which went on to deal with slavery in Stephen Spielberg's Amistad and Steven McQueen's 12 Years a Slave.[16] More radical black leaders, like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers had their story told in films by Spike Lee and Mario Van Peebles in 1992 and 1995.[17]

Social Comment films since 1990

As well as a great rise in the number of historical dramas around Slavery, Civil Rights and historical racism, more social comment films about race relations have been made since the 1990s. Spike Lee's break out movie Do the Right Thing (1989) opened up the field for a lot more searching examination of race in present day. Films like such as Justin Simien's 2014 comedy Dear White People, the Academy award-winning Moonlight and Jordan Peele's 2017 horror film Get Out show that film audiences continue to be gripped by racial conflict.[18]

Notable films with a race theme, by year

Year Film Director Notes
2017 Detroit Kathryn Bigelow Shocking depiction of police brutality in the Algiers Motel incident during riots in Detroit in 1967.
2017 Get Out Jordan Peele Sci-fi horror about a predatory white conspiracy to implant their consciousnesses into black bodies grossed $252 million
2017 All Eyez on Me Benny Boom The biopic of rapper Tupac Shakur
2017 Mudbound Dee Rees Tragic drama of two farming families one white and one black, based on the novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan.
2017 Gook Justin Chon Two Korean-American brothers in the midst of the 1992 Los Angeles riots
2016 The Birth of a Nation Nate Parker Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia, in 1831
2016 Moonlight Barry Jenkins Tarell Alvin McCraney's story of growing up black and gay in America grossed over $65 million worldwide against a budget of $4 million
2016 Loving Jeff Nichols The story of Richard and Mildred Loving's marriage and the 1967 Supreme Court judgment against the State of Virginia's outlawing of interracial marriage, with Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton
2016 Hidden Figures Theodore Melfi Taraji P. Henson is Katherine Goble leading a section of black women mathematicians working at NASA to computerise the Mercury Seven space mission
2016 I Am Not Your Negro Raoul Peck The story of writer and activist James Baldwin told through contemporaneous footage
2016 Fences Denzel Washington The film of August Wilson's Pulitzer prize winning play about a father, frustrated at the stymying of his baseball career, and taking it out on his son
2016 A United Kingdom Amma Asante Based on the true-life romance between Sir Seretse Khama and his wife Ruth Williams Khama in Bechuanaland and the imperial authorities' attempts to prevent it
2016 Free State of Jones Gary Ross The story of Newton Knight's revolt against the Confederacy during the American Civil War
2016 Nina Cynthia Mort Biopic of jazz singer Nina Simone starring Zoe Saldana
2015 Straight Outta Compton F. Gary Gray The Story of rappers NWA grossed over $200, four times its budget
2015 The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Stanley Nelson Jr. Documentary on the Black Panther Party and their repression under the FBI's Cointelpro program
2014 Selma Ava DuVernay About Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's arguments and preparations for the momentous 1967 Civil Rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Washington
2014 Dear White People Justin Simien A comedy about members of a black fraternity house negotiating the racial assumptions of their white counterparts at college
2013 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen The English director's film of Solomon Northrup's memoir of the same name (1853) about a free man being abducted from the North to serve as a slave in the American South
2013 The Butler Lee Daniels Forest Whitaker plays 'Cecil Gaines' (drawn from Wil Haygood's Washington Post article "A Butler Well Served by This Election" about Eugene Allen) who works as a Butler at the White House through successive Presidencies
2013 Belle Amma Asante Loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lord Mansfield's ruling on the Zong massacre in Georgian England
2013 Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Justin Chadwick Biopic of South African anti-Apartheid leader and President Nelson Mandela starring Idris Elba
2012 Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino Controversial western with a slave revenge theme, starring Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson
2011 Winnie Mandela Darrell Roodt Sympathetic biopic of anti-Apartheid leader Winnie Mandela
2011 The Help Tate Taylor Based on Kathryn Stockett's book of the same name about a black maids standing up to their white mistresses, with the help of an aspiring writer
2009 Precious Lee Daniels Grim story of parental rape and neglect in a deprived neighbourhood
2009 Invictus Clint Eastwood About the struggle to re-launch the Springboks rugby team in post-Apartheid South Africa
2009 Notorious George Tillman Jr. The life and murder of rap star Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.
2008 Gran Torino Clint Eastwood The unlikely friendship between Korean War veteran and a Hmong family in Los Angeles
2007 American Gangster Ridley Scott Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) works his way up from sidekick to gang leader, pursued by Russell Crowe's lawman
2004 Ray Taylor Hackford Biopic of the rhythm and blues singer Ray Charles starring Jamie Foxx
2004 Crash Paul Haggis Multi-plotted state of the nation film with Don Cheadle's character harassed by a policeman, and other stories of the challenges of different migrants and citizens of Los Angeles
2002 Dirty Pretty Things Stephen Frears The struggles of migrants in London
2001 Ali Michael Mann Will Smith stars as the legendary heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali
1999 Introducing Dorothy Dandridge Martha Coolidge Biopic of the actress Dorothy Dandridge with Halle Berry made for television
1999 The Hurricane Norman Jewison Biopic of boxing champion Rubin Carter falsely accused and imprisoned for a triple murder, starring Denzel Washington
1997 Amistad Stephen Spielberg The trial over the mutiny of the enslaved Mende people on board the Amistad in 1839
1997 Miss Evers' Boys Joseph Sargent HBO television film based on David Feldshuh's play about a U.S. Federal government experiment that led to men being left untreated for syphilis
1996 Ghosts of Mississippi Rob Reiner Courtroom drama based on the trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers
1996 When We Were Kings Leon Gast Documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974
1995 Panther Mario van Peebles Dramatization of the Black Panther's struggle against racism, based on Melvin van Peebles' book
1995 Jefferson in Paris'' James Ivory On US President-to-be Thomas Jefferson's affairs as ambassador in Paris, and his relationship with Sally Hemings (played by Thandie Newton
1994 Corrina, Corrina Jessie Nelson Interracial love story in fifties America with Whoopie Goldberg and Ray Liotta
1992 Sarafina! Darrell Roodt A coming of age story in the midst of the Soweto riots, filmed in South Africa
1992 Malcolm X Spike Lee Biopic of the inspirational Black Muslim leader starring Denzel Washington
1992 Juice Ernest R. Dickerson With Tupac Shakur and Omar Epps
1992 South Central Stephen Milburn Anderson Father and son learn to break ties with a street gang, an adaptation of the 1987 novel Crips by Donald Bakeer
1991 Boyz n the Hood John Singleton Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ice Cube star in this story of gang life in Los Angeles
1991 New Jack City Mario Van Peebles Wesley Snipes stars as Nino Brown, leader of a ruthless drug gang in the midst of New York's crack epidemic
1990 The Long Walk Home Richard Pearce A drama with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 as a background, starring Whoopie Goldberg and Sissy Spacek
1989 Driving Miss Daisy Bruce Beresford Gentle comedy based on Alfred Uhry's play of the same name set in the Civil Rights era
1989 Mississippi Burning Alan Parker Parker's film of the Civil Rights era contest over desegregation
1989 Do the Right Thing Spike Lee Acclaimed comedy-drama of racial tensions and rioting in Brooklyn
1989 Glory Edward Zwick Matthew Broderick stars as the anxious white commander of an experimental all-black troop of the Union Army in the American Civil War
1989 For Queen and Country Martin Stellman Denzel Washington stars as a Falklands War veteran returning to riot-torn Tottenham, England
1988 I'm Gonna Git You Sucka Keenan Ivory Wayans A parody version of a Blaxploitation film
1987 Cry Freedom Richard Attenborough The story of Steve Biko's detention and murder, and his friendship with the journalist Donald Woods
1986 Absolute Beginners Julien Temple Based on Colin MacInnes novel of the same name the film revolves around the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and features Slim Gaillard and Stephen Berkoff's impersonation of Oswald Moseley
1985 The Colour Purple Stephen Spielberg Based on Alice Walker's novel of the same name and starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey in a story of pre-civil rights Georgia
1978 The Wiz Sidney Lumet A black cast re-make of The Wizard of Oz_(film) starring Diana Ross
1977 Roots Marvin J. Chomsky ABC-TV miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family starring Levar Burton
1972 The Harder They Come Perry Henzell Jamaica-based story of an embattled Reggae star, played by Jimmy Cliff considered a breakthrough for reggae in the United States.[19]
1974 Foxy Brown Jack Hill Pam Grier stars in this Blaxploitation film as a woman fighting back against exploitation
1973 Cleopatra Jones Jack Starrett Tamara Dobson stars in this Blaxploitation film as an undercover agent exposing the drugs industry
1972 Superfly Gordon Parks, Jr. Ron O'Neal stars in this Blaxploitation film as a drug dealer trying to get out of the business - notable for its Curtis Mayfield soundtrack
1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song Melvin van Peebles A kaleidoscopic journey through race-torn America
1971 Shaft Gordon Parks Private detective John Shaft (Richard Rountree) is hired by a Harlem gangster to rescue his kidnapped daughter in a film that highlights black power, with a strong Isaac Hayes soundtrack
1970 Little Big Man Arthur Penn Dustin Hoffman stars as a boy who goes to live amongst the Cheyenne, witnessing the massacres carried out by Custer's Seventh Cavalry
1970 Soldier Blue Ralph Nelson Candice Bergen stars as a Cheyenne captured in the midst of a massacre of native Americans
1970 Watermelon Man Melvin van Peebles An inveterate racist wakes up to find he has turned black in a caustic comedy inspired as much by Kafka's Metamorphosis as by John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me
1970 The Landlord Hal Ashby This Norman Jewison-produced film stars Beau Bridges as heir to a slum landlord, who's feelings for his black tenants - in particular Lanie (Marki Bey), a dancer at a local black club - run away with him.
1969 Slaves Herbert J. Biberman Dionne Warwick and Ossie Davis in a lurid tail of plantation slavery
1969 Burn! Gillo Pontecorvo Marlon Brando plays a political agent who foments a slave revolt in a Caribbean island, only to help reinstate an oppressive wage-slavery in its place
1967 To Sir With Love James Clavell Sidney Poitier plays a teacher arrived from the Caribbean to teach in a run-down school in London, based on E. R. Braithwaite's 1959 autobiographical novel of the same name.
1967 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Stanley Kramer Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in this comedy of manners about liberal parents confronted by their daughter's black boyfriend
1967 In the Heat of the Night Norman Jewison Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is a detective from Philadelphia investigating a murder case and confronting prejudice in small town Mississippi
1964 Zulu Cy Endfield A white outpost is beset by thousands of Zulu warriors in the British Empire story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift
1962 To Kill A Mockingbird Robert Mulligan Gregory Peck stars in the film of Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the story of a black defendant falsely accused of rape
1961 West Side Story Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins Gang warfare between the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Anglo Jets in this film of the 1957 Broadway musical of the same name (itself inspired by William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet).
1959 Porgy and Bess Otto Preminger Film of George and Ira Gershwin's opera of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge
1959 Black Orpheus Marcel Camus A reworking of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Brazilian carnival
1959 Imitation of Life Douglas Sirk Susan Kohner stars as a mixed race woman who passes for white, in a film adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name
1957 12 Angry Men Sidney Lumet A jury decide the fate of a 'boy' charged with murder - though the race of the accused is never stated, the film deals with prejudice as one juror denounces slum-born people, no better than animals who kill for fun
1954 Carmen Jones Otto Preminger Sidney Poitier's airman is seduced by Dorothy Dandridge in the film of the 1943 musical, itself a re-working adaptation of Bizet's Carmen
1954 The Salt of the Earth Herbert J. Biberman Hispanic American miners fight against injustice based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico.
1951 Cry, the Beloved Country Zoltan Korda Based on Alan Paton's 1948 novel of the same name about a black minister's journey to Johannesburg to find his son in Apartheid South Africa
1947 Hi-De-Ho Josh Binney A race film showcasing jazz performer Cab Calloway
1946 Song of the South Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson Walt Disney's mixed live action and animation film of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories
1941 Hellzapoppin' H. C. Potter Zany musical showcasing Slim and Slam (Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart) and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
1940 Dark Command Raoul Walsh A Union-supporting John Wayne tries to uphold the law against the Confederate hold-outs of Quantrill's Raiders
1939 Gone With the Wind Victor Fleming Historical drama of a southern family in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel of the same name.
1937 A Day at the Races Sam Wood Marx Brothers film showcasing Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
1936 Song of Freedom J. Elder Wills Paul Robeson stars as John Zinga, an African dockworker who becomes an opera singer
1936 Show Boat James Whale Irene Dunne stars in the story of the Mississippi show boat featuring music by Oscar Hammerstein II and performances by Hattie McDaniel and Paul Robeson - who sings 'ole man river'
1935 Sanders of the River Zoltan Korda Leslie Banks stars as the colonial officer who takes on Paul Robeson's African chief
1934 Imitation of Life John M. Stahl Fredi Washington stars as a mixed race woman who passes for white, in a film adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel of the same name
1933 The Emperor Jones Dudley Murphy Paul Robeson stars as Brutus Jones, a convict who escapes to make himself Emperor of a Caribbean Island, based on the Eugene O'Neill play of the same title
1930 Borderline Kenneth Macpherson A black American couple played by Paul and Eslanda Robeson stay at a hotel in Europe with group of hedonists. An interracial love triangle shocks the townsfolk
1915 The Birth of a Nation D. W. Griffith The American Civil War and Reconstruction era with the Ku Klux Klan saving the white nation from black carpetbaggers

References

  1. ^ Jaap van Ginneken, Screening Difference: How Hollywood's Blockbuster Films Imagine Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2007
  2. ^ Melvin Stokes, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Oxford University Press, 2007
  3. ^ Garry Wills, John Wayne's America, New York, Touchstone, 1997 p 103
  4. ^ Thompson, Craig and Tian, Kelly (2008). "Reconstructing the South: How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Counter-memories."Journal of Consumer Research34.5, 595-613.http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1086/520076
  5. ^ Robert Crease, Divine Frivolity: Hollywood Representations of the Lindy Hop, 1937-1942, in Krin Gabbard, Representing Jazz, Duke University Press, 1995
  6. ^ Jim Pines, Blacks in the Cinema: The Changing Image, British Film Institute, 1971
  7. ^ Manthia Diawara (ed), Black American Cinema, Routledge, New York, 1993
  8. ^ Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie, I.B Tauris, 1998, p5-6
  9. ^ Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. By Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
  10. ^ Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic, University of Virginia, 2009, especially chapter five
  11. ^ Robin M. Boylorn, 'From Boys to Men: Hip-Hop, Hood Films, and the Performance of Contemporary Black Masculinity,' Black Camera, Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2017 (New Series) pp. 146-164
  12. ^ "Make My Day!": Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics, Michael Rogin, Representations, No. 29 (Winter, 1990), pp. 99-123, p 103.
  13. ^ See Robin Wood, The American Nightmare: Horror Films in the 1970s, p 29 http://www.blue-sunshine.com/tl_files/images/Week1-Wood-AmericanNightmare.pdf
  14. ^ Allison Graham, Framing the South, John Hopkins University Press, 2001, p 147
  15. ^ Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture, Smithsonian, 1995
  16. ^ Jasmine Nichole Cobb American Literary History, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2014, pp. 339-346 (Article)
  17. ^ Ed Guerrero, 'The Spectacle of Black Violence as Cinema', in Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn M. Feltey (eds) Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film, Sage, 2012
  18. ^ Maren Thom and James Heartfield, Hollywood's Race War, Spiked Review, December 2017,http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/hollywoods-race-war/20604#.WiaTs0x2uUk
  19. ^ McLellan, Dennis (2 December 2006). "Perry Henzell and Trevor D. Rhone; their movie `The Harder They Come' brought reggae to the world". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
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