A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black Cast Posters

by John Kisch and Edward Mapp

The Noonday Press, $20.00

MOST PEOPLE MAY ASSOCIATE THE WORDS "RACE MOVIE" with something like "Chariots of Fire." But race movies are actually a body of films made for an African-American audience, usually with an all-Black cast.

Race movies in this original conception were an answer to the racist and exclusionary movies coming out of "classic" Hollywood in the 1920s. Independent race movie producers, like Oscar Micheaux, set up their own production system that tried to represent the interests of African-Americans ignored or stereotyped by the Hollywood mainstream. These race, or "colored cast," producers struggled with only mediocre financial success until they were almost completely driven out of business. This eventual failure occured for a number of reasons, but mainly because the political dynamics of World War II Hollywood led to more complex portrayals of African Americans. After all, if Black Americans were meant to be fighting for the sake of the good ol' US of A, then a message of racial unity had to be played up in numerous wartime morale-boosting movies. More diverse images of Blacks proliferated in Hollywood--major studios even made Black cast movies of their own (i.e. MGM's "Cabin in the Sky" (1943) directed by Vincent Minelli and starring Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne and Ethel Waters)--so the independent race movie makers were squeezed out of the market, unable to compete with the slickness and polish of higher budget Hollywood films.

From the '50s onward, then, Hollywood began to move away from the bug-eyed, watermelon-eating portrayals of African-Americans that abounded in the '30s, introducing a wider variety of characters. As Stepin Fetchit became a phenomenon of the past, stars like Lena Horne and Sidney Poitier were born. Nevertheless, the roles available to Blacks were still basically tame--musicians, functionaries, and other characters that did little to challenge the status quo. The few movies that did have an edge to them were poorly distributed or received criticism for being too incendiary. For example, 20th Century Fox's controversial "No Way Out" (1950)--Sidney Poitier's debut--was maligned by critics; it never achieved the kind of exposure Poitier's later, more accessible movies received. Another racially challenging but commercially unsuccessful movie, "Odds Against Tomorrow" (United Artists, 1959), starring Harry Belafonte, portrays the eventual downfall of a multicultural band of bank robbers who can't get over their racial infighting. This movie dissected problems of racial division in the United States and was summarily panned.

While the race movie movement was dead as a systematic and continuous source of Black cinema, occasional isolated independent films would attack the social constructs so easily skated over by the integrated-but-trite Hollywood fodder. Cinema V put out "Nothing But a Man" (1963), starring Ivan Dixon (of Hongan's Heroes fame) and Abbey Lincoln, a film portraying the difficulties of family life in the segregated South. The well-developed characters showed that stories about African-Americans could be done without reducing the complexity of their lives to easy formulas. As the glitter-ridden elevator-shoed '70s dawned, the seminal "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" sparked what would become the Blaxploitation era of filmmaking. Since then, Black film has gone on to be characterized by mainstream stars such as Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and more recently by independent filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, Julie Dash, John Singleton and Reginald Hudlin '83.

The period from the beginning of race movies through the era of Poitier and Belafonte are the subject of A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black Cast Posters by John Kisch and Edward Mapp. This book is a glossy compilation of hundreds of posters used in promoting independent race movies and Hollywood features with an important African-American presence. Spike Lee offers an inconsequential preface that is thoroughly put to shame by the excellent introduction by Donald Bogle.

Bogle, the author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks and other books, has provided an amazingly detailed introduction that traces images of African-Americans from D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) to the present. Bogle's introduction will definitely become required reading for many film history classes, as he takes the time to explain the many nuances and changes of the portrayal of Blacks in film and explains how these shifts came about.

The extensive collection of posters in A Separate Cinema includes many for movies that have since been lost, for re-makes of original films, and for foreign movies starring African-American actors. Most are accompanied by a passage explaining their significance. There are six distinct versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, including one for cartoonist Tex Avery's "Uncle Tom's Cabana" in which, it is ironically pointed out, "liberties taken with the original story permit Uncle Tom to be run over with a steamroller and cut in half with a sawmill blade."

The poster of a seductive Josephine Baker for "Prinsesse Tam-Tam" (1953), a French film, is particularly striking as is the terrifying poster of a mounted Klansman for "The Birth of a Nation." The posters, in general, are fascinating and often artistically interesting, especially since the splendid colors are kept alive on the glossy pages.

Unfortunately, the posters are laid out poorly. They are broken down into 14 categories which are then arranged at times chronologically, and at times arbitrarily. It is probably best just to browse through the pictures and enjoy them as art and as they illustrate the history described by Bogle without looking for a logical order. Anyone who has seen these movies or who is interested in advertising should be struck by the way the producers and distributors tried to market their films, and what aspects of the movies the posters highlight. For example, the original poster for "The Duke Is Tops" (1938) features Ralph Cooper's name emblazoned boldly across it and Lena Horne's name in the fine print at the bottom. In the re-release of the film after Lena Horne achieved stardom in "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy Weather," the film is retitled "The Bronze Venus," and the posters focus on her now marketable name and face.

A Separate Cinema is a running illustration and commentary on the role of African-Americans in film both in the United States and abroad. Donald Bogle's introduction in itself is an invaluable encapsulation of the history, and these rare posters strikingly show the development of images of race and race relations as well as the continuing interplay between the so-called mainstream and marginal in American culture.