Black Women
In 1955, James Baldwin wrote an essay on the newly-released Carmen Jones — a Hollywood adaptation of the opera Carmen relocated to the American South with a cast consisting entirely of black actors. Ever the clear-eyed prognosticator of falseness and cultural harm, Baldwin viewed the film as “unreality,” or a suspended suggestion of blackness that had nothing to do whatsoever with what it meant to be black. The performers’ speech was “cleaned” up to resemble affectations of white speech; the use of Bizet’s opera was intended to lend gravity and credibility to the talents of black artists.
And when Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) and Joe (Harry Belafonte) made love, Baldwin wrote, it is “a sterile and distressing eroticism… because it is occurring in a vacuum between two mannequins… [The audience] is not watching either tenderness or love… one is watching a timorous and vulgar misrepresentation of these things.”
I would be eager to hear Baldwin’s reaction to Sounder, released eighteen years after Carmen Jones, in which Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) and Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield) share a palpable, twinkly-eyed affinity for one another. They’re sharecroppers in 1930s Louisiana, with three children; early in the film, Nathan Lee is put on a chain gang for stealing a neighbor’s chicken in a bout of hunger. (We find ourselves in the midst of the Depression, after all.) A year passes before he returns to his family — limping, but as full of spirited, hardy masculinity as ever before.
As soon as Rebecca puts the children to bed that night, she and Nathan Lee face each other. Across the small kitchen, their eyes meet: teary, shimmering, giddy that the insurmountable distance between them has finally diminished. Rebecca grins. Her husband laughs. With relief and desire, she goes to Nathan Lee and helps him stand as they shakily make their way to the bedroom.
That’s a kind of tenderness one almost never sees in movies, be the characters black or not. But both Sounder and Carmen Jones speak tacitly to the evolution in representations of black people — and specifically of black women — in American movies. Indeed, both were included in Film Forum’s recent series Black Women: Trailblazing African American Actresses and Images, 1920-2001, which ended last week. The two films came into being at very different moments in time: Carmen Jones was released in the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, whereas Sounder arrived at the height of the Black Power movement. They’re the products of distinct historical epochs, yet they amount to a common, vivid legacy: one in which black artists carefully leverage political power within a racist entertainment industry.
It’s a legacy one sees accentuated by the most recent film presented in the series: Monster’s Ball (2001), the movie for which Halle Berry became the first black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. In it, she plays Leticia, a destitute waitress grieving the loss of her husband and son — the former a victim of capital punishment, the latter of a reckless nighttime driver. Vulnerable and lonely, she enters an affair with Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), a racist corrections officer who happens to be the man who executed her husband.
Hailed at the time by the mainstream press as a triumph in racial equality, Berry’s victory today reads more as an anomaly than it does a success: in the two decades since, we’ve yet to see another black actor win an Oscar for a leading role, and it’s arguable that, through Leticia, Monster’s Ball worked to perpetuate the unreal images of blackness that James Baldwin warned us against nearly fifty years earlier.
The fact that Leticia falls for Hank — a man known for his racism — and that he falls for her lays bare the movie’s inherently magical thinking. And there’s a sex scene between the two that would make Carmen Jones blush. Yet like the “sterile” love-making in that earlier film, the eroticized exposure of Halle Berry’s body in Monster’s Ball is symptomatic of a suggested blackness, specifically of a suggested black female sexuality, that restricts or reduces more than it liberates.
The graphic nudity of Leticia is no different than the coy respectability of Carmen: in both instances, black women’s bodies are hijacked to flatter or reassure a white point of view. Refreshingly, the same cannot be said of Anna Lucasta (1958) — a movie that also concerns itself with a black woman’s desire, yet manages to present her desire within a sturdy framework of character and plausibility.
It tells the story of Anna (Eartha Kitt), a woman of ill-repute whose estranged family brings her back home to seduce a wealthy friend. At first oblivious to their opportunistic motivation, Anna is reluctant to risk emotional vulnerability before her family; she fears another rejection, just as she craves acceptance from her pious father (Rex Ingram). But once she meets the young man they’ve aimed to set her up with, Rudolph (Henry Scott), she obliges. After all, he is very good-looking.
But then Anna is given a run for her money: it turns out that Rudolph is a compassionate, gentle man who offers the kind of love that Anna had never even hoped to find. She is too ashamed of her past — there’s no way a man as good as Rudolph could understand it. After a night on the town, the couple does some window-shopping. Rudolph is trying to court her, but Anna brushes him off. She makes an off-hand, droll reference to the number of times she’s been hurt in love. Rudolph stares at her and, without a trace of irony, asks, “Why would anyone want to hurt you?”
Anna Lucasta is a brilliant dramatization of the push-and-pull between emotional isolation and self-love. It infuses its black female protagonist with a textured variety of emotions, fears and moral inconsistencies. Though written and produced by a league of white men, the movie features a roster of masterful black actors — including Frederick O’Neal, Rosetta LeNoire and Sammy Davis, Jr. — and counts as a mature, measured study in human frailty.
Yet would it meet Mr. Baldwin’s standards? While it surely grants humanness to its cast of black characters, does Anna Lucasta convincingly capture the reality of blackness? Ultimately, I am not the one to make such a call — as a white man, I never will be — but I do suspect that, politically-speaking, it falls short, much in the way Carmen Jones does: by ensconcing his movie in a world made up entirely of black people, white filmmaker Arnold Laven largely eliminates the impact of race. And while black people aren’t defined exclusively by their relationship to their white contemporaries, “blackness” as a reality cannot be grasped without recognizing its definitional and real-life co-dependency on “whiteness.”
A film that better addresses these issues is Claudine (1974) — a comedy that chronicles the ups and downs of a single mother (played by Diahann Carroll) while she’s courted by a ne’er-do-well beau, Rupert (James Earl Jones). This movie is far more buoyant than the others discussed in this essay, yet it revels in a gritty tangibility which emphasizes the frustrating realities that come with being black, living in a poor neighborhood and relying on welfare.
In order to provide for her six children, Claudine works as a housekeeper — but keeps this a secret from the white welfare agent (Elisa Loti) who periodically visits her meager apartment. She also hides her more “expensive” home appliances (like a toaster and a hot iron), because any deductions the agent makes would seriously wound Claudine’s already-thin income. A twisted irony: in order to get by, Claudine must appear to be out of work.
The welfare agency also requires that Claudine remain single. If she marries, she will no longer get any financial support. So she must keep her relationship with Rupert a secret, even though he’s no more well-off than she is: himself divorced, Rupert can barely provide child support for his ex-wife. And when he has Claudine over to his place one night for a romantic dinner, the cool ambience is temporarily interrupted by a rat that dashes across the carpet.
Though exaggerated and sitcom-like in tone, Claudine doesn’t shy away from the socioeconomic realities of black lives; the love that develops between Claudine and Rupert is tumultuous in part because of their conflicting personalities, but mainly because of the logistical pressures imposed by an oppressive, racist system. But their souls aren’t broken by these limits: like Rebecca and Nathan Lee in Sounder, the couple locates a witty sensuality that reaffirms and dignifies their lives. The humor of Claudine stems from its smart embrace of dogged optimism, even in the face of humiliation — what better testament to the reality of blackness could there be?
One certainly won’t find it in Lady Sings the Blues (1972). An adaptation of Billie Holiday’s searing, triumphantly good-humored memoir, it stars Diana Ross as the ill-fated jazz legend, and depicts her rise from abused girlhood to nightclub stardom, as well as her lifelong struggle with drug addiction. Formerly known solely for her work as a pop singer, Ross is touching in her first movie role — expressive and genuinely pathetic. But the movie itself fails its subject with startling rigorousness.
Although Billie Holiday was a queer singer-songwriter who had a substantial recording career, and counted scores of cultural luminaries among her friends, Lady Sings the Blues reduces her life to a limp romantic narrative involving her last husband, Louis McKay. (As played by Billie Dee Williams, he’s depicted as her loyal lifelong partner, when in fact McKay was an abusive third marriage.) Produced as it was by Motown executive Berry Gordy, the film is more a vehicle for building the legend of Diana Ross; to that end, it swathes its star in resplendent dresses and soft lighting. Though many of the more horrific events of Holiday’s life are depicted (e.g., her imprisonment for drug possession and encounters with white supremacists while touring the South), the greater nuances of her personality are glazed over. In life, Holiday was tomboyish, inventive and assertive. Here, she is represented as demure and apologetic.
Given the mores of its time, it’s conceivable that Mr. Gordy and his collaborators may not have felt safe (and, in fact, may themselves have been averse to) exploring the greater nuances of Ms. Holiday’s life. But Lady Sings the Blues reveals how even black filmmakers can lead themselves to betray reality for the sake of illusion. Indeed, such denial may have been a survival tactic: it is unlikely that Diana Ross could have been accepted by the public if she’d appeared as anything other than delicate or fragile. Such unthreatening qualities have ensured her prosperity — just as their absence may account for Billie Holiday’s untimely demise.
Therefore, it’s all the more empowering when, in movies, black women are afforded the space to be something other than “accessible.” Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) has long been held as a standard in independent filmmaking: it was the first theatrically-distributed American feature film to be directed by a black woman, and it offers a compelling contrast to the more mainstream objectives of the other movies discussed in this essay.
So far, all the depictions of black women I’ve covered focus primarily on a woman’s desire for romantic love. And in fact, every film — from Carmen Jones to Monster’s Ball — ultimately defines its heroine through her relationship to a husband or male love interest. (These movies were also all directed by white men.) In Dash’s film, it’s the desire for heritage and spiritual fulfillment that motivates Yellow Mary (Barbara-O), a former prostitute traveling with her female lover, to return to her Gullah family on an island off the coast of South Carolina.
Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Daughters of the Dust was praised at the time of its release for accurately portraying the Gullah culture and language: the real-life isolated community maintained traditions from several West African ethnic groups, preserved by its enslaved ancestors. But the movie is also noteworthy simply for featuring a cast primarily made up of black women: in addition to Yellow Mary, there’s Eula (Alva Rogers), an impregnated victim of rape who nonetheless maintains a spirited and optimistic connection with her cultural past; Haagar (Kaycee Moore), Yellow Mary’s moralizing sister, eager to leave the island and move north for greater economic opportunity; and Nana (Cora Lee Day), matriarch of the family who clings adamantly to her old way of life.
The various protagonists of Daughters of the Dust embody conflicting aspects of black American womanhood; through argument, they perform the internal negotiations that plague any daughter of a violent, racialized history who seeks to assert herself in an emergent, modern society. In short, the movie distillates everything to be found in the Black Women film series overall: generations of women sharing a common, visible space — contrasting one another yet conveying the breadth and complexity of their collective, unique, heavily politicized experience.
There are so many actors and characters in this series that I could write about: from the modest nobility of Evelyn Preer in Within Our Gates (1920) to the cheeky insouciance of Josephine Baker in Princess Tam-Tam (‘35), from Pam Grier’s brassy avenger in Foxy Brown (‘74) to Angela Bassett’s steely determination in Strange Days (‘95). When James Baldwin wrote of Carmen Jones’ “timorous and vulgar” misrepresentation of human behaviors, he did so with the conviction that black people deserved more from their movies — and he knew that the world would benefit from seeing black lives that were full of recognizable desire, heartache, insecurity and perseverance.
Thankfully, sixty-five years later, Baldwin’s conjecture is a reality we can witness for ourselves. I encourage my readers to watch these and other titles from the Film Forum series (link to the full programming list provided below) — and later this year, go see new theatrical releases like Premature, Antebellum and Respect. Every ticket bought is a vote cast for the kinds of movies we want to see produced. And as far as I’m concerned, a cinematic landscape that has more Rebeccas, Claudines, Annas and Yellow Marys is the kind of cinema for which I live.
https://filmforum.org/series/black-women-trailblazing-african-american-actresses-images-1920-2001
