Hollywood Fantasies Of Miscegenation

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of "miscegenation," to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies. With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema. What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender? Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney's new research on the Production Code's miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.

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William Thiele is remembered today as the father of the sound film operetta with seminal classics such as Drei von der Tankstelle (1930). While often considered among the most accomplished directors of Late Weimar cinema, as an Austrian Jew he was vilified during the onset of the Nazi regime in 1933 and fled to the United States where he continued making films until the end of his career in 1960. Enchanted by Cinema closely examines the European musical film pioneer’s work and his cross-cultural perspective across forty years of filmography in Berlin and Hollywood to account for his popularity while discussing issues of ethnicity, exile, comedy, music, gender, and race.

The first transnational history of cinema’s role in decolonization. Using popular cinema from the United States, Britain, and France, Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946–1959, examines postwar Western attitudes toward colonialism and race relations. Historians have written much about the high politics of decolonization but little about what ordinary citizens thought about losing their empires. Popular cinema provided the main source of images of the colonies, and, according to Jon Cowans in this far-reaching book, films depicting the excesses of empire helped Westerners come to terms with decolonization and even promoted the dismantling of colonialism around the globe. Examining more than one hundred British, French, and American films from the post–World War II era, Cowans concentrates on movies that depict interactions between white colonizers and nonwhite colonial subjects, including sexual and romantic relations. Although certain conservative films eagerly supported colonialism, Cowans argues that the more numerous “liberal colonialist” productions undermined support for key aspects of colonial rule, while a few more provocative films openly favored anticolonial movements and urged “internal decolonization” for people of color in Britain, France, and the United States. Combining new archival research on the films’ production with sharp analysis of their imagery and political messages, the book also assesses their reception through box-office figures and newspaper reviews. It examines both high-profile and lesser-known films on overseas colonialism, including The King and I, Bhowani Junction, and Island in the Sun, and tackles treatments of miscegenation and “internal colonialism” that appeared in Westerns and American films like Pinky and Giant. The first truly transnational history of cinema’s role in decolonization, this powerful book weaves a unified historical narrative out of the experiences of three colonial powers in diverse geographic settings.

Addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in television for children, and the outing of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. From publisher description.

Among early Hollywood’s most renowned filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era’s "three great minds" alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber’s remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing cinema’s power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work grappled with the profound changes in women’s lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on-screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood’s bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry’s history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women’s contributions to American culture.

In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.