Abstract
This chapter concerns two theoretical dichotomies: David Bordwell’s differentiation between classical Hollywood narrative and art cinema and the contrast Richard Dyer establishes between visible and invisible whiteness. The chapter defines Bordwell’s and Dyer’s terms and argues that deeper consideration of this intersectionality can help reveal how Hollywood narratives and generic structures are often grounded in American mythologies of white supremacy or invisible whiteness. Analyzing films that are hybrids with respect to these dichotomies establishes the framework for the remaining chapters. The chapter contextualizes the role of James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work and James Agee’s film criticism with respect to those supremacist mythologies that ground Hollywood or Hollywood-inspired filmmaking.
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- 1.
The seminal text is David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Narrative: Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). The article “The Art Cinema as a Form of Film Practice” written by Bordwell in 1979 is the one most often quoted in later articles that take up analysis of his categories. The article is reprinted in many places, notably in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen , eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 649–657.
- 2.
For extensive review of the debate over Birth of a Nation please cf., Melvyn Stokes’s D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Film of All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 3.
Richard Dyer’s text White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997, 2002). As Dyer specifies, “[W]hiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen” (45). As he equally emphasizes, any analysis of visual culture requires giving close attention to what is visible.
- 4.
Notable examples include Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009); Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Daniel Bernardi, ed., Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) or The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Jason A. Smith and Bhoomi K. Thakore, eds., Race and Contention in 21st Century Media (New York: Routledge, 2016), to name only a few.
- 5.
Paul L. Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Austin Fisher and Iain Robert Smith , “Transnational Cinemas: A Critical Roundtable,” Frames Cinema Journal. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/transnational-cinemas-a-critical-roundtable/.
- 6.
Tim Bergfelder, in “Transnational Cinemas,” 3.
- 7.
Robert Burgoyne, in “Transnational Cinemas,” 5.
- 8.
“Steve McQueen: ‘I could never make American Movies—They like happy endings,’” The Guardian, January 8, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2012/jan/08/steve-mcqueen-shame-sex-addiction-interview.
- 9.
In this instance, I evoke the concept of “mythology” derived from the works of Roland Barthes in his seminal text Mythologies, though the ultimate purpose of the second chapter is to lay out the similarities between Barthes’s notion of mythic structure and that of Baldwin. Barthes , Mythologies (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1970).
- 10.
Steve Neale’s “Art Cinema as Institution” (1980) is also considered to be a seminal text on this subject, reprinted in C. Fowler, ed., The European Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 103–120; of interest as well is David Andrews, “Art Cinema as Institution Redux: Art Houses, Film Festivals and Film Studies,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television, October 18, 2010. Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the new American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 349–369. Other scholars will also be referenced in due course.
- 11.
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005).
- 12.
In Michael Lofaro, ed., Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).
- 13.
The seminal text is Bordwell , Staiger , and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Narrative.
- 14.
Dyer , White: Essays on Race and Culture, 3, 45.
- 15.
A useful reference in film theory is Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Cahiers du cinéma 216 (October 1969), translated by Susan Bennett in The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (London: Routledge, 1990), 58–67. The hybrid films I wish to examine are most closely associated with Comolli and Narboni’s category C films, which operate “against the grain” of dominant ideologies. Comolli and Narboni claim that these types of movies would be the main subject of criticism for the Cahiers du cinéma, but I would also claim that this category is particularly useful for considering films of directors who are working across cultural boundaries and therefore challenging dominant ideologies that are assumed by the culture featured in their narratives but not taken for granted in their own cultures.
- 16.
Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.
- 17.
Du Bois’s concepts are summarized in The Souls of Black Folks, (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.) 1903. As he states on the first page of his foreword, “I have stepped within the veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses.”
- 18.
Susan Courtney , Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Braudy and Cohen , eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 767–776. Ryan Jay Friedman, “Enough Force to Shatter the Tale to Fragments: Ethics and Textual Analysis in James Baldwin’s Film Theory,” ELH: Journal of English Literary History 77, no. 2 (2010): 385–412. Jacqueline Stewart, “Negroes Laughing at Themselves?: Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 650–677.
- 19.
Agee addresses most directly issues of Selznick’s contribution in film history through Selznick’s work on Gone with the Wind (1939) in his comments on Since You Went Away, but it is important to establish the connection. Since You Went Away is riding on the success of Gone with the Wind but does not address explicit racial themes. It nonetheless assumes a restoration of order under the guise of white supremacy, as I will argue and as Agee intimates.
- 20.
Agee on Film, Volume I, Essays and Reviews by James Agee, (New York: Perigree, 1958), 107–108.
- 21.
In the course of researching and planning this book, I have considered many different films that might be useful for my purposes, though the ones I finally selected are intended as exemplary for building the argument I wish to pursue.
- 22.
Representative articles by each of these critics may be found in the text Film Theory and Criticism , 5th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 23.
The expression “the age of the Negro” derives from the title of the first chapter of Anna Everett’s Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). It will remain in quotation marks throughout this volume as a reminder that criticism of racially inflected films is markedly different prior to the advent of the Civil Rights period in the United States and thereafter.
- 24.
Daniel Bernardi, Review of Anthony Slide’s “American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 644.
- 25.
Agee’s article “ America, Look at Your Shame!” published in The Oxford American, no. 43 (January/February 2003) is of particular value. Though written much earlier in the 1940’s, Agee’s article was lost in his files and has only recently been published.
- 26.
Much of mainstream film theory is formed by structuralist- or poststructuralist-trained scholars and so concepts from Barthes , Benjamin, and others are assumed and will be documented throughout. The phrase in the title “through a glass darkly” alludes to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and his discussions of what it means to be “living within the veil,” which is to say, subject to the assumptions of American White supremacy.
- 27.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work. (New York: Laurel, 1976). 54–55.
- 28.
A useful critique with respect to this issue is Jean Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: nation et cinéma (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998). Frodon explores how Hollywood has controlled the imagination of filmmakers from other national cinemas as well as how Hollywood production styles and modes of production have affected filmmaking practices outside the United States.
- 29.
Martin Fradley, “Review: The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi,” Film Quarterly Review 63, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 71–73, 71.
- 30.
James A. Crank’s “Racial Violence, Receding Bodies: James Agee’s Anatomy of Guilt” in Lofaro , ed., James Agee at 100, 53–74, is an insightful article on Agee’s film criticism in relation to his other writings. It would be unfair to say that Agee was not thoughtful about race relations in America, but close analysis of his work indicates that he did not feel compelled to take a strong public stand on racial issues in his film reviews.
- 31.
Agee on Film, 283.
- 32.
Agee on Film, 283.
- 33.
It is clear that unequal treatment of African americans was by no means restricted to the South, but in order to understand Agee’s position with respect to racial issues, one is largely dependent on the penetrating treatment of class issues in the United States that one finds in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and its ability to allow us glimpses into the racial imbalance which played a role in class distinctions in the American South. This quote is from Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Mariner, 1939/2001), 28.
- 34.
Crank’s “Racial Violence, Receding Bodies” also gives an insightful perspective on this issue.
- 35.
Agee , “America, Look at Your Shame,” www.oxfordamerican.org.
- 36.
According to Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction to the reissue of Fanny Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1933/2004), xxxiii, Douglas Sirk was introduced to the novel, which served as the source material for both Stahl’s film and Sirk’s. (by producer Ross Hunter).
- 37.
In “Art Cinema as Institution Redux,” Andrews he specifies that one distinction between Bordwell’s and Neale’s treatment of art cinema concerns whether it should be considered as strictly linked to narrative or also to genre. The choice of films for this book allows for consideration of both sides of this debate.
- 38.
My argument in Chap. 8 takes into consideration Douglas Field’s article “Even Better than the Real Thing: Boris Vian, Vernon Sullivan and Film Noir,” African American Review 45, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 157–166, concerning Gast’s film’s partial use of film noir aesthetics. In this context, James Naremore’s More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, expanded version 2008), is crucial in setting reasonable timelines for the phenomenon and the dissemination of its American manifestations in France.
- 39.
Romain Gary, White Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 50.
- 40.
Dyer , White: Essays on Race and Culture, 1997. 32.
- 41.
Bordwell , “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” 651.
- 42.
As several articles on Renoir’s work in America argue, confrontation with American racial issues was effected through racial allegories rather than actual black-white confrontational plotlines, due to Renoir’s lack of comfort in treating such controversial relations as a non-American. Cf. Ben Dooley’s “Swamp Water: Renoir’s American Outsider Film,” September 24, 2007, https://ayearinthedark.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/swamp-water-renoirs-american-outsider-film/.
- 43.
Dyer , White: Essays on Race and Culture, 52.
- 44.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (London: Penguin, 1954, 1991), 101–107.
- 45.
Elizabeth Vitanza, “Interconnected Sites of Struggle: Resituating Renoir’s Career in Hollywood,” in Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, eds., Wiley Companion to Jean Renoir (London: Blackwell, 2013), Chap. 29. William Harry Gilcher, Jean Renoir in America: A Critical Analysis of his films from Swamp Water to The River, Thesis (Ph.D.), University of Iowa, 1979.
- 46.
Given the controversy surrounding the film The Outlaws, I will be using multiple references to that debate. It must be noted that Melvyn Stokes spends quite some time breaking down the mythic structures one finds in Birth of a Nation. Therefore, I will be linking his observations to my own observations about the mythic structures that inform The Outlaws.
- 47.
An interesting article to consider in terms of this realignment is Sirma Bilge, “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 405–424.
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Craven, A.M. (2018). Visible and Invisible Whiteness: An Introduction. In: Visible and Invisible Whiteness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76777-2_1
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