#minstrelsy

The Ugliest Trope in Modern Horror

Some early blackface roles in film directly continued traditions developed in the nineteenth-century minstrel show. […] These blackface performances made a spectacle of racial difference: audiences and performers alike (who for the most part were white and male, though there were occasional exceptions) played out sexual, racial, and class anxieties through theatrical exaggeration. In this way, they participated in what Tom Gunning has called “the cinema of attractions,” the tendency of the earliest films to privilege theatrical display over narrative absorption. Yet slightly later blackface began to function in an entirely different way in cinema as a result of changes both within the film industry and within American culture at large. One effect of the film industry’s transition between 1907 and 1913 was the shift toward the feature film as the dominant genre. In contrast to the earlier “cinema of attractions,” as Gunning has noted, this period saw the “narrativization of the cinema, culminating in the appearance of feature films which radically revised the variety format” and realigned the cinema with the legitimate theater. This shift, I suggest, coincided with a revision of the conventions of blackface: blackface characters now became part of a narrative plot rather than spectacularized attractions. Expanding on the comic and sentimentalized stereotypes developed in minstrelsy and vaudeville, the film industry now incorporated blackface characters into dramatic film roles based on literary sources. As racial segregation became increasingly institutionalized, the use of black makeup became a way to maintain all-white acting companies while still portraying African Americans on film. D. W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation, for instance, is reported to have forbidden “any ‘black blood’ among the players who might have to touch white actresses. Those actors were always whites in blackface.” According to [Thomas] Cripps, “as late as the mid-1920s major Negro roles went to white men in blackface. Not until after 1925 would a small cadre of Los Angeles Negroes replace the old white actors.” Although blackface minstrel performances and their counterparts in vaudeville continued to be represented directly in films such as The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, ironically many dramatic films transformed “blacking up” into a standard method of portraying racial difference on film while maintaining actual practices of racial segregation. Blackface was transformed from theatrical spectacle, then, to supposedly naturalistic makeup. The actor and the film did everything possible to make audiences forget that they were watching a racial impersonation. Maintaining and disrupting the fiction of blackness became the subject of white actress Norma Talmadge’s reminiscence about making The Octoroon. As a form of protest against a director’s decision: “We [white actresses] got together in a corner and deliberately decided to do everything in our power to be thrown out of the picture. … So the three of us blackened only our faces and the front parts of our necks, and as the auction block revolved the camera registered the backs of our necks snow-white. Needless to say, we were immediately dragged off the set, bawled out in very inelegant language, and sent home that day with no pay checks.” Talmadge’s prank reveals how important a naturalistic use of blackface was to the film and how ineffective it supposedly became when the audience could recognize the white body beneath it. In effect, where minstrel performers had used blackface to produce exaggerated and comic stereotypes of African Americans, the goal of many white movie actors in blackface was to “pass,” to act “black” in a mode believable to white audiences. The seeming authenticity of blackface performances on film depended on white audiences’ and actors’ assumption that race was a transparent visual sign. The naturalization of blackface on film was significantly related to the increasingly naturalized structures of racial segregation within American culture at large.

On Irish music and Black liberation in Sinners