Early Hollywood Representations

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) occupies a fraught position in the history of American cinema: it has been lauded for its technical accomplishments, pioneering close-ups, fade-outs, and the use of an orchestral musical score, while also being one of the most racist films in Hollywood history. In the introduction to his BFI Film Classic, Paul McEwan writes that there is little place in our understanding of art for a film that exalts ideals we find repulsive, and there are very few historical works that fall into this category. McEwan argues that an acknowledgment of the film’s power allows us to confront its ideology directly.

Gone with the Wind (1939), which followed Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, is another film that grapples with the art-or-racism dilemma. In this chapter from her BFI Film Classic, Helen Taylor analyses the film’s racial politics and the historical implications for modern viewers. She writes that Gone with the Wind gave the white conservative version of the Civil War a mythic status throughout a century that saw bitter struggles for progress in civil rights and relations between the races. Pro-South films were far more numerous than pro-North, so from 1911 onwards the ‘public memory of the Civil War’ was controlled by a southern bias that argued the War was about states’ sovereignty rather than slavery, and that the gracious and successful character of the Old South – the ‘Lost Cause’ – was violently shattered by a brutal, vindictive North. The film established a pattern of Civil War films that concentrated on the home front (and thus primarily on women) and ignored or sidelined issues of race – from Tap Roots (1948) and Shenandoah (1965) to Cold Mountain (2003). Only in 1989 with Glory was there a focus on actively resistant African Americans fighting in the War on the Union side.

Despite stereotypical race representations being rife in Hollywood during this period, Black directors were already working to push back against harmful tropes. One of the most prominent was Oscar Micheaux, the country’s first major Black filmmaker, who began making films in the 1910s and went on to direct 44 films over the course of his career. He skilfully depicted contemporary Black life, and his film Within Our Gates (1920) strongly challenged the racist stereotypes of The Birth of a Nation, delving into topics such as lynching, job discrimination, and mob violence. In this chapter from 100 Silent Films, Bryony Dixon analyses Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1925), detailing how, in order to produce films with an all-Black cast, Micheaux had to set up his own production company. Micheaux and the Black filmmakers who followed him were themselves subject to the challenges of racial discrimination, be it in the difficulties of securing funding for their films or of finding an audience, despite being shut out of the studio system and mainstream distribution.

Civil Rights and Blaxploitation

By the mid-1950s, the growing momentum of the civil rights movement began to be reflected in Hollywood’s output. In this chapter from 100 Film Musicals, Douglas Pye analyses Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954), one of the earliest musical films that featured a full Black cast and secured Dorothy Dandridge an Oscar nomination for Best Actress – the first ever for a Black woman in a leading role.

The 1960s witnessed a seminal shift in the portrayal of Black people in Hollywood cinema, away from stereotypical representations and towards more relatable and even admirable characters. Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for his role in Lillies of the Field (1963), and went on to star in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), which offered the first positive cinematic look at interracial marriage.

With the release of films like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1971) emerged Blaxploitation, an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film. In this chapter from The Cinema Book, Linda Ruth Williams contextualises the distinctive characteristics of Blaxploitation, tracing its origins and contending with its controversial generic conventions. While some hailed the genre as the first to incorporate Black Power ideology and permit Black actors to be the stars of their own narratives, others felt that it was merely a perpetuation of white stereotypes about Black people. Films such as Superfly (1972) and Mack (1973) were both criticised for representing Black men as criminals, gang-members, pimps, and drug dealers and for advancing exaggerated, hypermasculine depictions.

New Black Cinema since the 1980s

The start of the 1980s crystallised the New Black Cinema movement, which had had several separate beginnings in the late sixties. What gave this movement its particular and unifying character was its determined resistance to Hollywood’s formulaic film ideology. In this chapter of Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood, in which Stella Bruzzi discusses fatherhood in New Black Cinema, she characterises films from the movement as not merely rite-of-passage movies, but also social realist texts that engage overtly with contemporary social issues of Black masculinity.

Films such as John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) are credited as groundbreaking works for their ambition and diversity of genre and style. Dash, a prominent part of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, was the first Black woman to direct a feature-length film that was distributed nationwide. In this chapter from Women, Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, So Mayer discusses Dash’s 1975 short Four Women as expressing ‘the complex struggle to negotiate racist stereotypes; the necessity of code-switching within a racist culture; the imperative of internal decolonization; all while refusing to adhere to a European Enlightenment concept of the stable, unitary self.’

In 1985, Spike Lee began work on his first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It. With a budget of only $115,000, the entirety of the film was shot over twelve days. In this chapter from Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, Lee discusses the difficulties in securing funding for the film: ‘We had to put the money together nickel by nickel, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But I’m glad that it got made the way that it did.’ The film went on to gross $8 million at the U.S. box office and Lee was awarded the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.

In this chapter from 100 American Independent Films, Jason Wood highlights the significance of She’s Gotta Have It, not only to Lee’s oeuvre, but to Black filmmaking in general, while acknowledging feminist criticism of the film’s misogynistic overtones. Lee, whose Do the Right Thing three years later fully established the notion of a commercially viable Black cinema, helped create an environment in which other African American film-makers, including John Singleton, Leslie Harris, and Matty Rich, were able to find funding for their pictures. In this chapter from Studying American Independent Cinema, Rona Murray considers the politics and aesthetics of race in Lee’s cinema from Do the Right Thing of 1989 to his 2006 TV documentary series When the Levees Broke, in which Lee visited New Orleans in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

More than a century has passed since the release of The Birth of a Nation, during which time several generations of Black filmmakers have explored wide-ranging possibilities for authentic and nuanced representations of race on film. The modern era of Black cinema has seen directors such as Ava DuVernay, Radha Blank, Dee Rees, Barry Jenkins, and Jordan Peele tackle the complexities of representation, with both auteurist style and commercial appeal. Films such as Moonlight (2016) and Get Out (2017) have cemented both the cultural cache and financial viability of Black cinema. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) grossed over $1.3 billion globally, making him the first millennial Black director to have made a billion-dollar film. The success of the film eschews Hollywood’s long-held practice of keeping Black cinema deliberately underdeveloped, underfunded, and apart from mainstream distribution.

Histories of gay and lesbian representation

Gay and lesbian representation has been a feature of cinema ever since its inception, but before homosexuality was legalised in some countries, filmmakers found other ways to signal gay characters and queer desire. In this chapter on representations of gay men in early German and Swedish cinema, Shane Brown traces how directors including Dreyer and Stiller used sympathetic gay characters to argue against laws that criminalised homosexuality. In classical Hollywood cinema, forbidden sexualities were often implicit, and queer desire displaced into manifestations of the monstrous or the supernatural. In Patricia White’s study of Robert Wise’s 1963 horror classic The Haunting, she explores the representation of lesbian desire and its implications for the lesbian spectator. In more recent times, despite changing attitudes and liberalising legislation, homophobia and transphobia have continued to impact the lives of gay and trans people. This is powerfully shown in Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain and Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry of 1999, a fictionalisation of the short life of the trans man Brandon Lewis, discussed by Rona Murray in this chapter from Studying American Independent Cinema.

Documenting Queer Lives

Empowered by the arrival of cheaper and portable video cameras, filmmakers, often working within radical or experimental film networks, began from the early 1970s to document gay and lesbian lives and key moments in gay and lesbian history. In this chapter from A New History of Documentary Film, Betsy A. McClane describes a history of queer documentary from Word is Out: Some Stories of Our Lives (1977) by the Mariposa Film Collective to Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) about the gay San Francisco politician murdered by a homophobic colleague, and 1989’s Common Threads; Stories from the Quilt by Bill Couturié, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, about the AIDS crisis.

In the BFI Screen Guide 100 Documentary Films, Barry Keith Grant discusses two films of 1990 that portray Black and Latinx queer subcultures and sexualities. Grant explores Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied in this chapter, which celebrates Black gay culture at the same time as it acknowledges the impact of racism, homophobia and the AIDS crisis, and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning in this chapter which chronicles New York City’s performative ball subculture and the street life of its Black and Latinx gay male and transgender communities.

A New Queer Cinema

The 1990s saw the development of a new movement of gay and lesbian filmmakers, heralded by the film critic B. Ruby Rich as ‘the New Queer Cinema’. This article by Jackie Stacey in The Cinema Book explains that the ‘New Queer Cinema’ was defined by a deconstructive cinematic style, a fierce and vocal political protest and a focus on the dark ‘underbelly’ of sexual desire. Films such as She Must Be Seeing Things (Sheila McLaughlin, 1987) and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) examined questions of violence, jealousy, power imbalances, possessiveness and betrayal within gay and lesbian relationships. In this chapter from International Film Festivals, Ragan Rhyne examines the importance of lesbian and gay film festivals for the New Queer Cinema movement, providing a space for queer filmmakers to exhibit and gain wider distribution for their work, as well as an opportunity for gay and lesbian audiences to see consciously ‘queer’ movies.

Filmmakers in their own words

In this article from the film journal Projections, two leading lights of Queer cinema, the British director Derek Jarman and the American Gus Van Sant, discuss their movies including The Last of England, Edward II, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho in relation to gay sexuality and politics. In this interview with the film writer Geoffrey Macnab, Isaac Julien, another artist-filmmaker who came to prominence in the 1990s, describes how his filmmaking practice has been informed by his experience as a Black British gay artist.

Cinema’s undead

The figure of the vampire has haunted the history of cinema from its very early days. In his BFI Film Classic on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie der Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), Kevin Jackson invokes the links between cinema and vampirism: like vampires, cinema is peopled by the half living, actors reanimated by the magic of the projector, coming to life only in the darkness. Horror fiction provides a way for us to confront our deepest fears, or to address our collective mourning, trauma or anxiety about political, social or environmental upheaval. In this chapter from Nosferatu (1922): Eine Symphonie des Grauens, Kevin Jackson writes that the film expresses the traumatic aftermath of the First World War. In the words of the film’s producer and designer Albin Grau, Nosferatu was “unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men”, but it also expressed the aftershock of the terrifying Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more people than all the guns and bombs of the war. In this chapter on Let the Right One In (2008), Anne Billson explores the vampire’s cinematic meanings in relation to religion, sexuality and gender identities.

Vampires have long been associated with the crumbling ‘old world’ of the European aristocracy. But what happens when vampires come to America? In another cinematic analogy, some critics have likened the American vampire to the filmmakers and stars of early Hollywood, many of them émigrés from a Europe in turmoil. In this chapter from New Vampire Cinema, Ken Gelder discusses modern American vampire cinema, from Michael Almereyda’s New York vampire movie Nadja (1994) to the Tex Mex vampire trilogy John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998-2005).

Feminist and queer readings of the vampire have focused on vampire narratives as an expression of anxieties about sexuality and sexual desire. In the Introduction to Queer Horror Film and Television, Darren Elliott-Smith traces queer readings of the vampire from Nosferatu to the TV series American Horror Story (2011-present).

Global zombies

The zombie, the vampire’s undead cousin, has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade, which brought West African concepts of soul capture to Haiti, where the figure of the zombie developed in Haitian folklore, entering American consciousness as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Haiti from 1915-34. In this chapter from Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson traces changing manifestations and meanings of the zombie in Hollywood cinema, from White Zombie (1932) through to George A. Romero’s cult movie Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its four sequels. Zombies enjoyed a resurgence in popular culture at the turn of the millennium, and in her overview article 'Zombie Films Since 9/11', Sarah Lauro explores how recent movies such as the Korean film Last Train to Busan (2010) place their zombie origin stories in the excesses of global capitalism, such as environmental abuse and reckless scientific experimentation.

Making the horror movie

Horror can be an appealing genre for first-time filmmakers. It has an engaged fan community, and provides opportunities for filmmakers to create impactful movies on a low budget. Shot on a micro-budget by novice directors, both The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) were hugely successful in their own right, leading to a series of prequels, sequels and spin-offs. In this chapter from the book The Filmmaker’s Book of the Dead: A Mortal’s Guide to Making Horror Movies, Danny Draven takes aspiring filmmakers through a range of horror sub genres, from the supernatural thriller to the monster movie, with case studies of key movies and guides to further viewing. In this chapter from his book on The Blair Witch Project, Peter Turner traces the film’s script development, funding and production history as “an inspiring example of inventive independent filmmaking”. Tips and strategies for writing and, importantly, selling a script for a low-budget horror movie are provided by Marc Blake and Sara Bailey in this chapter from their book Writing the Horror Movie.

Screen Studies’ Filmmaking collection fills an important gap in the curriculum by bringing practical film experience to the forefront, marrying it with insightful theoretical understanding and bridging the gap between material on critical film studies and material focused only on film production.

Dip into the collection below to learn more about screenwriting, lighting, visual effects, distribution and film programming, which are just a few of the key areas of filmmaking covered in this collection.

The linked chapters are available to view throughout this Fall 2021 term.

This month we explore Orson Welles’ 1941 multi-faceted cinematic puzzle, Citizen Kane. The movie presents the life story of Kane, a media baron and politician based on the press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Described by Barry Keith Grant as a ‘cubist portrait’, Welles’ film follows the journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland), on a quest to discover the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “rosebud.” Thompson speaks to those who encountered Kane in his personal and professional life – his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore); his late banker and financial advisor, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris); his business manager, Bernstein (Everett Sloan); his boyhood friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), and Raymond, his butler (Paul Stewart).

Citizen Kane has inspired criticism and analysis from a range of perspectives, including Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the film from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint in her BFI book ‘Fetishism and Curiosity’. Mulvey situates the film in its historical context – it was released six months before Pearl Harbor, in an America split between isolationists such as Hearst, backed by his press empire, and ardent anti-fascists such as Welles, who was deeply engaged and influenced by European cultural forms such as German Expressionism. She goes on to consider how reading the film through a Freudian lens (despite Welles’ own claim that it represented mere ‘dollar-book Freud’) reveals a wealth of psychoanalytic reference and a narrative structure informed by psychoanalytic theory.

Read Fetishism and Curiosity: From Log Cabin to Xanadu: Psychoanalysis and History in Citizen Kane

The story of the Kane screenplay, co-credited to Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, is told in the Academy Award™-nominated movie Mank (2020), directed by David Fincher. In his chapter on Citizen Kane in ‘Constructing Dialogue’ Mark Axelrod takes a deep dive into the film’s opening sequences and shows how the screenplay sets up the QBA, or Question to be Answered – ‘what is “rosebud”?’.

Read Constructing Dialogue: Citizen Kane

The artistic triumph that Kane represents arose from the coming together of a group of expert creatives – not only the director, actors and screenwriter but editor Robert Wise and composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed not only the film’s non-diegetic music but also created an aria from a fictional opera, Salammbo, to be performed (disastrously) by Kane’s wife Susan Alexander, whom Kane encourages to pursue an operatic career far beyond her capabilities. Commenting on the scene, Herrmann wrote “Our problem was to create something that would give the audience the feeling of the quicksand into which this simple little girl, having a charming but small voice, is suddenly thrown.” In this chapter from his book ‘Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure’, David Schroeder explores the role opera plays in Citizen Kane, both to signal the pretensions of the high society to which Kane aspires to gain entry, but also to signal the tragic mismatch between Susan’s talents and the great stage onto which Kane’s ambitions have thrust her.

Read Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure: Deflated and Flat: Opera in Citizen Kane

A film such as Citizen Kane does not exist in isolation, and in their discussion of the film in their book ‘The Language of Film’ Robert Edgar, John Marland and Steven Rawle show how its meanings are imparted through the audience’s prior knowledge of other cinematic, literary and media texts and genres to which the film refers. They explore how Kane continues to resonate in contemporary culture, most recently in controversies around ‘Fake News’ and the power of the media in the run up to and aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election.

Read The Language of Film: Intertextuality

Screen Studies brings together a wealth of content addressing the many forms of filmmaking in national and regional cinema contexts as well as cinemas of migration and diaspora. In the introduction to her book World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, Lúcia Nagib addresses the term ‘world cinema,’ arguing that it should not be seen as the ‘other’ of ‘mainstream’ or Hollywood cinema, but when approached from “a positive, democratic and inclusive” perspective, as a diverse phenomenon with “peaks of creation in different places and periods.”