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"The Two-Way Mirror: African American Films and the Transition to Sound"
At this year's Wexner Center Lecture, English Department professor Ryan Friedman Friedman presented a chapter from his forthcoming book on 1920s and 30s African American cinema. Friedman's use of the mirror metaphor comes from white film critics and historians' concept of the movie screen as a "mirror screen" reflecting back to the viewer their imagined, utopian version of reality, predicated on early 20th century America's unequal relations of race and class.
Both in the period Friedman studies and today, American film critics have used the mirror screen idea to connect cinema to the way Americans imagine the nation. Contemporary film scholars have used the idea that what Americans (understood as white Americans with less-than-progressive views on race) see in movies can affect their expectations for the real world to explain how movies depicting black presidents-like Deep Impact, where African American actor Morgan Freeman plays the president-helped open Americans' minds to the idea of a black president, paving the way for Barack Obama's election.
As Friedman points out-citing African American journalists, actors, and politicians from the period-the African American public also endorsed this view of cinema as a mirror screen of the nation in the 1920s and 30s. They used this idea to argue that the appearance of all-black cast musical films, like 1929's Hallelujah and Hearts in Dixie and the genre known as "Negro talking pictures" marked an important step forward for African Americans, demonstrating their recognition and greater acceptance in the mainstream U.S. society through African Americans' representation in the film industry. By appearing in films, African Americans were now, these writers and speakers argued, accepted parts of the nationally imagined community, representing considerable racial progress. Furthermore, the fact that African Americans were now seen as "viable" candidates for cinematic representation invited the black community to imagine a better future with more opportunities to which they could aspire alongside their white castmates.
However, Friedman argues against the idea that film functions as an improving mirror screen for the nation or that African Americans appearing under any circumstances in movies during this period necessarily represented racial progress. Through an analysis of the 1933 film The Emperor Jones, Friedman suggests that the way African Americans were portrayed movies did not encourage an imagination of racial uplift. Instead, Friedman suggests that the social circumstances and visual representation techniques used for black characters in films were regressive, that is, at least as racist as the actual conditions African Americans faced in real life. Therefore, Friedman argues, the actual content of the films seriously challenges the rhetoric of racial progress espoused by the politicians and actors Friedman cites.
Specifically, the racist, essentialist associations these cinematic representations make between African Americans and primitivism actually rationalized, thereby encouraging, the exclusion of African Americans from social advancement based on their "natural" insuitability for positions of power. Furthermore, Friedman posits that representing African Americans' inferior social position as a natural condition rather than the effect of deliberate discrimination excuses white complicity in racism against African Americans.
However, to develop his concept of film as a two-way mirror, Friedman suggests that although the movies' content and representational strategies were overtly racist, some of the cinematic techniques they used serve to undermine this racism. In The Emperor Jones, for example, Friedman shows how the transitions that occur between some scenes emphasize the social conflicts that the rest of the film belies. Specifically, Friedman calls attention to the way the film uses transitions between scenes that draw attention to the African American labor that supports the American economy as well as pointing out the exploitative nature of this labor. Friedman argues that this counterargument, located in small, technical features of these films, complicates, the idea that film simplistically mirrors real-life conditions and possibilities, either negative or positive, allowing the film to make two competing statements simultaneously. Hence, his two-way mirror metaphor.
Look for Friedman's forthcoming book, tentatively titled Negro Talking Pictures: African American Migration and Musical Performance in Early American Sound Film, for more on the mirror screen concept and the representation of African Americans in early sound films.
