Redefining Black Film.

When asked about the recent studio interest in black films, black independent filmmaker Julie Dash responded:

We need films financed by Hollywood. We deserve them, and it[']s long overdue. Filmmaking is a business venture. It's not a charity; we have stories to be told, and studios have money to be made. (Wide Angle 13.3-4: 117)

Dash's comment indicates that black film criticism must now come to grips with the fact that some of the most promising black independents are ready to enter the big studios. Moreover, since the success of Spike Lee, many black independents no longer see their Hollywood affiliation as antithetical to the movement's earlier goal of making politically challenging films that are supported by the black community. The growing number of Hollywood movies by black independent filmmakers seems to demand a more nuanced black film commentary than that which was fostered by the blaxploitation era.

In Redefining Black Film Mark Reid attempts to meet this demand by elevating the critique of black Hollywood movies, including some by black independents, to the level of a critical theory of African American film. The book has seven chapters with discussions ranging from the early films of the Foster Photoplay Company to the more recent films of Spike Lee and John Singleton. Rather than provide an historical survey of black cinema, Reid instead analyzes a selection of films to support various aspects of his theory. In the first chapter, he examines feature-length movies about black people within three fundamental categories - comedy, family, and action - in order to create a conceptual frame for his historical view of black filmmaking. In subsequent chapters he analyzes films representing blackface, hybrid, and satiric hybrid variants of each category. The main thrust of Reid's theory is twofold: He aims to advocate Alice Walker's black womanist perspective while embracing a quasi-essentialist notion of black independent cinema.

Although there is a lot to be said in favor of a book that argues for a theory of black cinema, Reid's theory suffers from underdevelopment in several crucial respects. He presents the main tenets of his theory in the last four paragraphs of a chapter on comedy (Chapter 2), rendering his conception of African American cinema primarily in terms of minstrelsy. The organization of the book suggests that he wanted this conception to contrast sharply with the non-comedic paradigm of (diaspora) black independent film he advocates in Chapter 6. According to Reid the African American film image has amounted to nothing more than "comedy subtypes" and "their facsimiles in other genres" (43). Because, for Reid, the legacy of minstrelsy is a defining element of African American cinema, his distinction between studio-financed, produced, or distributed films and those that were independent from this kind of white control is the cornerstone of his revisionism. With such a heavy emphasis on the influence of minstrelsy, however, more needs to be said about the relevant discontinuities between African American and other black filmmaking, given that there has been less of a minstrel influence outside of the American context.

Reid uses the term black interchangeably with the term African American, as though there are no significant differences between filmmaking in Africa, America, Australia, Europe, and the Caribbean. This conflation of terms is not a problem in the case of comedy, since Reid only discusses American films about black people. The difficulty arises when he presents his paradigm of black independent cinema in Chapter 6. Reid's focus rapidly shifts from giving a quite critical assessment of Spike Lee (Chapter 5) to heaping uncritical praise on diaspora filmmakers from England, Australia, Cuba, and Africa. It makes no sense, however, to speak of black "independent" filmmakers in these countries in quite the same way as it does in the United States. While interesting in its own right, Reid's pan-African view of black cinema rests on a rather tenuous comparison which simply cannot account for the particular circumstances of black filmmaking practices in America. Although there is some sense in which African American independent films are rightfully situated among other black diaspora films, Reid evades discussing the quite different political and economic influences on black filmmaking practices in countries such as Cuba and Britain.

The most interesting aspect of Reid's theory is his account of audience reception. Following Bakhtin, Reid offers an analysis of black film in terms of a dialogical relation between readers and texts. He argues that audiences are not passive, inert receptacles absorbing monologic meanings from a screen, but instead engage in dialogue with a film. By reference to their own cultural frame audiences continually reinterpret what is depicted on the screen in ways different from the intended meanings. Reid uses this idea, for instance, to explain how blacks could laugh along with whites at Amos 'n' Andy. With blacks as the ridiculed objects, this kind of blackface minstrelsy requires a racist audience positioning. Reid acknowledges that, if blacks saw humor in Amos 'n' Andy, then apparently they laughed for a different reason than did whites. According to Reid, "When a comedy film objectifies blacks, it produces both pleasure and pain for both racial groups[,] but such feelings are not of the same quality and, therefore, must be differentiated" (25).

Reid does not mean, however, that black audiences resisted while white audiences assimilated the racism in Amos 'n' Andy. He first tells us that, "in the production and reception of minstrel and hybrid minstrel comedies, whites can produce racial myths, believe myths that support their imagined racial superiority, or feel maligned by the production of these myths and create an oppositional form of reception." He then goes on to point out that blacks are "permitted only the last two of these choices, both of which require black spectators to use oppositional strategies of reception" (25). These remarks suggest that Reid thinks both black and white spectators can resist a racist film discourse; consequently, resistance cannot be what distinguishes black and white audience reactions to Amos 'n' Andy.

Difficulties of this sort stem from Reid's tendency to vacillate on the issue of whether or not black cinema is intended for a black audience. He concedes that studio action films were made for a black audience, but when discussing black womanist filmmaking his view seems to shift:

The recognition and shared productivity of the postNegritude project result from the active participation of an "interested" audience that decodes the black subject by using discourses that surround and construct representations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation. An "interested" audience scrutinizes the incorporation of these images (and how they reflect individuals and the community). Through this shared postNegritude recognition, black audiences will question their own (and, by implication, others') interpretations. (113)

Reid moves very quickly from talk about an "interested" audience to talk about a black audience without making clear how the two are related. For instance, does the "interested" audience have the "shared postNegritude recognition" Reid attributes to black audiences? Moreover, Reid's attribution of this ideological orientation to black audiences seems wholly prescriptive, for he seems inclined not to appreciate the empirical nature of the question of whether black moviegoers have it or not.

Most of Reid's comments regarding audience reception are couched hypothetically. He speaks of audience reactions to black womanist films by claiming that "black womanist films that depict nonsexist men may threaten the psychologic desires of certain feminists - for example, separatists who deplore any feminism that includes men" and that "certain pan-Africans. . . might view black feminism as a threat to black communal solidarity . . ." (115). These remarks nonetheless suggest that Reid would be willing to concede that black womanist films, in fact, have not been well-received by black audiences. He points out that a black womanist film may provoke any of several modes of reception, including resistance. This implies that audience reception in the case of a black womanist film permits oppositional readings.

In his discussion of Spike Lee's films, however, Reid speaks as if such audience interpretations are not possible. He cannot be taken seriously if he means that Sharon Larkin's A Different Image is more polyphonic than Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, for he allows that even the grossly exploitative studio action films were polyphonic. Reid claims that "spectatorship is a physical phenomenon," yet he fails to notice that, despite his high appraisal, there is not much of a black audience for the black womanist films he cites. Empirical inquiry might even reveal that the "myopic" representations he attributes to Spike Lee are being assimilated by large black audiences, while Sharon Larkin's pan-African womanist representations are completely unknown to them. Reid aims to incorporate audience reception as a defining element of black cinema, but ends up giving us a top-down view that prescribes, more than it describes, the reactions of black audiences.

With regard to racial politics, the logic of Reid's analysis is sometimes elusive. His insistence that a film about black people must be controlled from writing to distribution by black people in order to count as black independent cinema does not jibe with his claim that the theory he is "proposing assumes an interracial audience" (42). To allow an interracial audience at the reception end of the filmmaking process is inconsistent with disallowing interracial participation at the production/distribution end. In the case of the Poster Photoplay Company, he admits that whites were involved in production, but maintains that the use of an interracial film crew does not matter in this case since whites were not in control.

What he means by control, however, is far from clear. Some of his remarks indicate different criteria. For example, he tells us that, according to his definition, ". . . the Micheaux films produced after his company's 1929 re-incorporation cannot be considered black independent films, . . . because black independent films must be produced by black-controlled film production companies" (17). Later he stipulates that,

although Sweetback was independently produced by a black, I do not consider it a black independent film. It was distributed by Jerry Gross's Cinemation Industries, a mini-major distribution company and the parent company of Cinecom Theatres. . . . Van Peebles intensified the eroticism of his film in order to make it appeal to Cinemation. (82)

These remarks imply that, for Reid, a black independent filmmaker loses control whenever his or her film is either co-financed, co-produced, or distributed by a studio.

To see that Reid's notion of control does not exhaust all of the variables affecting the outcome of a film, suppose that a black independent filmmaker, such as Julie Dash, were to gain enough control over a studio-financed project to make exactly the film she would have made as an independent. In his appraisal of Spike Lee's films, Reid seems to respond to this suggestion with the following claim, "I argue against the assumption that a black director, even with final-cut privileges, can guarantee a re-vision of the filmic image of black womanhood in particular and the black experience in general" (93). But since this absence of a guarantee applies to independent films as well, Reid has given no reason to prefer them over studio films by black directors with final-cut privileges. In fact some studio-financed films by black directors with final-cut privileges have done better at fulfilling Reid's womanist notion of a revised image (e.g., Bill Duke's Deep Cover) than somes non-Hollywood films under black control (e.g., Tony Brown's White Girl).

Reid's highly selective overview permits him to ignore a significant aspect of the history of black filmmaking which does not fit his theory. His worry about revising the black film image displays an aesthetic concern with the consequences of white control. But his contention that studio-affiliated black filmmakers have always produced "tendentious" (minstrel) images is not historically well-grounded. He condemns a priori any film touched by Hollywood hands as aesthetically defective. From the standpoint of historical practice, however, there simply is no aesthetic divide between independent and studio-affiliated films. Black independents and studio-affiliated black filmmakers have operated under similar political constraints. Reid touts the fact that independents have relied mainly on foundation grants and contracts with television stations in Europe as an alternative to studio backing. But such praise is misguided. Corporate donors and white philanthropists control the distribution outlets for black independent films as much as corporate Hollywood controls its theater chains.

Indeed, the market for black films is divided along class lines. Black independent films tend to circulate only in academic/museum/film festival circles, whereas studio-affiliated films are generally slated for a mass audience. Since in both cases there is financial backing by whites for films about black people that were made for a largely white audience (albeit different segments), Reid needs to tell us why black independent filmmakers have any reason to avoid having their films distributed by a studio. Instead, Reid tells us that, "since governmental agencies wanted to ameliorate the socioeconomic causes of urban uprisings and educate the American public, they preferred to finance and distribute social documentaries rather than experimentation and fiction films" (127). As is evident in the case of the recent uproar at PBS over Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, corporate financing and final approval by granting agencies can influence the making of black independent films in a fashion similar to the influence exerted by Hollywood studios.

Black independent filmmakers often have done whatever it takes to make their films. Reid's statement that "there are some black filmmakers who resist the calls of fame and increased production budgets" tends to portray the black independent's plight of having to make a film on a non-existent budget as a noble act of artistic autonomy (125). He misses the point of Oscar Micheaux's crafty business deals to stay afloat. Two of America's finest black independent films, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger, were both studio-distributed and shown on PBS. Along with these noncommercial films, Reid would oppose counting films such as Spencer Williams's Blood of Jesus, Bill Gunn's Ganga and Hess, and Ivan Dixon's The Spook Who Sat by the Door as black independent cinema because of the filmmaker's studio affiliation in each case. But this leaves us to wonder how his stipulation requiring such a rigid separation from Hollywood could be a defining element of black independent cinema when it clearly goes against the grain of what African American filmmakers do to survive. His theory allows him to position films that satisfy his notion of black independent cinema as the true black cinema because of their filmmakers' oppositional strategy of eschewing studio affiliation, a view which does not leave room for other more subversive strategies by filmmakers who have opted to work in Hollywood studios. It is unfortunate that Reid's account excludes their story, for they have produced many of the classic black audience films.