Race, Slavery, History, and the Movies

100 Years since The Birth of a Nation

As we have explored in Text Messaging, the history of American movies is closely tied to the long, complicated, and violent history of race and slavery in the United States, nowhere more so than in the case of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a screen experience that presented itself as a visual history lesson about the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan. Yet while two of the most popular and famous movies in American cinema history—The Birth of a Nation and 1939’s Gone With the Wind—are both set in the American South during and immediately after the Civil War, it remains striking how comparatively few mainstream Hollywood movies have dealt with American slavery and its aftermath. The controversy that has surrounded The Birth of a Nation since its premiere in 1915 is clearly one reason for this reluctance. By dramatically enacting brutal racial stereotypes and prejudices against African Americans, The Birth of a Nation acted as a justification of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination, dividing audiences between those who found the experience of the movie exciting and heroic and those who were repelled by the film’s racism. To this day, whether to exhibit and teach about The Birth of a Nation remains a fraught question, the subject of a Case Study in Chapter 2.

In the years immediately leading up to the hundredth anniversary of Griffith’s landmark (for better or worse) movie, however, mainstream Hollywood productions such as The Help (Tate Taylor 2011), The Butler (Lee Daniels 2013) and smaller independent films such as Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler 2013) have addressed the legacy of American racism with varying degrees of directness and engagement. More significantly, two major movies by established auteur directors—one British, one American—have dealt directly with American slavery, creating screen experiences meant to engage viewers with the violence, terror, and heroic resistance that defined the enslavement of millions of African Americans.

The two movies differ considerably, however, in the approaches they take. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) combines elements of the Italian “spaghetti Western,” Blaxploitation cinema, and even German opera to tell a mythic story about the efforts of the title character to rescue his enslaved wife and gain revenge against slave owners. The British director Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013), on the other hand, is based on the 1853 slave narrative by Solomon Northup, a free black American who was kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years before regaining his freedom. McQueen’s movie, no less carefully crafted and designed than Tarantino’s, nevertheless presents itself as more historically grounded than mythic, and many positive reviews of the movie stressed what the critics experienced as the “accuracy” of McQueen’s depiction. Both movies were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, with Twelve Years a Slave winning in 2013, and McQueen became the first black director to win the Best Director Academy Award.

For this Case Study, use these two recent movies to explore the question of what has changed in how American movies approach questions of race, slavery, and history since the appearance of The Birth of a Nation a century ago. Begin by watching or rewatching all three movies and making notes and observations about your experience of watching them in conjunction with one another. Then expand your research by reading reviews of both Django Unchained and Twelve Years a Slave and sampling the variety of commentary both movies created. Some questions you might consider:

• What is the relationship between the seriousness of the subject matter and the social function of movies as “entertainment”? As noted above, Griffith designed his movie to create a powerful emotional experience but also saw his work as part of the “uplift” movement in early cinema, an effort at presenting the screen experience of the movies as educational and informative. How are commentators and critics today weighing the balance between entertainment and enlightenment in relation to both Django Unchained and Twelve Years a Slave? Does Tarantino’s use of popular action genres, for example, trivialize the gravity of the slavery experience, or does it entice viewers from a variety of backgrounds to identify emotionally with a strong African American hero? Does Twelve Years a Slave represent a bold, historically grounded and therefore realistic experience of slavery, or does the beauty of the cinematography and of the actors distract from its political impact?
• How have writers discussed the cultural politics of who directed these two movies? Quentin Tarantino, a white American director, has long featured African American characters and actors in his movies, but not without criticism, most notably from fellow director Spike Lee. McQueen is an African British director, and while he is telling an “American” story, his own Guyanese ancestry points to the fact that the Atlantic slave trade was a global system, involving both the colonies that eventually became the United States but also British and other European colonies in the Caribbean as well as Central and South America. Both directors used international casts in their movies, the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz in Django, the Kenyan actor Lupita Nyong’o and the British actor of Nigerian ancestry Chiwetel Ejiofor in Twelve Years a Slave. How has the ethnic and racial complexity of both productions affected their reception, both within the United States and around the world?
• In what ways can we experience both movies as responses to The Birth of a Nation? Griffith’s movie is an undeniable part of American movie history, and all subsequent movies dealing with the Civil War, with slavery, with the post-Civil War Jim Crow era, with the depiction of race in the United States, all in some way have to negotiate the complex legacy of The Birth of a Nation. How has your study of American cinema history in general, and The Birth of a Nation in particular, affected your critical reaction to both movies? How has it affected your understanding of the motives and purposes behind these movies?

Screen Ages in the Twenty-First Century

Convergence Culture, Transmedia, and the Meaning of a “Movie”

The Avengers (Joss Whedon 2012), Iron Man (Jon Favreau 2008), Iron Man 2 (Favreau 2010) and 3 (Shane Black 2013), Thor (Kenneth Branagh 2011) and Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor 2013), Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston 2011) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony and Joe Russo 2014), The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier 2008), Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn 2014). We’ve discussed this series of movies based on Marvel comics as examples of the contemporary genre of the comic book movie, as part of the trend toward franchise movies, and as part of the media strategy of cross-marketing and synergy, linking movies with action figures, video games, websites, and other ancillary materials. Of course, franchise movies and endless sequels are nothing new when it comes to the entertainment industry’s desire to provide foolproof screen experiences sure to generate big ticket sales. But from another angle, this series of interconnected movies raises some questions related to the idea of a “movie” as a single screen event. It’s even hard to say which one of these movies is the “original” or most important movie, the way we might point to the first Star Wars (George Lucas 1977) as the beginning of that global franchise.

In his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, the media scholar Henry Jenkins coined the term “transmedia” to describe cultural productions such as the constellation of Marvel comics movies often referred to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unlike much “old media,” transmedia text span multiple formats and screen experiences, from movie screens to video games to computers and televisions. Rather than experiencing any one movie (or video game or television episode) as a self-contained unit, audiences participate in the creation of a much larger story universe. For Jenkins, creation is the key word here, as fans take an active part in the construction and maintenance of this universe, building off details in these different screen experiences to contribute to this universe through fan fiction, mash-ups, fan sites, cosplay, blogging, and other forms of digital interactivity.

From such a critical perspective, the movies are not an “adaptation” of the “original” comic books and graphic novels; both the movies and the comics all contribute to the experience of this larger universe (or even multiverse, as the comics feature multiple versions and universes for their most popular franchise characters). When the network television series Marvel’s Agents of Shield debuted in 2013, it too was not meant as merely derived from or ancillary to the movies; the individual stories told in that series are all a part of the same transmedia text.

Jenkins’s idea of transmedia texts as defining our contemporary media experience in the digital age brings us back to the questions we raised earlier, questions that suggest the need to explore new frameworks and critical methods for studying American movie history and our experience of the movies. For this case study, apply this idea of a transmedia text to a movie franchise of your choosing, whether contemporary or from earlier in American movie history, including the related video games, websites, fan fiction sites, and other examples of the transmedia universe related to the franchise you are analyzing. You can find a good introduction to the idea of transmedia texts, “Transmedia 101,” at Jenkins’s own blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Among the questions you should consider:

• How does a transmedia approach change the way we think of an individual movie? Traditionally, and throughout Screen Ages for the most part, a “movie” refers to a single screen experience of one to three hours or so, designated by a single title and occurring in a single year. The transmedia story universe, on the other hand, suggests that these individual titles are just parts of a larger whole. Movie reviewers, for example, have struggled with reviewing a movie such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Is it necessary to review the movie in the larger context of how it contributes to the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe? Or can it be reviewed as a stand-alone experience from the perspective of a viewer who has possibly never even heard of Marvel comics or the Avengers (if any such viewers actually exist). As Jenkins points out in “Transmedia 101,” the movie’s creators wrestle with this same challenge in terms of whether viewers can be expected to know information only available from previous movies or other transmedia texts.
• How does a transmedia approach change the way we think of the movies as a separate medium? Look at most college curricula, or the contents listings of most traditional newspapers, and you will see the arts broken down into separate mediums: literature, theater, cinema, television, dance, music. At most colleges, each of these mediums is the province of a completely separate academic department. But the idea of the transmedia universe blurs the lines between these media as part of what Jenkins calls “convergence culture.” These separate media don’t disappear, and they still refer to different kinds of screen experiences, but they also interconnect in ways that may make the study of “American movies” less useful, perhaps, than a study of “transmedia storytelling.” How might these different approaches change the way we think about different movie franchises?
• Finally, how might a transmedia approach change the way you think about your own experience of “the movies”? Compare the way, for example, you respond to watching a movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which includes the X-Men series as well) to watching a more “self-contained” movie such as The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson 2014). Or is any movie really “self-contained”? As we discussed in Screen Ages, directors like Anderson and Tarantino highlight the ways their movies participate in what we might call the larger “Universe of Cinema,” drawing on the entire history of moviemaking, quoting scenes and styles from dozens of other movies, and existing as part of our larger cultural experience.

Screen Ages Today

Movies and books about movies may end, but movie history never stops. As we explored in Screen Ages, evolution and change have always defined the history of those myriad screen experiences we group under the term “movies,” and that dynamism has never been more true than the first decades of the twenty-first century. The explosive development of digital image technologies, the continued expansion and incorporation of web and cloud-based communication into our daily lives, the increasingly globalized economy and world culture, along with the sheer proliferation of screens and screen experiences, make the idea of a final chapter or last word on American cinema history seem faintly ridiculous.

Chapter 9: Screen Ages Today will serve as an ongoing, online and open-ended “final” chapter to our textbook. As you study the history of American movies, whether during your cinema studies course or after the term has ended, you will find a continuously updated collection of Case Studies focused on ongoing developments in American movie culture and how these shape our own screen experiences. These Case Studies will connect to issues, trends, and ideas we have considering throughout Screen Ages and will also provide an opportunity for you to respond with your own ideas and research. All of us are engaged in the process of writing history every day, whether formally as part of a blog or personal journal or more informally as we discuss and recount with each other what’s happening in our lives and in the world around us. Chapter 9: Screen Ages Today will provoke thought, dialogue, and debate about the current state of American movies, and it will allow you to participate in the updating and revision of Screen Ages itself.