Long before Denzel Washington or Spike Lee, generations of pioneering and innovative black directors shaped American cinema and sought to challenge stereotypes, as an exhibit opens at the Oscars museum in Los Angeles on Sunday.
“Regeneration: Film Noir 1898-1971” reviews key moments in the little-known history of American film noir and, in particular, the hundreds of independent feature films made up to the 1960s with African-American actors for an African audience. -Americans, called “racial cinemas”, when racial segregation was still in force in cinemas.
“Creators, Producers, Pioneers and Viewers”
Highlighting works largely ignored by major Hollywood studios and audiences at the time, the exhibit opens with a recently rediscovered reel from 1898 showing two black vaudeville actors embracing.
“Are you ready to hear this secret? That black people have always been present in American cinema, from the very beginning,” director Ava DuVernay told a news conference.
“Present not as caricatures or stereotypes but as creators, producers, pioneers and enthusiastic spectators”, he adds. “We should have shown this much sooner.”
“Regeneration” is the second major temporary exhibition at the Oscar-winning museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has come under heavy criticism in recent years for its lack of diversity.
Restored images and historical objects
Among the exhibitions are mixed: the Oscar for Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win the prestigious statuette for best actor in 1964 for lily of the fieldthe tap dances of the dance duo Nicholas Brothers or even a costume worn by Sammy Davis Jr in the movie Porgy and Bess.
“I was surprised because I was unaware of the existence of these feature films before starting preparation” for this retrospective in 2016 and exploring the Academy’s archives, the exhibition’s curator, Doris Berger, explains to AFP.
“I asked myself: Why don’t we know about this? We should know!” he continues. “These are really exciting movies and proof that African-American performers had all kinds of roles and there were a lot of different stories.”
Audiences can now view the carefully restored images of such works as the western musical harlem on the prairiehorror comedy Mr Washington goes to town or the gangster feature film dark manhattan.
forever lost movies
But many “racing movies” for which only promotional posters remain have been lost forever. When Hollywood offered black actors of the time supporting roles such as “butlers and +mamas+ (black nanny, often slave, to wealthy white American families, editor’s note),” this type of independent cinema offered them roles as “lawyers, doctors, nurses and cowboys,” says Doris Berger.
“It’s proof (that Hollywood) could have been so much more diverse and exciting,” he adds.
The end of the exhibition focuses on the rise of “blaxploitation”, a genre of the 1970s that brought African-American actors to the fore, launched by black director Melvin Van Peebles, who died a few months before the coup. “Regeneration”, as Sidney Poitier.
Late but essential tribute
The exhibit is part of an effort by the Academy to respond to criticism of its lack of representativeness, epitomized by the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, which in 2015 pointed to the lack of black performers in Oscar nominations.
Since then, the institution has doubled the number of women and people from ethnic minorities among its members. Beyond informing the general public about “race movies,” “Regeneration” also has the credit of challenging certain black American directors.
“If I had known, about the actresses and all that, I would have had a completely different vision and approach to cinema,” says director Charles Burnett.
“This job had to be done. Long ago. It is an important and essential job”, Ana DuVernay abounds. “This exhibition highlights the generations of Black artists whose footsteps we follow.”
Source: BFM TV
