Black Power and Black Cinema Essay

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Black Power Movement and Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s: A Discussion of Overlap

As many scholars agree, all art is a product of its time. The social tensions, trends, patterns of thought and political issues of an era can’t help but influence the art that is created and consumed. This is particularly true with cinema and all forms of media arts. This paper will examine how the Black Power movement influenced cinema (and at times was influenced by cinema) in three distinct films of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Defiant Ones

“The Defiant Ones” (1958) directed by Stanley Kramer was a film that succeeded and failed in making meaningful commentary on race and race relations. It was perhaps its failings that helped provoke the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s most acutely. The movie is a “buddy film” a genre of cinema that details a story around an immediate or eventual friendship. In the film, the lead actors Sidney Poitier (Noah Cullen) and Tony Curtis (John “Joker” Jackson) play prisoners who escape their work truck when it turns over. Chained wrist to wrist they have to get ahead of the police force and search hounds as they hide in a the swamps and forests of the surrounding area. The two are eventually caught and face death though receive a last minute reprieve. “Their bound-together plight—blacklisted radical writer Nedrick Young won an Academy Award he could not collect, having co-written under a pseudonym—eventually produced solidarity and something like love” (Roediger, 2018). The film was also celebrated at the time as being a strong box office draw and able to attract both black and white ticket holders.

The film is very polarizing, though it shouldn’t be. It should be celebrated for its successes and still explored for its deplorable failures. Both the successes and failures of the film had an influence in helping to spark the Black Power movement that eventually followed. It’s important to place the film in a particular time that it was created. A film of 1958 it was just a few years after the Montgomery bus boycotts, in the prime of the Civil Rights movement. Many film critics argue that this film was able to pave the way for other more three-dimensional examinations of ethnic relations in the American experience. Nominated for nine Oscars, the reception was largely warm, as the work received nods for being avant-garde and well executed.

However, as James Baldwin notably illuminates in his essay “The Devil Finds Work” the problems of the film are invasive and originate at its core. As a buddy film, it is unable to accurately capture the real relationship between the two races. This is because it represents a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white (Baldwin, 524). Baldwin acknowledges that there is hatred between black and white that is portrayed in the film, but it’s misrepresented via a lack of understanding. When it comes to this resentment between the races, “…the hatred is not equal on both sides for it does not have the same roots. This is perhaps, a very subtle argument, but black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children’s way” (Baldwin, 525). Baldwin here is able to expressly pinpoint the problem of the film: it was written by a white screenwriter who had a generally myopic view of race relations. Nedrick Young, the screenwriter, clearly didn’t possess enough self-awareness about the white man’s fear of black men. Likewise, there’s a lack of understanding of what an average white man symbolizes to an average black man: an obstacle. A force that needs to be removed from the path as it blocks the way forward.

Another massive issue with the film, is that Poitier and Curtis are not equal matches. Poitier has a grace and a class onscreen that Curtis doesn’t come close to, and this creates a lack of believability that they would ever be friends. This is problematic and undermines the integrity of the whole film. One even wonders if this issue served to infuriate the black community who received the film and motivate the black power movement. After all, the inaccurate portrayal of the proverbial mountain between them alienates black members of society, making them feel misunderstood and misrepresented.

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As Baldwin illuminates, in such circumstances as two men being chained together, “No black man, in such a situation, and especially knowing what Poitier conveys so vividly Noah Cullen knows, would rise to the bait proffered by this dimwitted poor white child, whose only real complaint is that he is a bona-fide mediocrity who failed to make it in the American rat-race. But many, no better than he, and many much worse, make it every day, all the way to Washington: sometimes, indeed, via Hollywood. It is a species of cowardice, grave indeed to pretend that black men do not know this” (525). The failings of Curtis’s character were meant to seem relatable, making him more of an every man. However, to black audiences he just seems like someone unable to make use of the opportunities given to every white man upon birth. There’s very little portrayal of the enormous obstacles constantly affronted Poitier’s character in comparison. Curtis’s malaise with life and the “rat race” makes him seem spoiled and far beneath his Cullen.

This issue undermines the entire “friendship” presented. Poitier delivers a performance of unshakeable excellence and extreme truthfulness, but as Baldwin points out, the entire friendship seems like a lie (525). That Poitier would play along with this imbalanced “friendship” and forge a partnership with someone so beneath him perhaps helped to initiate the fury and impatience that was at the heart of the black power movement. Many black audiences saw The Defiant Ones as yet another film that didn’t understand the black experience in the world and among white, and was going to clumsily represent it in whatever way suited them—regardless of how untruthful. “Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. The Harlem audience was outraged, and yelled, Get back on the train, you fool!” (525). This is an example of the highly contrived ending that so many audiences had problems with. It demonstrates that at the heart of the film was nothing more than a series of “well-meaning politics” that didn’t portray with accuracy the realities of the era. Cullen is so forgiving that he offers absolution in a manner that Curtis’s character doesn’t necessarily deserve or hasn’t earned. The ending creates a clear springboard for the black power movement to come to life from because the black male lead is expected to forgo what’s best for his own interest for the sake of his friendship with the white guy. It’s an unrealistic and insensitive idea to suggest to audiences of any race. Here it is almost suggested that there’s almost a sense of service inherent, and that the black man feels obligated to help the white man, at the expense of his own needs and goals. This creates a sense of an overall slipshod ending marked by a sense of overall unevenness. What’s so problematic is that there’s a lack of a real resolution and these characters seem less like complex people, and more like caricatures of someone who wants to whitewash race relations in America.

Hence, it’s no wonder that a film that received such acclaim, could do its part in helping to spark the Black Power movement in America. The film’s inaccuracies in portraying the black experience and the film’s denial in acknowledging fear of white people towards blacks, created something that was frustrating and ultimately insincere. The frustrations created helped to do their part in creating a section of American society that was dissatisfied by the status quo.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

A similar film that sparked perhaps even more controversy during the heart of the black power movement was the famous Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967) directed by Stanley Kramer and starring, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracey, and Sidney Poitier. One thing about the film can be agreed upon, it definitely provokes strong reactions and opinions: “the film was a mannered Hollywood take on an incendiary topic. Some critics found it bland and patronizing, but it was a commercial hit that epitomized mainstream Hollywood's liberal leanings at a time” (Fleishman, 2017). While the film does nothing to really capture….....

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