Shadow Filmmaking

Mark Reid writes, “From their very independent beginnings to the present, African-American filmmakers have treated similar black-oriented themes and social issues within popular genre forms. These filmmakers injected black cultural content into western, musical, family melodrama, detective, and gangster film genres.” In essence, Reid is describing a shadow Hollywood, one that is employing the basic entertainment structures of the mainstream industry for its own uses. Some would see this as an implicit suggestion that such endeavors must produce only inauthentic dark-hued parodies. Josh Gibson was known, in shorthand, as the “Black Babe Ruth.” The western, as we know it today, was created by first white writers and then white filmmakers. Westerns with black casts are not simply “westerns,” they are “black westerns.” The basic contours of the movie musical – which may very well have involved black-composed or black-inspired music - were still laid out by white filmmakers. And so musicals with all-black casts are not simply “musicals” but “black musicals.”

What I am trying to say is that Reid is describing a filmmaking tradition that is based as much on cultural and political reaction as creation. A mainstream – one that is not particularly welcoming of black talent – had been set down with a few basic norms. It is now the job of black filmmakers – historically unwelcomed in the mainstream - to set to work always with an eye upon that mainstream. When such a concept is carried forward to more recent films of the last 40 years, we are led to describe Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing as a reaction to mostly white urban studies, while describing Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, no matter how radical a break it appears, as working within a tradition of noir film.

I am a believer that genres are good things. They provide a formula, like a basic frame for a good filmmaker, like a good jazz musician, to improvise and play with. Reid’s writing suggests that for blacks, this mode of improvisation with such established norms, carries with it a stranger historical weight.