Racism in the Cinama: Proposal for a Methodological
Investigation

LOUISE SPENCE AND ROBERT STAM

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF 

PAT KEETON
CHARLES MUSSER
RICHARD PORTON
SUSAN RYAN
ELLA SHOCHAT
ED SIMMONS

The following methodological model for dealing with questions of
racism and colonialism grew out of the discussions of a study
group on racism attended by interested graduate students from the
Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.  Our goal was
to understand the processes of racism as they operate not only
within individual film texts, but also within the institutions that
generate and distribute these texts as well as the audience which
receives them.  Our model, intended as suggestive rather than
definitive, proposes a series of questions that might be addressed
to specific films and to their processes of production.  We have
arranged these questions under specific rubrics - the industry,
the processes of production, distribution, reception - but we recog-
nize that these categories are not discrete but inter-articulated,
mutually reflecting and inflecting one another.  While recognizing
the importance of textual questions  ( a subject that merits a separate
essay), we have chosen here to emphasize the contextual, the social
institutions and production practices which construct the filmic
image of oppression, of injustice, and at times, of liberation.

Any serious discussion of racism in the cinema calls for a prior
definition of the term.  What exactly is racism?  One of the clearest
and most comprehensive definitions was proposed by Albert Memmi.
Racism, according to Memmi, is the "generalized and final assigning
of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser's bene-
fit and at his victim's expense, in Order to justify the former's
own privilege or aggression."1  Memmi's definition avoids the twin
traps of psychologism and sociologism common to what might be called
the 'Harris Poll' approach to racism: the assumption that racism
has exclusively to do with the internal harbouring of negative
opinions or hostile feelings toward another group.  Rather than
fetishize the individual and subjective, Memmi's definition calls
attention to the power situation of which racism is a part, that
it is not a mere mental attitude but rather a rationale for con-
crete oppression.  Although we have focused on anti-black racism
in this essay, the model hopefully applies to analogous oppressions -
including classism, sexism, colonialism and anti-semitism.

CH.ltlc.al KKU  Vol 2 No 4 

6

The first set of questions to be addressed concerns the structural
mechanisms of the film industry itself.  Here we are dealing with
the questions of access, control and market that have been asked
by minority, oppositional, and Third World film workers over and
over again.  In South Africa, Harriet Gavshon points out, films
intended for black audiences are financed, scripted, shot and
censored by whites.  In Brazil, blacks have had a minimal role in
the scripting, directing and producing of films that, as often as
not, concern them.  In the United States, despite the National
Association for the Advancement of•Coloured People's 1942 compact
with the Hollywood studios to integrate blacks into the ranks of
studio technicians, very few have become directors, scriptwriters
or cinematographers.  It was recently estimated that minority
directors  ( i.e. all naclal minorities) constituted less than 3% of
the membership of the almost 4 000-member Directors' Guild of
America.2  And among them, only two black directors, Sidney Poitier
and Michael Schultz, were finding regular work.  (Significantly, a
number of black directors, such as Robert Gardner tcia.ie.nce. and
AngeJL^ and  Woodie  King  £The. lon.tu.Ke.  o{  Uothe.ii J  , nave  chosen  to
work outside of the commercial film industry.)  An agreement between
several film unions and the U.S. Justice Department in 1970 required
that ethnic minorities be integrated into the industry's general
labour pools, but the agreement's good intentions were undercut
by growing unemployment throughout the industry and by white defence
of a seniority system which favoured older  (and therefore white)
members.

If blacks and minorities have difficulty entering technical and
professional unions, they have even greater difficulty gaining
access to crucial positions of control.  In a system of Gulf and
Western-style horizontal monopoly and production packaging, it is
often difficult to discover exactly who controls a given phase of
film production.  Much racial discrimination takes place at the
pre-production phase, the process by which subjects and lead players
and literary properties are chosen.  It has recently been reported
that racist and sexist criteria have been used in the planning of
made-for-TV films.  A white Anglo-Saxon male, according to the
formula, is the preferred hero because the networks believe that
people could more easily relate to such an ideal.3

A  system which favours big-budget blockbusters, similarly, is
often racist in effect, if not in explicit intention, in that it
favours groups with economic power and discriminates against those
without it.  The Third World, in this sense, is doubly cursed by
cinematic neo-colonialism.  First World films, usually from
Hollywood, with easy access to Third World distribution circuits,
emphasize production values which are difficult for Third World
industries to imitate and are often inappropriate to Third World
concerns.  At the same time, economic neo-colonialism and techno-
logical dependency raise film making costs in the Third World
itself, where imported film, cameras and accessories often cost
two or three times as much as in the First World.  (It_ is no acci-
dent that Brazilian parodies of American films, as Joab Vieira
points out, tend to focus on super-productions  such as KXng Kong
or Jawt,,  as a pretext for the directors to simultaneously mock
the American films as well as the Brazilian inability to imitate
their glossy and high-tech production values.)*  Even revolutionary
film makers, in such a context, remain dependant on multi-national

companies for their equipment and film stock.  And the film stocks

themselves, may be said to discriminate against darker-complected

CJij.tlc.al kKt&  Vol  2 Ho  4 

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peoples in that they are sensitive to particular skin tones and
must be stopped down or specially lit for others.  The celluloid
itself, in this sense, is racially inscribed by an implicitly
ethnocentric industry.

The production processes of individual films, their means of pro-
duction and relations of production, bring up many questions con-
cerning the film making apparatus and the participation of blacks
(as well as other non-whites and women) within that apparatus.  It
seems noteworthy, for example, that in multi-ethnic but white-
dominated societies such as South Africa, Brazil and the United
States, blacks have tended to participate in the film making process
mainly as actors and actresses rather than as producers, directors
and script-writers.  In South Africa, whites finance, script, direct
and produce films with all-black casts.  In the late twenties in
the United States, all-white film making crews shot all-black musi-
cals like He.anti in Dixie (1929) and Hallelujah (1929).  And in
Brazil, virtually all black and mulatto films like Black OJtpheui
(1959) or Rio lona Noite.  (1957) are shot by virtually all-white
crews.  Blacks then, like women, appear as images in spectacles
whose social thrust is largely determined by others: black souls
as white man's artifact.

Since commercial films are designed to make profits, we must ask
to whom these profits go.  Black South Africans do not profit from
the films made  'for them'.  The thousands of black Brazilians who
played at an out-of-season carnival, with virtually no pay, for
the benefit of Marcel Camus' cameras, never saw the millions of
dollars that Slack 0/ipheai made around the world.  It was not blacks,
similarly, who profited from the American blaxploitation films of
the early seventies.  Whites financed, produced, and packaged these
films and they received the lion's share of the profits.

A film inevitably mirrors, to some extent, its own processes of
production.  The processes by which Andrew McLaglen's The. Wild
Geeae (1978) was produced, for example, reflect a racism identical
to that promoted by the film itself.5  The film, a glorification
of white mercenaries and their black African allies, was financed
by South African investors and British banks.  Its crew, according
to Vaiiety, consisted of 140 white South Africans,6  82 British and
Americans, and "an additional 200 African blacks as workers."
Euan Lloyd, the film's producer, emphasized the advantages of using
cheap black labour, claiming that British productions using what
he called "ethnic labour" (as if all labour were not ethnic) were
the cheapest by today's standards.  The film's production, in sum,
'used' blacks much as the film itself used token blacks to 'inte-
grate' what was essentially a white racist mercenary force.

The choice of players for films also raises obvious questions of
racial bias.  In early films, political considerations  in racial
casting were quite overt.  In The Blith o£ a Hation (1915) hat-in-
hand Negroes were played by blacks and aggressive blacks were played
by whites in blackface.  But today, how many aggressive blacks are
cast in positions of power and responsibility?  Black actor Hal
Williams, the Sergeant Ross of the TV series Piivate Benjamin,
claimed on a recent programme of Tony B/iou>n'&  Jouinal  (14 November 1982)
that he was being pressured to underplay his strength in the per-
formance of his role as military man.  Why is it necessary, further-
more, that a role be designated "black" for a black actor to be cast?
(Brazilian practice, in this sense, is somewhat more open and less

Critical  Ktiti  Vol  2 Ho  4 

8

race conscious.  See Blacki -in Bna.zX.LX.an Cinema : An an ay Xn
Compa.na.tlvQ. UeXkodology in this issue.)  Does the role of astro-
naut, or judge, or politician, automatically imply non-black?

The importance of the participation of the colonized or formerly
colonized in the process of production becomes obvious when we
compare Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle. o& AtgXeii (1966) to his later
Sunn! (1970).  The former film was- an Italian-Algerian co-production
which cost $800 000.  The Algerians were involved in every aspect
of the production, and Franco Solanas rewrote the scenario many
times in collaboration with the Algerians.  In the film, Algerian
non-actors represent themselves in a staged reconstruction of the
Algerian War of Independence.  The result of this production pro-
cess is that Algerians exist as people in the film, speak in their
language and express themselves in the characteristic modes and
gestures of Algerian culture.  Bain.!,  on the other hand, Pontecorvo's
multi-million didactic portrayal of a failed anti-colonialist revolu-
tion, involved no such collaboration between Europeans and Third
World people.  An Italo-French co-production, the film casts Marlon
Brando as a British colonizer and the non-actor Evaristo Marques,
who had previously been a peasant, as the Latin American colonized.
By pitting one of the First World's most charismatic actors against
a completely inexperienced Third World non-actor, Pontecorvo dis-
astrously tipped the scales in terms of spectatorial fascination
in favour of the colonizer, in a film whose didactic intention was
to iappoKt anti-colonial struggle.  The lack of Third World partici-
pation in the production processes of the film led to a one-
dimensional and inauthentic portrayal of the colonized, who become
shadowy figures without clear human or cultural definition.

Censorship and self-censorship also inflect the film's represen-
tation.  In South Africa, Harriet Gavshon points out, censorship
of films made for black audiences has traditionally been more
stringent than that of films made for whites.7  In the United States,
the motion picture industry's self-regulation, the 1927 "Don'ts and
Be Carefuls" and the 1934 "Production Code" declared that miscege-
nation, spelled out as "sex relationships between the white and
black races" was not in keeping with the standards of American life.
And in Brazil, official sensitivity to latent racial tensions was
certainly one of the factors that postponed the release of Antunes
Filho's Compaao  de. E&peia (.Hacking  Time.) , a strong indictment of
individual and institutional racism in Brazil, for almost three years.

The same kinds of questions that we have addressed to the cinema
industry and its production processes are pertinent to distribution
and exhibition as well.  We must examine how a film reaches or fails
to reach an audience.  The existing global distribution of power
makes the First World nations of the West cultural 'transmitters'
while reducing most Third World countries to the status of 'receivers'.
The flow of sounds and images tends to be unidirectional.  While
the Third World is inundated with North American cultural products
in the form of Hollywood films, television series, and popular
music, the First World tends to receive precious little of the vast
cultural production of the Third World.

All the distribution advantages go to the First World countries.
This process began, in the cinema, shortly after the First World
War, when North American film distribution companies began to
dominate Third World markets, and especially those of Latin America.
(See Susan Ryan's article in this issue for a discussion of the

Cn.itlc.al  K>Lti  Vol  2 No  4 

9

'precise mechanisms, in the case of Mexico, of this domination).
Th,e continuing economic dependency of Latin American nations makes
tKem vulnerable to North American commercial pressure.  When depen-
dant countries take measures to strengthen their own film industries
or to set up trade barriers to foreign films, for example, the
American film industry, in collusion with the American government,
can threaten retaliation in some other economic area such as the
purchase of raw materials from the dependant country.  American
films also enjoy the advantage, in most cases, of having already
covered their costs in the domestic market, in which case they can
be profitably "dumped" on Third World markets at very low prices.
Indeed, it is often more profitable for Third World exhibitors to
screen American films than to screen local films, precisely because
of their low prices and often because of the conditions of cultural
colonialism, because of their easier marketability.  American films,
furthermore, often arrive in the Third World "pre-advertised" in
the sense that much of the media hype revolving around prestigious
big-budget productions—the rumoured hiring of stars, the projected
budgets, romances and quarrels - reaches the Third World, in the
form of journalistic articles and television reports, prior to the
local release of the film.  (The Brazilian parodies of American
big-budget films, such as King Hong , a parody of the De Laurentis
King Kong, and Ba.ca.lhau,  or "Codfish '. a parody of Jauli,  parasitically
profit from this hype in order to attract audiences to the local
parody version of the films).  The dissemination of American popular
music also plays a role in the advertising of Hollywood films.
Saturday Night fe.ve.t,  for example, arrived with previous publicity
in many Third World countries because multinational-dominated  radio
and television stations had often given over considerable air time
to the music featured in the film.

If we shift our attention to the situation within particular First
World countries, we must ask similar questions concerning access,
control and market.  How do distribution factors determine the
audience or predispose spectatorial reception?  The theatre or
neighbourhood into which a commercially released film is booked can
determine a film's audience, just as the audience can inflect
booking policies.  South African blacks, for example, are partly
served by cinemas, church and school halls sufficing mainly in the
towns and open air mobile units in the countryside.  In Brazil,
movie theatres tend to be located in urban middle-class areas,
a location which discriminates, in a sense, against the largely
black and mulatto populations of the outlying "suburbios."  In the
United States, the urban demography is reversed, so that blacks
tend to live in the inner-city areas, precisely the areas where
the proportion of movie theatres is declining.  Distribution can
thus ultimately affect production, in the sense that producers
might argue a declining black audience as a reason for refusing
films with black themes or participants.

Marketing strategies often discriminate between target audiences
and even between neighbourhoods.  Thomas Crippe writes of a film
from the early teens that was entitled One. LaJtge. Eve.nJ.ng  when
it played  in the ghetto and A Night In Coontouin when it played in
white neighbourhoods.'  The high-cultural presentations of the
American Film Theatre, similarly, were not booked in Harlem.  More
recently, Ragtime advertised itself as a black power film in the
ghetto, and as an exercise in nostalgia in white neighbourhoods,
with advertising copy that began:  "It was the best of times ..."
Such practices, whether termed demographic, deceptive or simply
racist, demonstrate the powerful relationship between distribution

Cultlcal Axti  Vol 2 No 4 

10

and exhibition policies and spectatorial expectations and vantage
point.

Distribution and exhibition policies also inflect the audience
reception of a given film.  Viewing The. BiHth o{ a Hat-ion at a
Ku Klux Klan rally, in a film history class or at a commercial
release does not lead to an identical experience.  Seeing Battte.
o£ klgle.ni>  is not the same experience when it is seen in Paris with
Frenchmen or in Algiers with Algerians.  But apart from such questions
of the nature of the audience, distribution and exhibition strate-
gies can "aim" a film at a mass public or at a specifically tar-
geted audience which might share a common framework of concern.
The pairing of films on a double bill or their selection as part
of a special series or retrospective  (e.g. on such subjects as
"blacks in film") can also orient a film's reception or help define
its audience.

Film criticism, finally, often operates as a kind of literary appen-
dage to the film industry, as First World critics often project
their ethnocentric assumptions in criticism which is often frankly
discriminatory or tendentiously ignorant.  When Andrew Sarris
declares in Hote.i  on the. ku.te.ivi Thtony In 1962 that American
Cinema is "the frosting of a few great directors at the top," he
is using auteurism to express an ethnocentric perspective which
dismisses as irrelevant most Third World and many European cinemas.
Often the critics who pass judgement on Third World films are
simply not culturally equipped to even understand the films.  Janet
Maslin of The. New Vonk Ti.me.i,  for example, regularly criticizes as
"confusing" Third World films which are not at all "confusing" for
Third World audiences.  North American reviewers often project
their own racial perspective on Latin American products, perceiving
the couple in Lucia III  as a "racially mixed couple" (when the
film makes nothing of race) or seeing Ten-t orf HiHacle.&  as a film
about mixed marriage  (which is only a minor theme in the film).
Racist pejorative language creeps into the very descriptions of the
action of the films.  Bosley Crowther, in his New Yolk Ti.me.1  review
of the Brazilian film The. Give.n WoHd (1962), for example, gave
remarkably  inaccurate and ethnocentric accounts of specific scenes,
in which "swarms" of "pagan dancers" stage a "riot" and "Negroes
and Indians" perform "wiggle dancing".  The "wiggle dancing" is in
fact simply "samba," and the bestial swarm of negroes and Indians,
who are not in fact so easily distinguishable as Crowther suggests,
is simply an ethnically mixed group of Brazilians enjoying them-
selves.  In such cases, colonialism and racism inflect the very
perception of the critic.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 

2 

» 

» 

Memmi, Albert 1968:  Vomi.nate.d Han, Beacon Press, Boston,  p 186

Dempsey, Michael and Gupta, Udayan  April 1982: "Hollywood's
Colour Problem," Kme.Klc.an  film.

Bedell, Sally  17 July 1982:  "CBS Drops a Formula Involving
Race for Evaluating TV Film Ideas," New Yolk T-ime.i.

Vieira, Joao Luiz 1982: "From High NoontoJa.ua: Carnival
and Parody in Brazilian Cinema," in Randal Johnson and
Robert Stam KHazi.Li.an. Ci.ne.ma,  Associated University Presses,
New Brunswick.

Cnitical kHti  Vol 2 No 4 

11

5 

6 

7 

8 

See Stam, R.  19: "Wild Geese", Clnejute.  , Vol.9 No.2p50-51

The South African Film and Television Technicians Association
disputes this figure, claiming that Lloyd used no more than
15 recognized South African te.chnlcla.nA.  The "hundreds" refer
presumably to the black unskilled personnel such as runners,
drivers, carriers, etc. who could be paid much less than over-
seas employed technicians doing the same tasks.  See Tomaselli,
K.G. 1980: "The Role and Function of SAFTTA in the South African
Feature Film Industry", The. SAFTTA Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1 pp 5 - 7

See also Tomaselli, K.G. 1980: "Ideology and Censorship in
South African Film", C/Utlcal Attti,  Vol.1 No. 2  pp 1 - 15

Cripps, Thomas 1977: Slow Ta.de. to Black, Oxford University
Press, New York,  p 42

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