Lecture 2: Integrating Race into the Narrative System

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Lecture 2Integrating Race into the Narrative
System
Broken Blossoms (1919) Directed by D.W. Griffith

• Professor Michael Green

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Previous Lecture

• What Kind of Distance Learning Course is this and
  How can You Succeed in it?
• Why Study Race and Gender in American Film?
• Categorizing the Other
• Episode I and The Birth of a Nation

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This Lecture

• The Meaning of Whiteness
• The Voice of Whiteness in Griffiths Biograph
  Films
• The Artful racism of Broken Blossoms
• Writing about Film Lesson 1

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The Meaning of Whiteness
Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999) Directed by
George Lucas

• Lecture 2 Part I

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What is Whiteness?

• Whiteness is Not Biology
• Science of Whiteness is Ideological
• Ideologies are Historical
• Whiteness is a Historical Ideology
• Whiteness is Not an Illusion
• Whiteness is an Identity
• Whiteness is Social History
• Whiteness is Power Privilege
• Whiteness is Pain Pride

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The Discourse of Whiteness

• Whiteness gains its power and legitimacy from
  the politico-scientific myth that "whites" are
  innately superior, the ultimate result of divine
  intervention, natural selection, or cultural
  preeminence. Like all myths, white superiority
  legitimizes the ideological as biblical or
  evolutionary the right of the chosen/ survival
  of the fittest. The myth rests on the
  reciprocal ideology that people who do not count
  as white are . . . inferior.
• Daniel Bernardi, The Voice of Whiteness

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Who Counts as White?

• This is a historical question.
• The Case of Jewish Americans
• The Case of Italian Americans
• The Case of Latino/as
• How about Arab and Persian Americans?
• Its also a question of assimilation.
• Losing Culture
• Participating in White Racism
• Acting/Performing as White

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Whiteness and Race

• As long as race is something applied to
  non-white peoples, as long as white people are
  not racially seen and named, they/we function as
  a human norm. Other people are raced, we are
  just people.
• Richard Dyer, White
• most white Americans either do not think of
  their whiteness or think of it as neutral.
• Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, Screen Saviors

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Whiteness is a Choice

• There are no whites, only those who pass for
  white.
• Daniel Bernardi, Classic Hollywood, Classic
  Whiteness
• Counting or not counting as white changes with
  time and space. At the turn of the century, Jews
  and Italians didnt count as white.
• Today, far too many American Jews and Italians
  believe they are white.

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Phenotypes and Signs of Race

• Phenotypes
• Skin Color
• Hair and Facial Features
• Signs (a little theory)
• Signifier
• Signified
• Arbitrary Relationship (i.e., historical)

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Examples of Phenotypes in Film
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White is Defined Against Color

• At the interpersonal level, the biological trait
  or set of traits thought to reveal race are
  used as assumptions about other physical,
  intellectual, emotional, or spiritual traits of a
  person with those characteristics.
• In the U.S., for example, those who are not
  considered white are often automatically assumed
  to be smelly, greasy, less intelligent, lazy,
  dirty, not in control of their emotions,
  unreliable, and so on.
• Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, Screen Saviors

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Summary of Points

• Whiteness is not biology, but rather identity and
  social history.
• Whiteness gains its power and legitimacy from the
  myth that whites are superior.
• Who counts as white is a historical question.
• Whiteness is often seen as an invisible norm.
• Whiteness is a choice.
• Phenotypes are often used as racial signs.

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The Voice of Whiteness in D.W. Griffiths
Biograph Films
The Birth of a Nation (1915) Directed by D.W.
Griffith

• Lecture 2 Part II

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Griffith Bio

• David Wark Griffith (1875 1948), born in
  Kentucky to a former Confederate Colonel.
• Began his career as actor and playwright, sold
  scenarios to Edwin Porter and then to Biograph,
  where he became a director.
• He made over 400 films for Biograph, most of them
  one-reel short films.
• He went on to make feature films, including The
  Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
• Co-founded United Artists

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Supported by History

• Various factors propagated white supremacy before
  and during Griffiths Biograph tenure.
• Supreme court rulings
• American Imperialism and propaganda
• Intellectual and academic activity
• Rise of the KKK
• Anxiety over immigration

D.W. Griffith
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More Socio-historical Context

• The rise of Democrats to Congressional power in
  1910 and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in 1912
  brought a return of Southern patriarchal and
  racist beliefs and practices to political
  prominence.
• Growing anxiety over the influx of Southern
  European and Jewish immigrants and the migration
  of African Americans to Northern cities was used
  to support separate and unequal practices.

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Early Cinematic Racism

• Racist representations were common in early
  cinema, and not just in Griffith's films.
• African Americans, Asian and Latino Americans,
  and other non-white groups are systematically
  vilified and negatively stereotyped while whites
  are shown as heroic, divine and natural leaders.
• The discourse of whiteness had numerous
  socio-political, industrial, and individual
  proponents, beyond Griffith and Biograph.

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A Formal Innovator

• Griffith did not invent film techniques such as
  close-ups and parallel editing, but he was an
  important innovator of Hollywood style.
• He was a pioneer, helping transform early cinema
  from a cinema of attractions to a system of
  narration.

The Great Train Robbery (1903) Directed by Edwin
Porter
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Ideology in Griffith

• Many scholars have explicated the racist
  practices in Griffiths work.
• Among the most repellent elements in his films
  (and there are such) we see Griffith as an open
  apologist for racism, erecting a celluloid
  monument to the Ku Klux Klan, and joining their
  attack on Negroes in The Birth of a Nation."
• Sergei Eisenstein (filmmaker and theorist)

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Racism in the Biograph Films

• Throughout the over 450 Biograph films directed
  by or under the direct supervision of Griffith,
  racism is a consistent and often explicit
  formation.
• Griffith's articulations of style and of race
  are involved in the same cinematic and discursive
  processes pragmatically, they co-constitute the
  filmmaker's narrative system.
• Daniel Bernardi, The Voice of Whiteness

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Melding Form and Content

• Griffith helped develop stylistic practices in
  support of storytelling.
• The storytelling often supported racism and white
  supremacy.
• Therefore, argues Bernardi, development of form
  how the story is told is inseparable from the
  story itself.
• Griffiths articulations of style and race
  co-constitute the filmmaker's narrative system.

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Griffiths Discourse of Whiteness

• Tense, mood and voice work together to integrate
  whiteness into Griffiths Bio. Films.
• Tense refers to the temporal relationship between
  shots.
• Mood refers to "the narration's perspective of
  the story told," or what American literary
  criticism terms point of view.
• Voice is essentially the ideology of the
  "narrator," an intervening force visible in the
  juxtaposition of shots, or editing, and through
  story structure.

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Genres

• According to Bernardi, the voice of whiteness in
  Griffith's narrative system circulates within
  three intermixed genres
• Stories of non-white servitude
• Stories of colonial love, or turn-of-the-century
  jungle fever
• Stories of the divinity of the white family and
  serenity of the white woman.
• He also made "Greaser" films, Indian films, Civil
  War films and Melodramas.

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Stories of Non-White Servitude

• Concern a non-white character, usually male who
  struggles and sacrifices to better serve the
  clean and civilized space of white society.
• This character is usually demasculinized to
  rationalize and justify his service as well as
  ensure that his motivations are not read as
  sexually transgressive or miscegenetic.
• That Chink at Golden Gulch (1910).

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Stories of Colonial Love

• Race and sexuality are either segregated or
  represented as immoral and prurient in Griffith's
  narrative discourse.
• Non-white male desire for white females is almost
  always motivated by an intent to rape.
• White females only desire white males
• White male desire for non-white females is
  loosely sanctioned in Griffith's narrative
  system.
• A Romance of the Western Hills (1910)

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Advocating Segregation

• In what amounts to colonial love, films from
  this genre culminate in characterizations and
  narrative resolutions that maintain and advocate
  segregation. While a white male can have his way
  with an Indian female in Griffith's films, their
  union always ends with the Indian back on the
  reservation. The narrative in these stories goes
  out of its way to educate the desiring Other, and
  the audience, in keeping the races separate.
• Daniel Bernardi, The Voice of Whiteness

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The White Family/White Woman

• These films dramatize the attack on and defense
  of the integrity of white woman.
• Male control over the family and women the
  divinity of patriarchy is ultimately at stake
  in many of Griffith's films
• When the family in Griffith's story is coded as
  white, the threat to its dismemberment comes from
  a savage and lustful non-white male.
• The Zulus Heart and The Girls and Daddy

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The Big Point

• Griffith's films employ cinematic technique
  from characterization to editing to tell the
  story of the inability of non-whites to fully
  assimilate into white culture and society, and
  ultimately provide a justification for their
  servitude, segregation, and punishment.
• Daniel Bernardi, The Voice of Whiteness

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The Big Point (Continued)

• Through stories of servitude, colonial love,
  and the white family/white women, the
  filmmakerhis voiceperpetuated a discourse that
  cast non-whites as the metonymic and metaphoric
  threat to the normality and superiority of
  whiteness.
• Daniel Bernardi, The Voice of Whiteness

The Birth of a Nation (1915) Directed by D.W.
Griffith
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The Artful Racism of Broken Blossoms
Broken Blossoms (1919) Directed by D.W. Griffith

• Lecture 2 Part III

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Familiar Sexual Traits

• According to Julia Lesage, in cinema, male and
  female film characters are assigned familiar
  sexual traits that express the cultures commonly
  held sexual fantasies.
• The same kind of sexual political story, or
  assignation of sexual traits, is repeated from
  film to film, no matter how much the manifest
  content differs between films.
• This repetition is not ideologically neutral, but
  serves to reinforce patriarchal social relations
  in the world outside the film.

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Broken Blossoms

• Griffith released Broken Blossoms in 1919 as a
  reaction to his earlier films. He tried to
  counter the then dominant racist ways of
  depicting Asians in popular literature,
  magazines, and film and BB was perceived as a
  sensitive and humanitarian film.
• The film features two male protagonists, a poor
  Chinese shopkeeper and a working class brute
  named Battling Burrows, who are at odds over
  Burrows daughter.

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Broken Blossoms

• Blossoms has a moral message Asian Buddhist
  peacefulness is superior to Anglo-Saxon
  ignorance, brutality and strife.
• Julia Lesage, Broken Blossoms Artful Racism,
  Artful Rape
• Lesage
• Pause the lecture and watch Clip 1 from the
  movie.

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The Abuses of Masculinity

• The film is about sex roles as much as it is
  about race. In particular, it is about
  masculinity. In the figure of Battling Burrows,
  the film presents the potential evil of
  masculinity, here safely attributed to a
  grotesque Other from the lower classes.
• Julia Lesage, Broken Blossoms Artful Racism,
  Artful Rape

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Battling Burrows

• Pause the lecture and watch Clip 2 from Broken
  Blossoms

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The Sensitive Outsider

• Projected onto the Chinese man's character are
  all the traits of the 19th century sensitive
  outsider, the romantic hero--a self-destructive
  dreamer who never lives out the fulfillment of
  his dreams.
• Julia Lesage, Broken Blossoms Artful Racism,
  Artful Rape

Pause the lecture and watch Clip 3 from the
movie.
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Lesages Reading

• Both men symbolically consummate sexual contact
  with Gish.
• Their slums, brutality, and opium smoking cast
  them as Others. Griffith safely assigns
  perversity to other races and to the poor.
• Lesage sees the two men as representing mens
  options under capitalism.
• Using the Asian man as the romantic hero hides
  the social reality of racism.

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Her Big Point

• On the superficial level, the film is an
  antiracist text, but the film says nothing from
  an Asian person's point of view, just as it says
  nothing from a womans point of view. The images
  of the East, of Buddhism, of racial traits, and
  of an oppressed person's reaction to oppression
  are all drawn from hegemonic, white stereotypes.
• Julia Lesage, Broken Blossoms Artful Racism,
  Artful Rape

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Her Big Point (Continued)

• In fact, not only is Griffith working only with
  received opinions and prejudices about Asians,
  women, and the working class, but when he sets up
  his basic opposition of brute vs. sensitive man,
  he is working with a set of oppositions that have
  nothing to do with race.
• Julia Lesage, Broken Blossoms Artful Racism,
  Artful Rape

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Writing About Film Lesson 1
The Birth of a Nation (1915) Directed by D.W.
Griffith
Lecture 2 Part IV
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Three Types of Film Writing

• There are three major types of film writing
• Descriptive a neutral account of the basic
  characteristics of the film.
• Evaluative which presents a judgment or opinion
  about a films value.
• Interpretive which presents an argument about a
  films meaning and significance.

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Descriptive Writing

• As it suggests, descriptive writing describes a
  film, without evaluation or judgment.
• Most descriptions of narrative films relay plot
  events, while a description of a documentary
  might describe not only the topic of the film,
  but also the approach.
• While descriptions do not offer judgments, they
  may go beyond plot summary to describe genre.

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Example
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Functions of Descriptive Film Writing

• Descriptive film writing can be found many places
  including
• Television and movie guides
• DVD cases
• Programs for film screenings
• Books about film
• Its function is to give potential viewers an idea
  about what a movie is about.

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Why Descriptive Film Writing is Important

• Descriptive film writing is the first essential
  component in all writing about film. You must be
  able to describe a film before you can say
  anything evaluative or interpretive about it.
• Often, descriptive writing is one component of
  more complex forms of film writing.

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Developing Skills

• Descriptive writing helps you build skills in
• Close viewing
• Critical Analysis
• Synthesizing and synopsizing
• You will use descriptive writing in all your
  critical papers at the university level.
• Accurate, concise well-articulated description is
  also crucial to any job, in the film industry or
  otherwise.

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Choosing Descriptors
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End of Lecture 2

• Next Lecture Romantic Ethnography