The Political Economy Of Black Film

7 Pages 1626 Words

(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)
by Jesse Algeron Rhines
Cineaste v21, n3 (Summer, 1995):38

For most of the last three decades, African-American filmmakers have waged a struggle to become part of the Hollywood system. The economic and political realities of that battle are relevant to African-American filmmakers today who are debating whether Hollywood remains the best, or indeed the exclusive, means to reach a mass audience. The breakthrough period for black cinema came in the late 1960s, when the industry had severe economic problems stemming from a mature television industry and the continuing complications of the 1948 Paramount Consent Decree in which a U.S. government suit forced the major Hollywood studios to divest their interests in both film production and exhibition. Social pressures arose from liberal concern within the film industry to respond in some visible manner to the massive civil rights movement, then at its height. The most obvious result of these factors was that in 1969 Gordon Parks became the first black director of a Hollywood film, The Learning Tree. The following year, Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baad-asssss Song opened the 'blaxploitation' era.
From 1969 through the mid-1970s, white-owned distribution companies released an average of fifteen films per year featuring blacks as strong, sexually charged characters frequently at war with traditional American society. Although aimed at black audiences, many of these films were written, produced, and directed by whites. Their low production costs and high profit ratios helped distributors prosper, but blockbusters like The Godfather and The Exorcist, released in the same period, demonstrated that African-Americans on screen were not needed to bring African-Americans into movie theaters. Neither of these films featured black characters, yet one-third of the domestic box office was from black communities. Since black dollars flowed as...