230169 African Americans and 100 Years of representation through Film in the United States (S) (WiSe 2015/2016)

2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the release of D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, 1915, a cornerstone moment in the history of African American hegemonic representations in cinema. The Hollywood commercial success, which was credited as groundbreaking among its contemporaries for its innovative application of the medium of film, contributed to create and perpetuate some of the most enduring, dangerous, if not damaging, stereotypical images of African Americans as individuals (black manhood and womanhood) and as a group. At the same time, the nomination of the African American female director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor Ava Marie DuVernay for the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Picture for her work in Selma, released 2014, in 2015 marks another milestone in the history of African American representation for DuVernay is the first black female director to achieve this recognition. Acknowledging that films—often considered ‘harmless entertainment’--have a powerful, and at times unrecognized, impact on beliefs and values, from a historical perspective this seminar examines instances in the evolution of the representation of blackness on the commercial screen and how these images have been contested by the cultural and political self-definition of African Americans. This course aims to contribute to a better understanding of such cultural phenomena as the recurrence of certain resilient stereotypes and depreciations of African Americans as it inquires in how far the films studied in class reveal the emotional and intellectual complexity of black life and the extent to which the movies reject and resist the power of white supremacy to define blacks in US American film.