They were called “race movies” in the early-to-mid 1900s. These films featured all-black casts, were mostly made by African-Americans and were counterpoints to the negative stereotypes put on the silver screen by white filmmakers.
Race films ran the gamut of genres, from musicals to crime dramas, from comedies to westerns. But the images remained largely the same: A variety of intelligent, dignified black men and women who were a reflection of the audiences that the movies targeted.
Race films were a response to such bigoted fare as 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation”–recently named by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 greatest movies ever made–where blacks were portrayed as marauding, sex-starved cretins and the Klu Klux Klan was the “hero” of the day.
Almost 30 race films spanning more than 30 years will be shown Wednesdays at 7 p.m. through July on Turner Classic Movies. The film festival is one of two on cable next month focusing on films from people of color.
The highlight of Wednesday’s kickoff of the TCM festival, called “A Separate Cinema,” is a restored version of one of the earliest race movies, the 1920 feature “The Symbol of the Unconquered.” It was written and directed by pioneering filmmaker and author Oscar Micheaux, a man whose career included a lot of work at Chicago-based film studios.
TCM offered a black film festival two years ago for African-American History Month and discovered a wealth of worthwhile films were available for the network’s movie-hungry audience, which now numbers 25 million.
“We found that it was a really interesting area of film that just hadn’t been, I think, given its justice in terms of coverage,” says Tom Karsch, senior vice president and general manager of TCM.
Karsch’s programmers have put together four Wednesdays of themed entertainment, each broadcast hosted by acting husband-and-wife Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis from the Douglass Theater in Macon, Ga.
Wednesday is dedicated to Micheaux, with an airing of a 1994 documentary. “Midnight Ramble” (the term refers to the time at which race movies were shown at certain theaters). It will be followed by Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered,” in which the writer/director tackled the sensitive subject (especially then) of injustices inflicted on blacks after the Civil War.
The movie has a new score by jazz musician Max Roach and a sprucing-up of the print at a cost of between $20,000 and $30,000, according to Karsch.
On subsequent Wednesdays, TCM will focus on Paul Robeson (July 8), Josephine Baker (July 15), crime stories (July 22), and sports films and musicals (July 29).
“These are just fun films, like so many of Hollywood’s movies made at the same time,” Karsch explains. “They’re just fun escapism, and they’re trying very hard to just give the black audiences the same kind of heroes and villains to root for that white audiences had. So I think they’re charming.”
“A Separate Cinema” is an opportunity to show “what kinds of work were done in that earlier period, and to put into context what the contributions of African-Americans have been to the larger picture of American cinema,” says Pearl Bowser, “Midnight Ramble’s” co-director.
“It’s another way of revisiting that aspect of social history,” Bowser adds, “as well as seeing what the African-American input was in terms of addressing particular issues around questions of color, of racial discrimination.”
Unless a city sponsors a themed festival, movies such as these would rarely be seen by an audience interested in them. So broadcasting movies like “The Symbol of the Unconquered” represents “the beauty of cable,” according to cable executive Nina Henderson.
“When you have more choices, you have the ability to do more of what would be called niche programming,” says Henderson, vice president of BET Movies/STARZ!3 , a specialized cable channel focusing on films by African-American actors and filmmakers.
BET Movies broadcasts its second Pan-African film festival starting July 15, running Wednesdays through Aug. 29. Films from Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil and other countries will be highlighted, with actress CCH Pounder (“Millennium,” “ER”) serving as host.
Like TCM, BET Movies, which reaches about 3 million viewers, can be more “risky in terms of programming,” Henderson says, because ratings aren’t as much an issue as they are with network television.
Explains Henderson: “We have the opportunity here–not only because we’re cable and (it) is our mission to do unique programming that others, especially the broadcast networks, wouldn’t do–but also as a non-ad supported channel. . .we have a little more leeway than even the advertising-based cable services do.”
