Race

Ideas of race have shaped film since the medium's invention during the late nineteenth century. Some of the first works produced by Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter, and Georges Méliès contain demeaning portrayals of African Americans devouring watermelons, stealing chickens, or menacing innocent whites. Other early works show allegedly primitive “natives” living as “natural savages” in exotic settings, far from a presumed white viewership. One of the Edison Company's earliest major productions was Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1903, the first of many efforts to mount on film Harriet Beecher Stowe's flawed narrative concerning the injustices of racialized slavery. Perhaps not too surprisingly, prevailing conceptions of white supremacy, racial hierarchy, manifest destiny, ongoing contemporaneous projects of “race science,” and the American theatrical tradition of blackface minstrelsy fundamentally influenced the depictions of race in these early films. However, similar conceptions or their successors also permeate many later cinematic landmarks, among them Birth of a Nation (1915), Nanook of the North (1922), The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Searchers (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Chinatown (1974).