ABSTRACT
The first epigraph is taken from James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976, 69), which is a powerful attempt to convey the experience of an AfricanAmerican man struggling to grasp simultaneously three aspects of his existence as a black in America: the cultural power of the Hollywood entertainment industry in relation to black experience, the structural and chronic pervasiveness of white racism in America, and the possibility of hope for black people. The second epigraph comes from an interview with Jack Green, the cinematographer who worked on Eastwood’s film about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Bird (Gentry, 7); Green is talking about the difficulties he experienced in trying to ensure that the color black showed up properly on the celluloid in this film whose characters are mostly black and that contains many interior scenes, especially of dark and smoky clubs. Baldwin is talking about race while Green is talking about color; thus my juxtaposing of their comments is, of course, just a heuristic device, perhaps even a conceit. But the quotations do perhaps point in a strangely apt way to two different aspects of a serious problem in the movie entertainment industry. Baldwin’s quotation points to the problem that the meaning of race is something that Hollywood, a mostly and chronically white-owned institution and industry, is not equipped to consider; Green’s quotation points up in a stunningly literal way the difficulty for the Hollywood apparatus of representing “black.” I think it is symptomatic that the white cinematographer discusses the problem as a
technical issue, as a matter of the capabilities of film technology to give representation to black, while the black observer is left to complain about the white industry’s lack of equipment in the realm of meaning. There is a certain incommensurability between the two ways of posing a problem which it will be the task of this section to contemplate.
