South Central Review

Much might be made of the turn toward history in film studies—current job lists, if nothing else, are evidence of the zeal of English departments, communication departments, and film studies departments for historically informed scholars of media. Film studies appears to have reached a point of maturity in which some notion of contextual matters is as necessary to the critic as a command of theoretical tools. But what does historically informed film studies look like in practice? Two recent books on blackness and whiteness—both metaphorical and actual—in American film production suggest that scholars both inside and outside the discipline of film studies are still grappling with what "film history" should mean.

Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, edited by Daniel Bernardi, is an anthology designed to extend the chronological reach of his 1996 The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. Classic Hollywood covers the coming of sound to the early 1960s. The aims of the project are laudable; film history needs to attend to questions of race in a way that integrates them into the broadest possible discussion of the trajectory of filmmaking and film reception in the United States since the late nineteenth century. That said, however, it must be acknowledged that the anthology is uneven in quality and idiosyncratically organized. To begin with the question of organization, the collection offers the reader four large categories, namely class, gender, war, and industry. The reader discovers, however, that essays on representations of Native Americans appear in more than one category (for reasons that don't become apparent), while essays on institutional questions relating to the representation of Latin America and Latin Americans are likewise placed in different sections. It is clear that organizing the nineteen essays presented here created conceptual problems, particularly because Bernardi doesn't want to offer "the history of individual colors" (xvii), but the opacity or looseness of the organizing principles reveals that the collection frequently eschews the specific for the general. As the introduction unhelpfully observes, "Past, future, spirituality, freedom, perseverance, community, insight, and passion are present in the colors of Hollywood, though for some, seeing this refraction of race is as difficult as seeing whiteness itself" (xvii). This unfortunate sentence suggests that the tendency to work with the binary "whiteness" v. "Other" undermines the collection's ability to make historically informed points about the [End Page 107] manifestations and uses of race in the American film industry from 1929 to 1960.

The problem here is that a number of the essays are satisfied merely to use films to illustrate major social trends, without adequate regard to questions specific to the trajectory of the medium, namely the history of filmmaking, film reception, and the contours of the industry in the United States. For example, Thomas E. Wartenburg's "Humanizing the Beast: King Kong and the Representation of Black Male Sexuality" is right to emphasize the self-referential nature of the film but primarily makes the obvious associations between King Kong and Birth of a Nation vis-à-vis representations of embattled white femininity rather than offering a sustained discussion of a film about filmmaking in which a white man risks a white woman as bait for a black monster. The essay is also marred by intrusive references to Hegel and recourse to a definition drawn from a dictionary. These aren't the sources or the strategies conducive to the production of film history.

Similarly, Karen Wallace's "The Redskin and The Paleface" shirks its obligations to film history by offering only a close reading of The Paleface with contextual details derived from Lewis Jacobs's by now rather creaky The Rise of the American Film and basic works on representations of Native Americans. The essay might have gained rather more traction from considering this film's own filmic forebears in such texts as Buster Keaton's The...