The ori­gin of dra­mat­ic sto­ry­telling in cin­e­ma is often traced to a sin­gle movie, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It also hap­pens to be a film that cel­e­brates the racist vio­lence of the Ku Klux Klan, based on a nov­el, The Clans­man, that does the same. The film’s tech­ni­cal achieve­ments and its racism became inte­gral to Hol­ly­wood there­after. Only rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly have black film­mak­ers begun enter­ing the main­stream with very dif­fer­ent kinds of sto­ries, win­ning major awards and mak­ing record prof­its.

This would have been unthink­able in the 1920s, a peri­od of intense racial vio­lence when black WWI vet­er­ans came home to find their coun­try armed against them. “When the sol­diers returned,” writes Megan Pugh for the San Fran­cis­co Silent Film Fes­ti­val, “Jim Crow still reigned supreme and lynch mobs con­tin­ued to ter­ror­ize the South.” Hol­ly­wood pla­cat­ed white audi­ences by only ever fea­tur­ing black char­ac­ters in sub­servient, stereo­typ­i­cal roles, or cast­ing white actors in black­face.

Against these oppres­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions, black film­mak­ers like Oscar Micheaux and George and Noble Jack­son “used cin­e­ma to con­front Amer­i­can racism,” respond­ing to Grif­fith with films like Micheaux’s With­in Our Gates and the Jack­sons’ uplift­ing The Real­iza­tion of a Negro’s Ambi­tion. There were also sev­er­al white film­mak­ers who made so-called “race movies.” But most of their films avoid any explic­it polit­i­cal com­men­tary.

These include the films of Richard Nor­man, who between 1920 and 1928 made sev­en fea­ture-length silent movies with all-black casts, “geared toward black audi­ences.” He made romances, come­dies, and adven­ture films, cast­ing black actors in seri­ous, “dig­ni­fied” roles. “Instead of tack­ling dis­crim­i­na­tion head-on in his films,” writes Pugh, “Nor­man cre­at­ed a kind of world where whites—and con­se­quent­ly racism—didn’t even exist.”

Though we may see this as a cyn­i­cal com­mer­cial deci­sion, and its own kind of appease­ment to seg­re­ga­tion, the approach also enabled Nor­man to tell pow­er­ful, alter­nate-uni­verse sto­ries that a more real­ist bent would not allow. 1926’s The Fly­ing Ace, for exam­ple, Norman’s only sur­viv­ing film, is about a black fight­er pilot return­ing home to “resume his civil­ian career as a rail­road detective—without remov­ing his Army Air Ser­vice uni­form, a con­stant reminder of his patri­o­tism and val­or.”

Nor­man tells the mov­ing sto­ry of Cap­tain Bil­ly Stokes (see Part 1 at the top), “a mod­el for the ideals of racial uplift,” despite the fact that “African-Amer­i­cans were not allowed to serve as pilots in the Unit­ed States Armed Forces until 1940.” One might say that rewrit­ing recent his­to­ry as wish-ful­fill­ment has always been a func­tion of cin­e­ma since… well, at least since The Birth of a Nation, if not fur­ther back to The Great Train Rob­bery.

Nor­man takes this impulse and dra­ma­tizes the life of an impos­si­bly hero­ic black WWI ser­vice­man, at a time when such men faced wide­spread abuse and dis­crim­i­na­tion in real­i­ty. While he insist­ed that he only made genre films, and avoid­ed what he called the “pro­pa­gan­da nature” of Micheaux’s films, it’s hard not to read The Fly­ing Ace as a polit­i­cal state­ment of its own, and not only for its oblique top­i­cal com­men­tary.

The film cen­ters on pos­i­tive, com­plex black char­ac­ters at a time when stu­dios made quite a bit of mon­ey doing exact­ly the oppo­site. Nor­man gave black audi­ences heroes of their own to root for. In The Fly­ing Ace, Cap­tain Stokes not only returns from fly­ing dan­ger­ous mis­sions for his coun­try, but he then goes on to cap­ture a band of thieves who stole his employer’s pay­roll. The char­ac­ter “nev­er would have made it onscreen in a Hol­ly­wood movie of the time.”

Nor­man estab­lished his stu­dio in Jack­sonville Flori­da, at the time con­sid­ered “the Win­ter Film Cap­i­tal of the World.” Many major stu­dios decamped there from New York until WWI, when they moved west to L.A. Nor­man, who grew up in Mid­dle­burg, Flori­da, made a for­tune invent­ing soft drinks before turn­ing to movies. He returned to his home state to find lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion left in Jack­sonville in the 1920s.

His stu­dio would become “one of the three lead­ing pro­duc­ers of race films in Amer­i­ca,” next to the Micheaux Film Cor­po­ra­tion and the Jack­sons’ Lin­coln Motion Pic­ture Com­pa­ny. In 2016, Nor­man Stu­dios was des­ig­nat­ed a Nation­al His­toric Land­mark. The filmmaker’s son, Richard Nor­man Jr. became a pilot, inspired by The Fly­ing Ace, and has plans to turn the build­ing into a muse­um cel­e­brat­ing Jack­sonville’s, and Nor­man’s, cin­e­ma lega­cy.

via Silent Movie GIFS

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

Watch D.W. Griffith’s Silent Mas­ter­piece Intol­er­ance Free Online — It’s the “Ulysses of the Cin­e­ma!”

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image by “Sieb­bi,” Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There is a bat­tle rag­ing on the inter­net, and you may count your­self lucky if you’ve heard noth­ing about it since it involves the usu­al unnec­es­sary esca­la­tions and knee-jerk reac­tions: the bat­tle of super­hero movies ver­sus the art form known as “cin­e­ma.” The first shot, one might say, was fired by Mar­tin Scors­ese, who has cer­tain­ly earned the right to make pro­nounce­ments on the sub­ject. Asked for his thoughts on the MCU (that’s Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse for the unini­ti­at­ed) dur­ing an inter­view with Empire mag­a­zine, Scors­ese opined, “that’s not cin­e­ma. Hon­est­ly, the clos­est I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the cir­cum­stances, is theme parks.”

This writer is of the opin­ion that one can enjoy film both as art and as pure spec­ta­cle, while rec­og­niz­ing clear dif­fer­ences between them. They share a medi­um, but they aim at and pro­duce dif­fer­ent effects. Com­par­ing the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing Avengers: Endgame or most any oth­er Mar­vel film to rid­ing a roller­coast­er seems per­fect­ly appo­site to me. Still, com­ic film fans went wild online, lob­bing all sorts of accu­sa­tions at Scors­ese and fel­low direc­tors who deliv­ered even less char­i­ta­ble takes on the Mar­vel movie phe­nom. Twit­ter memes and jokes pro­lif­er­at­ed; Disney’s CEO weighed in with what must sure­ly be a dis­in­ter­est­ed crit­i­cal opin­ion.

Let’s look past dis­tract­ing hot takes, mar­ket­ing strate­gies, and gen­er­a­tional war­fare. Scors­ese has elo­quent­ly clar­i­fied his posi­tion in a New York Times op-ed, and his argu­ments are worth our atten­tion. For one thing, the direc­tor approach­es the sub­ject with humil­i­ty, admit­ting his own bias­es. “The fact that [Mar­vel] films don’t them­selves inter­est me is a mat­ter of per­son­al taste and tem­pera­ment,” he writes. “I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a lat­er time, I might have been excit­ed by these pic­tures and maybe even want­ed to make one myself.”

He details his own sense of what cin­e­ma should be, one drawn prin­ci­pal­ly from his influ­ences: Bergman, Godard, Hitch­cock (whose movies might also be called theme parks in a way, Scors­ese grants, but rely more on char­ac­ter­i­za­tion than grand set pieces and spe­cial effects). He also lists cur­rent favorites: Ari Aster, Spike Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Thomas Ander­son. As an auteur him­self, he has a clear bias in favor of oth­er auteurs. Yet there’s more at stake than taste or what some have seen as elit­ism. “Why not just let super­hero films and oth­er fran­chise films be?” he asks. “The rea­son is sim­ple. In many places around this coun­try and around the world, fran­chise films are now your pri­ma­ry choice if you want to see some­thing on the big screen.”

Super­hero movies have dom­i­nat­ed the mar­ket, edg­ing out oth­er kinds of films with oth­er kinds of aspi­ra­tions. The “finan­cial dom­i­nance” of what Scors­ese calls “world­wide audio­vi­su­al enter­tain­ment” is “being used to mar­gin­al­ize and even belit­tle the exis­tence” of cinema—of small­er films that take cre­ative risks and are not com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed prod­ucts of mar­ket research and audi­ence test­ing for max­i­mum box-office con­sump­tion. Hav­ing grown up him­self in the Hol­ly­wood stu­dio sys­tem, Scors­ese doesn’t dis­miss film as a busi­ness, but he laments the loss of a “pro­duc­tive ten­sion” between “the artists and the peo­ple who ran the busi­ness.” With­out that ten­sion, the indus­try becomes an effi­cient, but inhu­man, machine.

It’s a prob­lem, in oth­er words, of a pow­er imbal­ance in which studios—vertically inte­grat­ed into mega-cor­po­ra­tions like Disney—push prof­it over most oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions. This severe­ly lim­its the risks they’re will­ing to take, and it push­es inde­pen­dent and exper­i­men­tal film­mak­ers fur­ther into the mar­gins, and out of the­aters alto­geth­er, where their works were meant to be seen. Net­flix and oth­er stream­ing ser­vices may open up unique oppor­tu­ni­ties, but they dimin­ish film by rel­e­gat­ing it to tele­vi­sion screens (and, worse, tablets and phones).

Scorsese’s argu­ment is only part­ly an aes­thet­ic one—he may object to Mar­vel movies on the grounds that they’re for­get­table and pre­dictable. But the pri­ma­ry con­cern he voic­es in his essay is a prob­lem of pro­por­tion. The Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Universe—like the vil­lain in Avengers: Endgame (which Scors­ese hasn’t seen)—threatens to take over and half-destroy the uni­verse of cin­e­ma in all its vari­ety of forms and expres­sions. It is large­ly suc­ceed­ing. “For any­one who dreams of mak­ing movies or who is just start­ing out, the sit­u­a­tion at this moment is bru­tal and inhos­pitable to art,” Scors­ese writes. “And the act of sim­ply writ­ing those words fills me with ter­ri­ble sad­ness.” Read his essay here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese to Teach His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Frank Zap­pa Explains the Decline of the Music Busi­ness (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness