White Screens/Black Images

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Hollywood's representation of blacks has been consistently misleading, promoting an artificially constructed mythology in place of historical fact. But how, James Snead asks, did black skin on screen develop into a complex code for various types of white supremacist discourse? In these essays, completed shortly before his death in 1989, James Snead offers a thoughtful inquiry into the intricate modes of racial coding in Hollywood cinema from 1915 to 1985. Snead presents three major methods through which the racist ideology within film functions: mythification, in which black images are correlated in a larger sceme of semiotic valuation where the dominant I' needs the marginal other' in order to function effectively, marking, in which the color black is repeatedly over-determined and redundantly marked, as if to force the viewer to register the image's difference from white, and omission--the repetition of black absence from positions of autonomy and importance. "White Screens/Black Images" offers an array of film texts, drawn from both classical Hollywood cinema and black independent film culture. Individual chapters analyze "Birth of a Nation, " "King Kong, " Shirley Temple in "The Littlest Rebel" and "The Little Colonel, " Mae West in "I'm No Angel, " Marlene Dietrich in "Blonde Venus, " Bette Davis in "Jezebel, " the racism of Disney's "Song of the South, " and "Taxi Driver." Making skillful use of developments in both structuralist and post-structuralist film theory, Snead's work speaks not only to the centrality of race in Hollywood films, but to its centrality in the formation of modern American culture.