AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN THE CINEMA
Foreward by Kwyn Bader
McFarland & Co. Publishers, Inc. 2003
"...your forward turned out to be an asset to the manuscript - thank you so much for your generosity and support...."
Dr. Norma Manatu, to Kwyn
FOREWARD BY KWYN BADER
One of the enduring frustrations for many citizens living in America is the great disparity between our nations promise and its behavior, between its word and its action. How does a country, whose humanistic ideals inspire great expressions of liberty and aspiration, dehumanize so many of its own with historic regularity? Nowhere is this national paradox more visually apparent than in our movies, reels of celluloid wonderment tapping into the shared subconscious of the culture, with central characters, viscerally representing us all, traversing an obstacle course of the spirit on their way towards change and higher consciousness. American movies are wanted everywhere in the world - to the extent that industries in once great filmmaking countries like Italy can no longer support such an enterprise, their citizens preferring Cameron to Bertolucci. Even those who are enemies of the U.S. obviously admire the spectacle of our cinema. The design and violence directed on New York in September of 2001, so obviously the stuff of the summer blockbuster, reflects that its perpetrators may hate America, but they sure as hell connect with American movies.
The problem is, that despite all its technical and creative wizardry, the Hollywood industry I work in has made only small advances in its development of non-white characters. Thank God for Denzel Washington, who is a phenomenon of talent, able to cultivate part after part with Robert Duvall - and Robert DeNiro - like levels to huge mainstream box office success. But try to get a black cast movie off the ground when it's not a laugh-a-minute comedy that doesn't have Washington. Even if the screenplay is well crafted and fits in a tired and true commercial genre - let's say even if the most prominent black filmmaker in the world is on board to produce it for you. Just try it. I'm doing it right now.
"We don't know how to market that."
It's not pretty. And while the depictions of any multi-level, fully dimensional characters (the understanding of which expands our sense of the American and human experience) are few in movies at large (which is why the actors who play those few characters usually get nominated for Oscars), when it comes to black women, these depictions are virtually nonexistent. Dr. Norma Manatu's writing seeks, through its comparison of depictions of black women by black and white male directors, to demonstrate the extent to which American films have failed a significant segment of the country's female population, forbidding its members parts in films that might present them, for good or for bad, as fully realized beings with universally accessible stories and experiences.
As a screenwriter and director I have the unique opportunity to believe daily in that which isn't and that which hasn't been, since it's the spirit of the unrealized that I let run about in my imagination. It is an innately hopeful state of being. So there's never been a film with a four-eyed neurotic bi-racial antihero in a French New Wave-inspired American film with a multi-racial cast that's only concerned with each other's differences when it comes to attitudes on sex and love. There's one running around in my mind. I'll write it. Direct it. It might be five years in gestation, but during that time the movie I feel sustains me. When I do make it and it finds its way into the world, re-running on cable somewhere, it's butter on the toast. Though insecure, off-balance, and often lacking in sustaining capital, it is, I admit, in its nourishing escapism, a charmed existence.
But any woman or man who doesn't live the life of a mad-brained filmmaker can view only what has already been made, and for that matter, only what has been distributed on a mass level. She or he does not have the irrational comforts of the films that could be, but must watch the movie that really is playing in the local cineplex, searching for someone in the action to relate to and live through. And the films that have been made with female actresses in American cinema generally depict characters which conscious, multi-dimensional black women cannot find themselves in, which instead offer incomplete projections that neither they nor anyone else can fully relate to. Most people accept that this is just the way things are, or they don't pay attention, or they may criticize without offering any constructive advice, or they may concentrate on inspiring exceptions to the rule.
Dr. Manatu, however, exhibits the courage to stare the monster in the face, and in a comprehensive study, to look at the history and current state of affairs, with the foreknowledge that what's she going to see cannot make her feel good. She has gone ahead and done the hard, dirty investigative work needed for critical understanding of race and American cinema. African-American Women and Sexality in the Cinema offers the type of evolved, challenging, and direct thought that must be engaged in by cineastes, movie viewers, actors and filmmakers (and even, by some miracle, industry executives) if we are to share more intelligent, aware and meaningful cinema. I hope that her words find an interested audience in you, the reader, and I offer best wishes that the sentiments expressed here may find their way, either now or eventually, into the national dialogue on film.