| Film history and theory reveals that early 20th century American white filmmakers blatantly discriminated against the black body on screen. As film became popular in the first decades of the 20 th century, before black actors were cast for major Hollywood films, white actors perpetuated the degrading stereotypes of minstrelsy by performing in blackface, and mass-producing the black caricatures and stereotypes cultivated on the minstrel stage. Through the medium of dance and film, I investigate the potential to re-imagine the black body on the screen as one that contests inaccurate depictions of the black identity seen in early American films. I create a screendance that presents the moving body as raw, complex, intelligent, beautiful, and valuable through this interdisciplinary art form, and I attempt to dismantle images of the black body that present the black race as inferior to the white majority. I propose that screendance can be used to recreate these images and bring an authentic visibility to the black body that is rarely projected on the big screen. By analyzing images seen in early seminal films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind , I was able to discover both the overt and subtle racial aggressions towards black characters, and how those relationships vividly depicted the troubling truth behind race relations in America. |
