BGuthrie Photos: DC -- S. Dillon Ripley Center -- Exhibit: Close Up In Black

DC -- S. Dillon Ripley Center -- Exhibit: Close Up In Black:

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Description of Pictures: Close Up in Black: African American Film Posters
May 7, 2005 – July 28, 2005
Ninety framed film posters trace the history of the African American experience in the movie industry. From the golden age of "race movies" to the present, these artworks illuminate the impact of African Americans—performers, writers, designers, directors, and producers—on screen and behind the screens.
This exhibition is organized by the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture and SITES.

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[1] RIPBLK_050723_001.JPG	[2] RIPBLK_050723_009.JPG	[3] RIPBLK_050723_012.JPG
[4] RIPBLK_050723_020.JPG	[5] RIPBLK_050723_026.JPG	[6] RIPBLK_050723_029.JPG
[7] RIPBLK_050723_035.JPG	[8] RIPBLK_050723_039.JPG	[9] RIPBLK_050723_043.JPG
[10] RIPBLK_050723_047.JPG	[11] RIPBLK_050723_053.JPG	[12] RIPBLK_050723_058.JPG
[13] RIPBLK_050723_060.JPG	[14] RIPBLK_050723_068.JPG	[15] RIPBLK_050723_070.JPG
[16] RIPBLK_050723_075.JPG	[17] RIPBLK_050723_079.JPG	[18] RIPBLK_050723_082.JPG
[19] RIPBLK_050723_090.JPG	[20] RIPBLK_050723_095.JPG	[21] RIPBLK_050723_096.JPG
[22] RIPBLK_050723_100.JPG	[23] RIPBLK_050723_104.JPG	[24] RIPBLK_050723_111.JPG
[25] RIPBLK_050723_117.JPG	[26] RIPBLK_050723_120.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. RIPBLK_050723_020.JPG: Movie posters become artifacts, as time goes by. Like old films, they are clues from a bygone era. Some posters survive for films that have been lost, and then they are the rarest of evidence. Through the foresight of collector Edward Mapp, elements of American film history and African American culture, otherwise lost, endure in the posters shown here. "Close Up in Black: African American Film Posters" was developed and organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Margaret Herrick Library, and the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture. The exhibition film posters were selected from the Edward Mapp Collection of the Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS. Historian: Thomas Cripps, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Morgan State University. Consulting cultural historian: Clyde Taylor, Professor, New York University. Writer/editors: Robert D. Selim and John Styron.
2. RIPBLK_050723_026.JPG: The video is from the pioneering first full-length presentation film ever made -- D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", which openly supports the KKK.
3. RIPBLK_050723_029.JPG: Blaxploitation and Beyond: "Black Power" drowned out the chorus of integrated voices singing "We Shall Overcome." As economic hard times hit American cities, blacks and whites who could fled urban neighborhoods, and the mean streets got meaner. The universalist spirit of the crossover movie faded to black in a radically different genre of African American film -- dubbed "blaxploitation" by the trade paper Variety. Not since race movies had black audiences seen screen images addressed mainly to them, and often made by black directors and producers. Blaxploitation movies always wore two faces: though funded by major studios, they were irreverent, profane, and unwavering anti-white. The lone black heroes were urban outlaws triumphing against the evil "white system." The stories celebrated ghetto life, black history and style, and were marked by an aesthetic of cool, an insouciant attitude of walk and talk that said, "I'm black, I'm beautiful, and I'm free from 'the man.'" These movies filled urban theaters and made money. They echoed the turbulence of the times -- police dogs and fire hoses, tanks and tear gas, peace demonstrators shot down, and body bags flown home from Vietnam. They romanticized a corner of black life to the disservice of a richer and more sustaining African American culture. But there was more to the new wave of movies than killer thrillers. Their success opened the way for other cinematic sensibilities. More black women found roles as leading ladies and heroes. Black families in their neighborhoods became the center of human dramas.
4. RIPBLK_050723_035.JPG: Crossing Over: Postwar American was taken with the Modernistic aesthetic of art, architecture, and industrial design, but wasn't ready to embrace the social implications -- a universalism, an openness to crossing boundaries. The Civil Rights Movement contained some of the same tension; as it broke down the barriers of racial segregation, it also threatened racial identifies. In the 1950s, a black actor, Sidney Poitier, found a way to bridge two worlds. His characters were new black men for the movies, stoic in the face of racial hostility, but smart, resilient, and sure of themselves. Black audiences had a hero who reflected their humanity. White audiences had a fully dimensional black man through whom they could confront their own racial prejudice without feeling threatened. Hollywood had a vehicle to reach a broad integrated audience. For two decades, Poitier dominated the genre known as the "crossover" film. Sidney Poitier took a step forward for black actors in Hollywood, but it soon became clear that studios hoped that single step would be enough. When the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement ended in violence, black-themed movies began to show a harder edge.
5. RIPBLK_050723_043.JPG: Blaxploitation and Beyond
6. RIPBLK_050723_075.JPG: Fruits of War: Message Movies: During the Great Depression, black and white Americans endured economic hardships, though the suffering often struck African Americans first and hardest. In World War II, both battled an enemy driven in part by racism, though they fought and died in segregated units. Activists worked hard to make sure the irony was not missed -- how could America fight Hitler's racism abroad but blithely accept racism as custom and law at home? War propaganda was everywhere and laced with the language of tolerance and brotherhood. The spirit of equality, if not triumphant, was ascending in the national agenda. Hollywood -- pressured from the inside by producers and from the outside by groups led by the NAACP -- began to address racial injustice. The "message movie" was born; race movies lost their relevance and faded away. Film roles for blacks were broadened -- actors were no longer restricted to portraying entertainers and servants. In message movies, African American characters became central to the plot, serving as metaphors for the injustice of society. While these films did not look deeply into black life, they did bring American film a step closer to an honest depiction of race.
7. RIPBLK_050723_079.JPG: Budgets:: Budgets for African American films were tiny compared to those for movies from Hollywood. This inevitably limited the artistic options and technical quality of many independent films. Tight budgets also left little money to support the design and printing of the movies' promotional materials. Nonetheless, many of the posters and graphics for independent black films of the 1920s and 1930s are of the highest artistic quality. Several on view here are fine representatives of the Modernist trend in the graphic arts in the first decades of the 20th century. They avoid the melodramatic air of much Victorian art and show elegant and often adventurous typographic experimentation, dizzying perspectives, and sophisticated lithographic techniques.
8. RIPBLK_050723_090.JPG: "Better than White Voices": In the late 1920s, movies began to talk. Technology heralded the Modern Age. The rhythm of the era was jazz. The music, dance, comedy and verbal sophistication of African American culture filled clubs, dance halls, theaters, and streets in cities across the country. New York's Harlem became synonymous with the richness of African American culture. The romance and exoticism of this creative energy lured white patrons to urban, black neighborhoods. The Modernist urge to cross cultural lines pushed aside traditional taboos. Black music was making a hit on Broadway. Black subject matter won Pulitzer Prizes. "Black" had begun to matter in urbane white circles. Sound film only broadened the reach of this sophisticated and appealing culture and art. Race filmmakers made dozens of "talkies" for black urban audiences. At the same time, in Hollywood, a trickle of films starring black actors and actresses began to appear. Many African American artists and activists hoped that the presence of black actors in these sound films would open a way for black people and culture to be accepted as American.
9. RIPBLK_050723_100.JPG: Black-owned companies: Between 1910 and 1950, more than 150 independent film companies were established to make "race movies.," Most were short-lived. Roughly a third of these companies were owned and operated by African Americans. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles may have been the most promising of the early black-owned firms. Noble Johnson, an actor in Hollywood, enlisted the help of several other African Americans to establish the company in 1916. He also starred in the first three of Lincoln's films. The company released at least a half-dozen well-received movies that presented black characters free of humiliating stereotypes. But Lincoln, like most others, succumbed to financial pressures in only a few years and closed in 1923. The Micheaux Film Corporation, founded in 1918, was the only black-owned independent film company that produced films into the late 1930s. Its long life was due to its namesake, Oscar Micheaux, a tireless producer, director, fundraiser, promoter, salesman, manager, screenwriter, and author. His goal, in his own words, was "to uplift the race."
10. RIPBLK_050723_117.JPG: Race Movies: In 1915, when D.W. Griffith released "The Birth of a Nation," a new nation really was being born. Griffith's film warned of he horror of an integrated nation and romanticized an idyllic Southern paradise -- ruled by whites and served by African Americans. But outside the theater, the new nation just coming into being was Northern, black, urban, and growing in influence. In the early decades of the 20th century, African Americans streamed to Northern cities. They moved north to escape harsh working conditions and to fill the demand for industrial workers brought on by World War I. They left the South to avoid restrictive laws and vigilante violence -- by 1920 thousands had died in lynchings and burnings. In the same era, film had begun to exert its extraordinary culture-shaping power. Yet, there was no authentic African American voice. Emmett J. Scott, secretary to educator and political leader Booker T. Washington, proposed a movie that would reflect "that indefatigable something I shall call the colored man's viewpoint." His initial project failed, but let to the first major "race movie," "The Birth of a Race", in 1918, a direct response to Griffith's film. The many race movies that followed -- made by both black and white companies -- gave black actors, directors, and writers a place to find their own artistic voices. They showed African American audiences black heroes in westerns, comedies, and dramas. Race movies became the first projections of black people women into this new American mythology.
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