The new Walt Disney Studios’ animation The Little Mermaid’s live action, released in May, brought up multiple discussions once the protagonist chosen is Halle Bailey, a 23-year-old black actress and singer. The lack of black representativeness in the cinema industry has been required for decades and now, a new public tuned to racial issues, united mainly by social media, contests this scenario and defends that the erasure of minorities from movie screens is not something acceptable anymore.
Why can we not be enough?
A historical background of the film industry can easily clarify the reason why black representativeness is so essential for people to fight for. Since the 19th century, the initial “appearance” of black people in movie screens was in white bodies, with the use of Blackface: ridiculed characters stuck in a comic and mocking storyline.
As time went by, black people stood up for producing their own films for themselves, the race films. Those ones emerged in 1915s, from independent companies, in response to stereotyped roles, that highlighted black people as complex and worthy, bypassing the Jim Crow laws at the time, a system imposed in the Southern United States that legalized racism, segregating the white population from the “colored” ones in public spaces, restricting their attitudes and access to opportunities. This doctrine lasted until 1965, and even Hattie McDaniel, the first black woman to win an Oscar for playing a maid in Gone with the Wind (1939), needed a special permission to enter the theater and attend the ceremony in the state of California.
Moreover, in the 1970s, the movement Blaxploitation reinforced ideologies in favor of black people, pointing out social criticism to trigger the audience.
The Brazilian filmmaker, Larissa Fulana de Tal, a black woman who owns an audiovisual business, reminded the importance of humanization: “That’s to understand that representativeness is the place of humanity. It is to break this place of object. It means that we do not want to treat people and characters superficially. The maid is only the maid, she is nothing more, has no desires or dreams. We want the right to humanity and black characters to have this right to be multiple.”
Even nowadays, according to the latest Hollywood Diversity Report, an annual study from UCLA (University of California), people of color in theatrical releases compose only 22 percent of lead actors, 17 percent of directors and 12 percent of writers, compared to streaming environments. Also, the research demonstrates an absence of women in the industry.
More than just “representation”
The fact that Hollywood productions such as Spider Man: Into The Spider Verse or The Little Mermaid can be remade and represented by black people, and they were, does not mean that the opposite can happen.
A film with a huge proportion such as Marvel’s Black Panther cannot be replaced by a white cast because it changes an ancestral narrative and discredits the black struggle. It is necessary to understand that those stories show the strength and resistance of a people that has been slaughtered, humiliated and neglected historically. Black strength is built by not just the color, but the fact that, besides everything black people have suffered, they still can be on big movie screens around the world connecting with an audience based on embodying identity and ancestry’s pride.
The substitution of white characters does not offend the white race or its ethnic history, but enhances the sense of existence of the black ones. “Chaos is necessary for new orders and I think we do this when we occupy everything, every place… in academia, in criticism, in front of screens or behind screens. It’s actually a new perspective of making cinema”, said Larissa.
A reflection: the real industry’s intentions
On the other hand, it is possible to reflect on the possibility of lucrative intentions behind the black representation.
Social media campaigns have raised a public that constantly presses the Hollywood industry for changes in movie casts, and in The Academy Awards, Oscar, for more diversity. In 2016, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite got all over the internet and leaked out to the public eye.
In addition, the film director Larissa bothers to emphasize that the cinematographic structure does not belong to the black people, once the perspective and the narratives can only change if black people are present in spaces of creating and directing, wondering if all of this may be merely performative: “We have to keep saying, proving that we exist and this is agonizing“. Larissa explains that it is a constant dispute for the symbolic: when values placed by society are recognized.
To support the sense of black protagonism in front of the cameras, it is necessary that there are more of these people behind them in decision-making positions. For instance, Larissa affirms that representation is much deeper than what is only seen on the screens, mentioning The Little Mermaid’s live action’s director as Rob Marshall, a white man.
Adapting the term “pink money”, from the LGBTQ+ community, she associated the advantageous business of embracing the diversity idea to the mercantilism of minority groups: “No one will care that the director is white and that the whole team might also be because the industry has already understood what gives money. It’s the same discussion that the LGBTQIAP community raises with the idea of “pink money”. They bring the ‘black money’ version and this becomes contradictory because the structure does not circulate through us”.
In addition to that perception, Larissa notices features of a system that has used black bodies to its own benefits: “So they don’t talk about us just to be winning with our bodies. Then, it would be that idea of the new form of colonization, neocolonialism, which is cultural. They have won with our bodies, with our culture and we still do not earn anything, because the money does not return to us in any way”.
The cinema as a social construction
It is not possible to dissociate a movie from its historical background. Larissa defined the cinema as “a blade well mirrored between reality and the world”, once she advertised the complexity of portraying the likelihood.
The movie The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, depicted the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan as heroic figures, demonizing black people as bestial and wicked, mainly with the use of Blackface. As a consequence, many of those groups returned to being active. Around the 1930s, the cinema had a political influence on the masses with the rise of Nazism, building a sense of patriotism.
Moreover, Larissa highlighted the film City of God (2002) and the Netflix drama TV serie When They See Us (2019) to explore the social impact that the audiovisual may cause: “This movie, for example, brought a very bad repercussion of thinking that the reality of the City of God, a real city in Rio de Janeiro, was just that: crime and violence. On the other hand, we will see a movement of the series When They See Us, which managed to bring the judicial process of those young guys unjustly convicted, who had their lives mown down, to the surface.”
As a factor of a social transformation, when we are the spectators of a film are not aware of how intensively this can affect our lives. Larissa recognizes that the cinema uses the life and the daily perspective as raw material to create new narratives and new imaginaries and she explained that this factor hits black people when they begin to understand that there are many possibilities to exist, to see and imagine: “This place of imagination is very fundamental to our society because it is part of it that creates new ‘futures’, or ‘presents’. We are building ‘presents’ by reconstructing the past. Not only the cinema world, but art does that: it is a dance between times, which may not be as divided as we imagine.”
When black people see themselves on movie screens, they understand what they are capable of being in real life: what they want to be.
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The article above was edited by Isadora Costa.
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