Race and the Struggle for Cinematic Meaning: Film Production, Censorship, and African American Reception, 1940-1960

Abstract

Using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, this dissertation traces the discursive channels for creating racial meaning in cinema, starting with reception and moving backward to production. I explore individuals and institutions that shaped Black representations in widely various films exhibited in the U.S. between 1940-1960, focusing on controversy that altered cinematic discourses relating to racial justice. I grant sustained attention to the role of Black audiences, film producers, industry self-regulation, state censorship, and exhibitors who ran Black movie theaters. In examining cultural context, I illustrate the differing cultural production processes and resonances of racial signification in independent and major studio features, as well as in shorts known as “Soundies.” Chapters 1 and 2 shed new light on patterns of Black response to spaces of exhibition and to films viewers linked with civil rights, by using a unique combination of oral histories from Richmond, VA, Baltimore, MD, and New York, NY and Black press sources. Chapter 3 examines state censorship, considered one of the most pernicious forms of cinematic restraint. I explore censorship’s racial politics in the North, South and in a Border state. Chapter 4 studies the racial politics of industry self-regulation through the Studio Relations Committee and the Production Code Administration, focusing specifically on self-regulation of the word “nigger,” Black stereotypes, lynching, social equality, and miscegenation. Chapter 5 investigates the role of film producers in pre-emptive censorship by assessing how Darryl F. Zanuck, Fox’s production head, acted as both agent and constraint upon the “miscegenation” film, Pinky, and No Way Out, one of the first race riot films. I conclude the project by tracing, from “encoding” to “decoding,” the textual history of The Well, a forgotten but historically-important film dealing with race riots that was independently produced by white men, Harry and Leo Popkin. I demonstrate how their cultural knowledge of Black life and loose directorial style encouraged actor and audience participation in determining meaning and, subsequently, galvanized countervailing forces of censorship and Black reception. This dissertation shows the value of historicizing the cinema by exploring moments—and spaces—of reception, censorship and production that richly produced meaning.