Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Oscar Micheaux. EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.
Belafonte’s character and the white male survivor (played
by Mel Ferrer) over the sole surviving woman (Inger
Stevens), who is white.
Of the three new black stars, only Poitier would
enjoy a long and varied career, one that would last for
decades. Dandridge’s was cut short by her death in 1965.
Belafonte, frustrated by the lack of roles, turned his
energy toward music and a more involved role in the
global human rights movement. Poitier became a
Hollywood icon and a popular star with audiences. He
was the first African American to receive an OscarÒ nomination for a leading role, in 1959 for his work in
The Defiant Ones (1958), and he would eventually win
the award for his performance in Lilies of the Field
(1963). His groundbreaking performances in films like
In the Heat of the Night (1967), in which he plays a
Philadelphia police detective who, in Mississippi to visit
his mother, works with the local racist sheriff to solve a
murder, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), in
which a seemingly liberal father is introduced to his
daughter’s fiancé, played by Poitier, foregrounded issues
of racism in American and the need for progress.
It was not until 1962 that an African American
director would be accepted in Hollywood, when the
renowned photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006)
African American Cinema
was contracted by Warner Bros. to direct the adaptation
of his autobiography, The Learning Tree. The film, a
sensitive and poetic drama completed in 1969, chronicles
the coming of age of a black teen in 1920s Kansas. It
influenced the theme of most subsequent African
American coming-of-age films, which, unlike their white
counterparts, do not focus on sexual initiation. Rather,
they center on the emergence of racial consciousness.
Melvin Van Peebles (b. 1932), noted for his work in
the independent realm, is also one of the earliest African
Americans to work within the Hollywood studio system,
securing a three-picture deal with Columbia Pictures
after the success of a film he made in France, Story of a
Three Day Pass, in 1967. His second film, his first in
Hollywood, was Watermelon Man (1970), a comedy
examining racism and its stereotypes. In the film, the
comedian Godfrey Cambridge plays a white bigot who
wakes one morning to discover his race has changed—to
black. That same year, United Artists released the first film
by the actor/playwright/activist Ossie Davis (1917–2005),
who would go on to direct four more feature films. Cotton
Comes to Harlem, an adaptation of the Chester Himes
crimenovelofthesamename.Itisunfortunatethatthis
film and those by Parks and Van Peebles are often misidentified,
commonly assumed to be a part of the film
movement known as blaxploitation (black exploitation).
The movie-viewing public often assumes incorrectly that
all black-themed films of the 1970s, regardless of origin,
style, or content, can be categorized as such. A close
examination of the period, however, reveals that there
were three major trends of African American filmmaking
during the 1970s: films produced within the Hollywood
system; films produced by exploitation studios, such as
American International Pictures (AIP); and another independent
movement—an aesthetically challenging cinema
politically grounded in issues of civil rights and the global
pan-Africanist movement.
THE FIRST BLACK RENAISSANCE
The decade of the 1970s represents a unique period in
American film history: it was the first time since the race
movies of the silent era that such a high volume of blackthemed
films played in commercial theaters, many of
them helmed by African American directors. The reception
of the early works by Parks, Van Peebles, and Davis,
by both critics and popular audiences, resulted in a new
acceptance of African American talent in Hollywood,
both in front of and behind the camera. Films moved
beyond the usual social problems to treat African
American communities more broadly, from comedies
about everyday life, teen films, and romance to biopics,
period films, and action thrillers. Though many noted
films that featured black actors and themes, such as
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 63