real message is that you must fit into the iron-cast American family values. I can't go into the whole analysis the students gave, which was brilliant, but they illustrated time after time that same message: know your place in American society.
They also noticed that when the white people were making love or kissing each other or just being romantic, the scene was always filmed like a deodorant commercial: very pristine images were used; the lovers never really did anything outrageous with each other; it was all soft focus. Now when the black people were being romantic, that was all in the dark, half hidden, and filmed in an entirely different way. When you saw naked people, you saw black people. The white ladies were always
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kind of dressed upnot the black; the producers used them to provide sexual titillation. But the values about knowing your place and conforming, the celluloid was dripping with that.
I also talked with them about cutting rhythms and production decisions. I asked them to really look at the role of actors, and at the pat narrative structure, with the violins playing and the guy coming back home after twenty years away from his slave family and the tears, the synthetic tears, rolling down the faces of the black ladies. It's puke-making. I really can't look at a narrative film anymorenot one with these traditional rhythms going on. The manipulation is so obvious and so patent. I got the students to think about what these rhythms might be doing in terms of their perception of history, their perception of themselves, and their sensitivity to the black and white issue.
We didn't meet Alex Haley, but we met his counterpart in
Gerald Green. He came along and spoke; we were lucky to get him. Everything I've said about
you could say about
. The people who make these shows are so proud of their research, but when you start to press them about it, they back off immediately and say, 'Well, you know, we're not doing documentary; we're making a show; we're making drama; we never pretend that we're being historians.' But they do! The Learning Corporation of America, the distributor of
is constantly saying in the blurbs that this
reality, this
accuracy, that it represents an incredibly high academic standard, that this is for people who don't have time to read anymore. I remember Green saying, well, we don't think of ourselves as historians; this is entertainment. It's fantastic the way these people yo-yo between the two. As soon as you hold them to some responsibility for what they're doing, they do a quick Pontius Pilate and say no, no, we're only entertainers.
Well, I think they feel proud because they've done
research; most TV is entirely fantasy.
And unfortunately it's just that that allowed
to scrape through in America, because it was the first timewhich just proves the absolutely appalling standard of American televisionthe
time anything on the subject had even been seen. According to most people I've talked with, black people welcomed it with open arms. But in my opinion, it is overt racism of a most virulent form, to take the suffering of the slave experience and the suffering of the whole experience of being black in America today and wrap it up in this conservative, if not neofascist, schmaltz! I would go so far as to say that to put the black experience into a conventional narrative structure is racisttoday. Because you are feeding it into a language that neutralizes it. How many people say, 'I can't even remember the film I saw last night.' You put the slave experience through the same rhythms as
and
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[1970] and . . . well, I think that's a real problem now. And the other problem is that few people are even criticizing this phenomenon.
How do you account for the fact that
was so popular? I believe some episodes had the largest audiences in the history of American TV. Do you think that's a function of people's hunger to deal with that issue?
I don't know what goes on in the minds of other people. All I can do is guess. I think it's certainly partly what you said; in fact, it must be very strongly what you just saidespecially on the part of black people. I regret to say I also think it is part of the whole attraction that film has these days for people. I think we're on a high as far as film is concerned, but I think this high is going to break sooner or later, because the rhythms are getting faster, and people are being overstimulated by more and more audiovisual stuff now. I think it's got to break sooner or later. But I also speculate whether the Hollywood people have found a pattern of rhythms that from a film language point of view simulates a kinetic experience. You've got so much happening; the cutting is going so rapidly; you've got so many climaxes; you never have silence; you have dialogue thrown backwards and forwards, cut, response, cut, response, whang, climax, car chase, violence; you're hauled around, cutting, cutting, cutting. I'm beginning to think we're being attracted to television and cinema by a kind of flicker.
It's kinetic enough to keep you watching, without getting you deeply involved.
I think it's important to keep throwing one's mind over one's shoulder to the cinema. I'm getting to be more
