By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 20, 2005
THERE ARE several histories being told simultaneously in "Close Up in Black: African American Film Posters," on view at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center. The most obvious, yet probably the least intriguing, despite its at times kitschy entertainment value, is a history of 20th-century graphic design and popular taste. That history including nods to art deco; the lurid covers of 1940s pulp paperbacks (plus a throwback model featuring a Jheri-curled Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's 1994 "Pulp Fiction"); the austere, almost documentary sobriety of "The Great White Hope"; the leather-jacketed hero and funky '70s typography of "Shaft"; and the graffiti-inspired spunk of Spike Lee's 1986 "She's Gotta Have It."
Far more compelling, though, than the art history is the cultural history that the show illustrates, from posters advertising the "race movies" of the first half of the century -- uplifting films made for black audiences (and even occasionally by black filmmakers), yet free from the demeaning stereotypes common to Hollywood films of the day -- to posters for such acclaimed recent movies as Antoine Fuqua's 2001 "Training Day," which features an Oscar-winning performance by Denzel Washington as one especially bad cop, yet a cop whose badness has more to do with character than skin color. Compare this, for instance, with the 1940 "Son of Ingagi," the first all-black-cast horror talkie, in which the light-skinned hero stood in stark contrast to the dark-skinned villain (or the 1923 "Regeneration," which boasted a similar dichotomy).
The color-blindness of "Training Day" is, in a perverse way, progress, as the show rightly notes. Yet, as the show also notes, history is an ongoing thing, and the exhibition implies that it would be wise to keep one wary eye on the future, even as we cast one toward the past.
To this end, the show is accompanied by a video loop featuring clips of Washington, Sidney Poitier and Halle Berry accepting their Academy Awards during the 2002 Oscar telecast. (The same night Washington won his for "Training Day," Berry took the Best Actress prize for "Monster's Ball," while Poitier was given an honorary career achievement statuette.) In her acceptance speech, Berry refers to a door that "tonight has been opened" for all the "women of color" in the acting profession who will come after her.
Yet that's only one door, and it refers to the casting office door, and not to the door of the theater itself. For while you may open all the doors in the world that once barred African Americans from entry -- and as the show points out, there were plenty -- unless African Americans walk through those doors, what good is it being opened?
What I'm getting at is the still largely unspoken, de facto segregation that exists, even today, between the audience for certain films that are perceived as "black" and the audience for certain films that are perceived as "white" -- a segregation hinted at in the jokes host Chris Rock made during his opening monologue for the last Oscar ceremony, in which the comic poked fun at the difference between the audience for, say, "White Chicks" and "Million Dollar Baby." It's a divide perhaps best exemplified by the recent "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," a film that was almost universally panned by mainstream (read: white) critics, yet one that was so vociferously championed by its target (i.e., black) demographic that reviewer Roger Ebert chose to write a follow-up column addressing some of the black-white issues raised by his original, highly negative review.
Which is a more African American film? "The Color Purple," starring Whoopi Goldberg and based on the novel by Alice Walker, but directed by Steven Spielberg, or "Boyz N the Hood," John Singleton's film starring Cuba Gooding Jr.? The issue of, as the wall text puts it, "staying black," or of whether there might even be such a thing as what artist Kerry James Marshall has called the "black aesthetic" demands a quality of analysis conspicuously absent from "Close Up," an exhibition based on a collection of posters originally amassed by film scholar Edward Mapp and now in the possession of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library.
This is not to suggest that the show is lightweight or uncritical, but simply to point out that some of the questions "Close Up in Black" gives rise to are far more weighty than even it is prepared to answer.
CLOSE UP IN BLACK: AFRICAN AMERICAN FILM POSTERS -- Through July 28 at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center, 1100 Jefferson Dr. SW (Metro: Smithsonian). 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-357-1729). Open daily 10 to 5:30. Free.