When he was a seventh-grader in Michigan, the teen-ager who would grow up to become Malcolm X went to the movies to see "Gone With the Wind." Many years later, he recounted what happened:"I was the only Negro in the theatre, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug," he wrote in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."Fast-forward to Sacramento, Calif., in 2008 and the controversy over a planned screening of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at a free-movies-in-the-park series sponsored by City Councilman Steve Cohn.Asian-American activists protested Mickey Rooney's 1961 portrayal of the character Mr. Yunioshi as racist. Rooney, as the often-irritated neighbor of Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly, wears grotesque buck teeth and adopts absurdly "Asian"-accented English.Both incidents point to a wider problem that movie fans have when viewing older Hollywood films that were made when racial and ethnic stereotypes -- both virulent and more benign -- were commonplace.Thanks in part to the civil-rights movement, many Americans are now more aware of and sensitive to images and portrayals that demean racial minorities. Yet controversies continue over the depiction of some ethnic groups -- Muslims in particular -- in modern films and TV shows.This also poses a particular concern for parents who don't want to ignore the onscreen racism and stereotypes to which their children are exposed.Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's public defender and a documentary filmmaker, wrote and directed "The Slanted Screen," about the portrayal of Asian and Asian-American characters in Hollywood films."The Mr. Yunioshi character is a textbook example of a racist caricature," says Adachi. "The only purpose that he serves in the movie is to laugh at him."Pat Hanson, a film historian at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, points out that "historically, there are many films that have racial portrayals that we would now consider very inappropriate."Some from the 1930s and '40s, for example, included performances by African-American actors such as Stepin Fetchit, Fred "Snowflake" Toones and Butterfly McQueen that many now consider stereotyped and demeaning. And other films, says Hanson, featured "little throwaway scenes where somebody dons blackface."Patricia Turner, a professor of African and African-American studies at the University of California-Davis, goes back even further in time. "African-Americans have been dealing with this since the circulation of 'Birth of a Nation' in 1915," says Turner. D.W. Griffith's film, which is considered a milestone in moviemaking technique but which features evil blacks (portrayed by white actors in blackface) and noble white KKK members in the post-Civil War era, "faced boycotts even at the time it was released."The controversy over the portrayal of racial and ethnic minorities is also as recent as 1999's release of "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," which introduced the character Jar Jar Binks. Peter X. Feng, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and co-host of the Turner Classic Movies series "Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film," says "a lot of people thought that George Lucas' Jar Jar was subliminally a lazy Jamaican. And the trade guild that was causing the problems (in the movie) was Japanese-accented."UC-Davis' Turner sees the recent spotlight shone on "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as providing "teachable moments" -- where "the current population and community has an opportunity to see what kind of racism was taken for granted and was accepted years ago.""One of the things that happens in a university classroom is that we encounter students who don't quite get what kinds of ethnic stereotyping existed in the past, who don't get the way racism was manifested in popular culture," Turner says.You can point out, she says, that "an actress of the caliber and stature of Audrey Hepburn didn't protest saying these lines and having this relationship with Mickey Rooney. I think it helps students understand a little bit of what their Asian grandparents had to endure in the 1960s when something like that was acceptable."Turner adds that the same "teachable moments" occur when students see "Amos & Andy" or the Frito Bandito -- stereotyped black and Latino characters, respectively.Discussing such matters in the classroom can be difficult, Turner says, because "painful things are a part of our past."Yet teaching a course on World War II, for example, requires that one talk about the treatment of Jews in concentration camps. That's particularly painful for Jewish students, Turner acknowledges, "but it doesn't mean that you get to erase it. It needs to be handled in a responsible way."Several years ago, Warner Home Video chose to deal directly with offensive imagery from the past when it released a volume in the "Looney Tunes: Golden Collection" series featuring cartoons from the 1930s through the 1950s.Whoopi Goldberg was recruited to introduce the cartoons, and she pointed out that while the cartoons were historically important and well-loved, they also conveyed humor that, while once commonplace, is now seen as insensitive or harmful to racial minorities and women.Another approach was taken by TCM and Feng in their "Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film" series."We showed upwards of 40 films in eight nights, and the whole series was about context," Feng says. The series included movies with Asian or Asian-American actors as well as films in which white actors portrayed Asians -- such as the Charlie Chan movies of the 1930s and '40s starring the Swedish-born actor Warner Oland. "So we had a lot of time to talk about those kinds of things."That brings us back to the recent controversy in Sacramento over the city-sponsored screening of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Mickey Rooney, now 87, told the Sacramento Bee he was heartbroken about the criticism of his portrayal. He also said that in the more than 40 years since "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was released, he's received "not one complaint."In response to the criticism, Cohn at first said he was unaware of the movie's racist overtones and would edit them out. He later decided to cancel the screening entirely.For Turner, the dispute "just increases the responsibility of the people showing the film to provide an opportunity for dialogue and contextualization."Adachi notes: "I can certainly see a change in terms of a greater willingness to address these issues. In the past, it has been more a problem that was swept under the rug -- either not discussed at all or minimally considered or dismissed."The idea is not that Asian-Americans are thought police or have anointed themselves as politically correct monitors," Adachi says. "It's just that these types of portrayals are no longer acceptable, even in a classic movie."(Contact Bruce Dancis at bdancis(at)sacbee.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Post new comment