Black and White States: Race in American Cinema, 1915–1991
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation—which opens the Black and White States series—cost $110,000. At the time, the average production cost was around $10,000. Films typically ran between fifteen and several dozen minutes; Griffith’s work lasted over three hours. Most stories were told using no more than a hundred shots; The Birth of a Nation contains more than one and a half thousand.
Americans of all social classes wanted to see what is often considered the first blockbuster in history. Film crews, accompanied by an orchestra, would travel from town to town, set up chairs in the largest available space—often a barn—sell out every screening, and move on. The film toured the United States for five years. Fifty million tickets were sold.
“The worst thing about this film is that it’s so good”, wrote a critic a century after its release. Griffith portrayed Black Americans as savages threatening the nation. The film inspired William J. Simmons to revive the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1920, in response to The Birth of a Nation, Oscar Micheaux—one of the most prolific of the few Black filmmakers of the time—made Within Our Gates. The film includes a lynching scene involving an alleged Black rapist, only to reveal, through a series of flashbacks, that the assailant was in fact white.
However, few people were interested in Micheaux’s films. For most of its history, Hollywood was white. Studios run by white businessmen produced films about white people in a white world, written by white screenwriters, starring white actors, and directed by white directors. On film sets, Black workers were relegated to manual labor, hauling cables and equipment. Black Americans had their own music, poetry, and literature; their own theaters and cabarets, newspapers and magazines; their own fashion, churches, and leaders. But they did not have their own cinema. You can’t make a movie the way you write a poem. It takes money—money that was simply not available in the ghetto.
The path for Black filmmakers was paved by Hattie McDaniel (Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind, 1939), by Sidney Poitier, the first African American leading man, and by the directors of 1970s blaxploitation cinema, which targeted Black audiences. Spike Lee’s emergence in the following decade marked the beginning of contemporary Black cinema.
The films presented in this section at the Timeless Film Festival Warsaw—The Birth of a Nation, In the Heat of the Night, Shaft, Mississippi Burning, Do the Right Thing, and Boyz n the Hood—offer insight into the process of racial emancipation in both society and on screen. Boyz n the Hood, the final film in the section, directed by John Singleton and produced thanks to the persistence of Stephanie Allain, grossed ten times its budget. Its success among both Black and white audiences attests to the evolution that has taken place—and continues to unfold—in North America and in American cinema.
Maciej Jarkowiec – section curator, author of “Na bulwarach czyhają potwory. Filmowa historia Ameryki”
The festival is co-financed by the City of Warsaw, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Polish Film Institute.
The festival’s main partners are the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute (FINA), the Gutek Film, and the New Horizons Association.
The festival is co-organized by the Documentary and Feature Film Studios (WFDiF) and the Mazovia Institute of Culture.