Playing in the Dark

I take this title from Toni Morrison from a book in which she argues that American literature can be understood only by realizing the significance of a racialized other within the country, that shaped, animated, and impacted its literature. Thus a black presence, an enslaved presence, at the height of the American Renaissance, and a disenfranchised one in post-bellum times,provided an indispensable "surrogate" and "shadow" for white authors as they were defining a country's literature and identity. Similar concepts can easily be applied cinema, where after all the interplay of light and shadow predominates, and much groundbreaking research is currently being done in this very field, including a compelling work by Alice Maurice entitled The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema. Maurice, however, explores not simply the portrayal of blacks in these early days, but, more radically, how a racialized other shaped film technique, and continues to do so throughout film history.These are complex issues far beyond the scope of this blog, but it is impossible, even on the most superficial level,  to ignore how film noir (black film) so powerfully illustrates this racialized perspective suggested by both Morrison and contemporary film scholars.  I find it compelling to speculate that the dialectical interplay of shadow and light in these films , in their hyperbolic expressionism, render them so suitable  for a vast array of ideological/political interpretation (queer studies, gender, marxism etc)