Racism In Early American Film
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Racism In Early American Film
Racism in early American film is the negative depiction of racial groups, racial stereotypes, and racist ideals in classical Hollywood cinema from the 1910s to the 1960s. From its inception, Hollywood has largely been dominated by white male filmmakers and producers, catering to a predominantly white audience. Various techniques have been used to depict non-white characters including whitewashing and ethnic stereotyping. Themes of white supremacy and xenophobia are commonly found within these films, reflecting contemporary attitudes towards non-white groups, taking on different imagery as race relations shift. 1910s–1930s African American In February 1915, the film ''The Birth of a Nation'' by D.W. Griffith was released. The film depicted Ku Klux Klansmen as the saviors to the nation that bring back a stable government and uphold American values. The movie used actors in blackface to depict African Americans as mindless, lustful savages, portraying them as an active danger ...
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Classical Hollywood Cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking which became characteristic of American cinema between the 1910s (rapidly after World War I) and the 1960s. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide. Similar or associated terms include classical Hollywood narrative, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Old Hollywood, and classical continuity. For centuries, the only visual standard of narrative storytelling art was the theatre. Since the first narrative films in the mid-late 1890s, filmmakers have sought to capture the power of live theatre on the cinema screen. Most of these filmmakers started as directors on the late 19th-century stage, and likewise most film actors had roots in vaudeville (e.g. The Marx Brothers) or theatrical melodramas. Visually, early narrative films had adapted little from the stage, and their narratives had adapted very little from vaudeville and mel ...
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ...
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Myrna Loy
Myrna Loy (born Myrna Adele Williams; August 2, 1905 – December 14, 1993) was an American film, television and stage actress. Trained as a dancer, Loy devoted herself fully to an acting career following a few minor roles in silent films. She was originally typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp or a woman of Asian descent, but her career prospects improved greatly following her portrayal of Nora Charles in ''The Thin Man'' (1934). Born in Helena, Montana, Loy was raised in rural Radersburg during her early childhood, before relocating to Los Angeles with her mother in her early adolescence. There, she began studying dance, and trained extensively throughout her high school education. She was discovered by production designer Natacha Rambova, who helped facilitate film auditions for her, and she began obtaining small roles in the late 1920s, mainly portraying vamps. Her role in ''The Thin Man'' helped elevate her reputation as a versatile actress, and she reprised the ...
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Nick Lucas
Dominic Nicholas Anthony Lucanese (August 22, 1897 – July 28, 1982), known professionally as Nick Lucas, was an American jazz guitarist and singer. Known as the Crooning Troubadour, he was the first jazz guitarist to record as a soloist. His popularity during his lifetime came from his signature song "Tiptoe Through the Tulips". Career Lucas was born into an Italian family in Newark, New Jersey, United States. In 1922, at the age of 25, he gained renown with his hit renditions of "Pickin' the Guitar" and "Teasin' the Frets" for Pathé. In 1923, Gibson Guitars proposed to build him a concert guitar with a deeper body. Known as the "Nick Lucas Special," it became a popular model with guitarists such as Bob Dylan. It was this guitar's outline that was later used as the basis for the Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar. Also in 1923, he began recording for Brunswick and remained one of their exclusive artists until 1932. In 1929, Lucas co-starred in the Warner Bros. two-c ...
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The Show Of Shows
''The Show of Shows'' is a 1929 American pre-Code musical revue film directed by John G. Adolfi and distributed by Warner Bros. The all-talking Vitaphone production cost $850,000 and was shot almost entirely in Technicolor. ''The Show of Shows'' was Warner Bros.' fifth color film; the first four were ''The Desert Song'' (1929), ''On with the Show!'' (1929), ''Gold Diggers of Broadway'' (1929) and ''Paris'' (1929). (''Song of the West'' was actually completed by June 1929 but had its release delayed until March 1930). ''The Show of Shows'' featured most of the contemporary Warner Bros. film stars, including John Barrymore, Richard Barthelmess, Noah Beery Sr., Loretta Young, Dolores Costello, Bull Montana, Myrna Loy, Chester Conklin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tully Marshall, Nick Lucas, and Betty Compson. Overview The film was styled in the same format as the earlier Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film ''The Hollywood Revue of 1929''. The high budget of the film meant that although it pe ...
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Yellow Peril
The Yellow Peril (also the Yellow Terror and the Yellow Specter) is a racist, racial color terminology for race, color metaphor that depicts the peoples of East Asia, East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world. As a psychocultural menace from the Eastern world, fear of the Yellow Peril is racial, not national, fear derived not from concern with a specific source of danger from any one people or country, but from a vaguely ominous, Existentialism, existential fear of the faceless, nameless hordes of yellow people. As a form of xenophobia and racism, Yellow Terror is the fear of the Oriental, Other (philosophy), nonwhite Other; and a Racialism, racialist fantasy presented in the book ''The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy'' (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard. The racist ideology of the Yellow Peril derives from a "core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which developed during th ...
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Warner Oland
Warner Oland (born Johan Verner Ölund; October 3, 1879 – August 6, 1938) was a Swedish-American actor. His career included time on Broadway and numerous film appearances. He is most remembered for playing several Chinese and Chinese-American characters: Dr. Fu Manchu, Henry Chang in '' Shanghai Express'', and, most notably, Honolulu Police detective Lieutenant Charlie Chan in 16 films. Early years Oland was born in the village of Nyby, Bjurholm Municipality, Västerbotten County, Sweden. He claimed that his vaguely Asian appearance was due to possessing some Mongolian ancestry,Hanke, Ken. Charlie Chan at the Movies: History, Filmography, and Criticism'. McFarland & Company: Jefferson, North Carolina, 1989.LoBianco, Lorraine.Daughter of the Dragon Turner Classic Movies. though his known ancestry contains no indication that this was so.Swedish genealogist Sven-Erik Johansson has traced Ölund's ancestry back 5 generations/ref> When he was 13, Oland's family emigrated to the U ...
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The Mysterious Dr
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a v ...
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Fu Manchu
Dr. Fu Manchu () is a supervillain who was introduced in a series of novels by the English author Sax Rohmer beginning shortly before World War I and continuing for another forty years. The character featured in cinema, television, radio, comic strips and comic books for over 90 years, and he has also become an archetype of the evil criminal genius and mad scientist, while lending his name to the Fu Manchu moustache. Background and publication According to his own account, Sax Rohmer decided to start the Dr. Fu Manchu series after his Ouija board spelled out C-H-I-N-A-M-A-N when he asked what would make his fortune. Clive Bloom argues that the portrait of Fu Manchu was based on the popular music hall magician Chung Ling Soo, "a white man in costume who had shaved off his Victorian moustache and donned a Mandarin costume and pigtail". As for Rohmer's theories concerning "Eastern devilry" and "the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese," he seeks to give them intellectual credentials ...
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Chang Apana
Chang Apana (December 26, 1871 – December 8, 1933; ) was a Chinese-Hawaiian member of the Honolulu Police Department, first as an officer, then as a detective. He was acknowledged by Earl Derr Biggers as the inspiration for his fictional Chinese-American detective character, Charlie Chan. Early life Chang Ah Ping (鄭阿平) was born December 26, 1871 in Waipio, Oahu, Hawaii. Apana is a Hawaiianized version of the Chinese name ''Ah Ping''. His family moved back to China when he was 3, but Chang returned at the age of 10 to live with his uncle in Waipio. As an adult, Chang was fluent in Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, and Cantonese. He never learned to read, relying on his family to read newspapers and documents for him. In his youth, he worked as a paniolo (Hawaiian cowboy), starting in 1891, and it was as part of this job that he first began carrying a bullwhip on a regular basis. Three years later, Chang started working for the Hawaii Humane Society, which at the time was part ...
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Charlie Chan
Charlie Chan is a fictional Honolulu police detective created by author Earl Derr Biggers for a series of mystery novels. Biggers loosely based Chan on Hawaiian detective Chang Apana. The benevolent and heroic Chan was conceived as an alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu. Many stories feature Chan traveling the world beyond Hawaii as he investigates mysteries and solves crimes. Chan first appeared in Biggers' novels and then was featured in a number of media. Over four dozen films featuring Charlie Chan were made, beginning in 1926. The character, featured only as a supporting character, was first portrayed by East Asian actors, and the films met with little success. In 1931, for the first film centering on Chan, ''Charlie Chan Carries On'', the Fox Film Corporation cast Swedish actor Warner Oland; the film became popular, and Fox went on to produce 15 more Chan films with Oland in the title role. After Oland's death, American actor Sidney Tole ...
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East Asian People
East Asian people (East Asians) are the people from East Asia, which consists of China, Taiwan, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, and South Korea. The total population of all countries within this region is estimated to be 1.677 billion and 21% of the world's population in 2020. However, large East Asian diasporas, such as the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian diasporas, as well as diasporas of other East Asian ethnic groups, mean that the 1.677 billion does not necessarily represent an accurate figure for the numbers of East Asian people worldwide. The major ethnic groups that form the core of East Asia are the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Other ethnic groups of East Asia include the Ainu, Bai, Manchus, Mongols and other Mongolic peoples, Nivkh, Qiang, Ryukyuans, Tibetans, and Yakuts. Culture The major East Asian language families are the Sinitic, Japonic, and Koreanic families. Other language families include the Tibeto-Burman, Ainu languages, Mongolic, Tungusic, ...
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