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Tag: Bill Robinson

  • Race in Film: Stormy Weather

    **This video was made specially for Roger Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents. That is why my mug is in it. Now you can see all the facial expressions you could only dream of before… and I apologize now for the state of my hair.**

    The first thing you must realize about Stormy Weather before anything else, is that it is not real.

    Of course it isn’t real in the sense that it is a narrative film and as such it is fiction, but it is unreal in another way. It is a  romanticization of African American life offering one-dimensional characters without nuance– in “response” to the one dimensional un-nuanced characters in other films.

    The movie opens as famous dancer Bill Williamson (Bill Robinson) receives a magazine in his honor “celebrating the magnificent contribution of the colored race to the entertainment of the world during the past twenty five years.” This prompts him to reminisce about his career and courtship of the beautiful singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne). The plot however, is of little importance. The film is primarily a vehicle for famous black talent in music and dance. These are glamorous blacks in romantic and dramatic leads. Blacks with sex appeal. Blacks with their own storyline.

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  • Race in Film: Swing Time & Shall We Dance

    *This video includes clips and commentary for both “Swing Time” and “Shall We Dance”, so don’t turn it off after the Bojangles number! Also my voice cracks a lot in a weird way… I guess I’m becoming a real man.*

    This, more than any previous Race in Film post, gets to the nitty gritty of the whole series, and I am very nervous.

    It might be strange to get timid nine posts in, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what I am comfortable talking and not talking about.

    Judy Garland is fair game, but Fred Astaire… Fred Astaire…

    He is the man that makes my knees lose themselves.

    I am in love with his high waisted pants, his receding hairline, and his feeble chin. He is supremely comforting. Like a Danny Kaye five thousand times more poised. My idolization is so great I suspect I unconsciously chose my first teenage boyfriend because he bore a striking resemblance to the man (but no trace of his panache).

    Can you find offense with a film and still love it with all your heart? I think so… but it’s not fun.
    There is a tendency, when someone suggests something might be offensive, for people to swarm in and point out all the reasons why it isn’t and could never be, before considering how it could be perceived that way. So, you are immediately alienated.

    The need to belong, as uncool an admission as it is, is primal. There is safety in numbers. Good times to be had inside fun rooms. Jokes and laughing. Knowingness. A supreme and rare silence: evidence of comfort not unease. Being in is good. Being out is constant navigation. Talking about race in well loved movies places you firmly “out”.

    I don’t even want to talk about it with myself.

    You dirty whore. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you even know? You’re betraying Fred. That’s what you’re doing. And after all he’s done for you. Congrats on ruining everything. Have a nice life. I’m out!

    Says a voice in my mind.

    It’s a wispy voice this voice. It doesn’t carry much weight. But still it’s there flitting around like a vulgar gnat. A testament perhaps to a unhealthy dependency on RKO musicals. Rationally, I understand it’s ridiculous, but anxiety remains. I feel a real hesitancy in saying anything vaguely critical about Astaire. Like a member of my family. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, or disrupt our merry relationship. I’d like to keep Fred completely and totally untarnished. Perfect in every way…

    But to do that I’d have to completely ignore his “Bojangles of Harlem” routine in the 1936 film Swing Time directed by George Stevens, and choreographed by Astaire and long time collaborator Hermes Pan.

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