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The Films of Spencer Williams

1978; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3041505

2326-1536

Thomas Cripps,

Art History and Market Analysis

In recent years of Spencer Williams have attracted increasing critical attention of sort usually reserved for members of Hollywood underground, such as European emigres Edgar G. Ulmer and Hugo Haas. Williams's admirers, unlike many cultists, approach his work with a cool conviction rather than shrill and blameless praise. Among most persuasive are filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his student Jim Hoberman. But they are not alone. Atlanta's High Museum gave a session of its black film festival to Williams's work. And currently, at least two filmmakers and producers are scouting opportunities to memorialize his work in compilation films. If this trend-not to say movement-persists, it must be said that Williams's work cannot be taken as typical canon of works to which authorship theories are often applied. Usually, work of directors such as Ulmer, Howard Hawks, or Raoul Walsh, those filmmakers whose work has been taken as proof of utility of authorship theory, has been considered successful in proportion to degree of resistance from corporate Hollywood. That is to say, their contain elements that studio executives for marketing or other considerations preferred left out. Indeed, this presumed antagonistic cooperation between director and studio offices is at heart of much authorship theory. The result of a lifetime of conflicts, authorship theorists insist, is a corpus of on which director's personal signature is placed in small ways, characteristic moods, points of view, and formulas. Especially for American filmmakers, artistic success has been viewed as director's personal or political victory-often a small and half-hidden one. In Williams's case, few of these preconditions that inspired authorship theories affected his films. On contrary, Williams, being of Afro-American descent in period between World Wars, found himself excluded from studios merely by customary rules of racial etiquette and not by artistic considerations. Therefore, we must examine Williams's not as work of shrewd insider who manipulated his studio against its will to produce art in spite of itself, but rather as outsider so far removed from basic techniques of Hollywood production that he must be regarded as a genuine primitive. In other words, for our purposes Williams is not Van Gogh breaking with canons of taste and aesthetics, but rather Rousseau or Edward Hicks, whose art emerged from simply not knowing how to paint in conventional ways. Of course, if Williams's work contributed to a black genre of film it was composed of more than primitivism. In order to understand this point, black genre film must be seen through an of its parts. Self-evidently, because makers of black genre film have historically been inspired by some social motive, we must expect that traits that shaped black genre must emerge more from social concerns than from aesthetic standards. For example, parts that compose whole of black genre films, even if they were to take up some white theme, spoke from a segregated social point of view. Their repertoire of symbols included derivatives from black folk culture. We might expect black film to use a hyperbolic streetfolk idiom or various aloof masks that Robert Farris Thompson called the aesthetic of cool. A more pastoral movie might rest on anecdotal bits from rural legends of tricksters and natural men. Both symbolic content and point of view of race movies were given a sense of moral urgency by a tone of advocacy and even special pleading that might seem out of place in a white movie. Black genre film also conveyed shared experiences, some of which, however, had not touched all members of audiences with same intensity or frequency. Therefore, black genre films often employed literary device of anatomy -a means of understanding whole subject through description of its parts. All good genre film acts out a ritual that celebrates some myth, some value-impregnated tale that is truer than mere truth, such as American success myths and fundamentalist salvationism. Finally, a black genre film would include heroic figures that range from earthy pastoral Southerners to picaresque urban hustlers. The critic is drawn inevitably to those Williams films that were most preciously his own because they were black genre films shot outside of constraints of Hollywood convention and technique. Yet, even his race movies, those films made for exclusive consumption of black audiences, must be viewed with restraint, for in many cases he merely contributed to work of other filmmakers. From beginning to end, his career was like that of Orson Welles-made discontinuous by long spells spent at merely earning a living. From Hollywood in 1920s as script doctor at Al Christie's studio and in front of camera in conventional black bits as supernumeraries until late in his professional life when he hooked on with Amos 'n' Andy, a television version of a popular radio program in which players were presumed to be in blackface, Williams spent himself in pursuit of odd jobs. We have left only a half-