Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (Volume 29)

by Cindy Patton

Though largely forgotten today, the 1949 film Pinky had a significant impact on the world of cinema. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film was a box office success despite dealing with the era’s most taboo subjects—miscegenation and racial passing—and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its African American star, Ethel Waters. It was also historically when a Texas movie theater owner showing the film was arrested for violating local censorship laws, his case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the censorship ordinance unconstitutional. In Cinematic Identity, Cindy Patton takes Pinky as a starting point to meditate on the critical reception of this and other “problem films” of the period and to explore the larger issues they raise about race, gender, and sexuality. It was films like Pinky, Patton contends, that helped lay the groundwork for a shift in popular understanding of social identity that was essential to white America’s ability to accept the legitimacy of the civil rights movement. The production of these films, beginning with 1949’s Gentleman’s Agreement, coincided with the arrival of the Method school of acting in Hollywood, which demanded that performers inhabit their characters’ lives. Patton historicizes these twin developments, demonstrating how they paralleled, reflected, and helped popularize the emerging concept of the liberal citizen in postwar America, and in doing so illustrates how the reception of projected identities offer new perspectives on contemporary identity politics, from feminism to the gay rights movement. Cindy Patton holds the Canadian Research Chair in Community Culture and Health at Simon Fraser University, where she is professor of women’s studies and sociology. Her books include Inventing AIDS, Fatal How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong, and Globalizing AIDS (Minnesota, 2002).

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (2007), Cindy Patton argues that problem films of the 1940s and 50s, particular with method acting, served as "a venue for working out the meaning and mode of representing authentic selfhood" (3). Particularly, these films, situated at the beginning of the civil rights movement, helped to develop perceptions of social identity, including perceiving universality and otherness (4). Unlike theorists who focus on performatives for identity construction, Patton is more interested in how we come to understand identity and interiority (11). (She also criticizes performativity theory for focusing too much on the individual and not "on the simultaneously reconstituting social university necessary to make a performative sensical" [137:]).

Thus, she focuses on the pedagogy of films such like Pinky that teach citizens to understand identity in certain ways. Problem films helped to "universalize" oppression, making the feelings understood in a way that everyone could understand. Thus, under the logic of method acting, only a black actor could have the experience to play a black character, but white audiences could understand the "authentic" relayed feelings of that character. This developed a new citizenship after World War II, one based on empathy and social cohesion instead of a war-based connection (22-23). Black bodies in film began to be understood as a signing racism, that as, as representing racism to white audiences (110).

Relating this empathy to national identity, Patton argues that queerness must involve a non-identification of sorts, a refusal of "political love" (43-46).