PASSING: A FETISH OF REEL LIFE (pt. 2) - CELLULISM: Race, Shade, Identity & Celluloid

written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

(left to right) Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934) and Douglas Sirk’s version in 1959

FILMS ARE NOT HISTORY LESSONS, nor should they be. That’s not what’s wrong with them but what’s right about them. Drama is about the acts, not the facts. And with good art, truth comes through in the shape of a lie.

The problem is we seem to think movies can replace a decent history teacher and plumb deeper than a dignified debate. Imani Perry’s lionizing of Rebecca Hall’s direction (foolishly, she lauds the film’s “Black gaze”!) is intriguing to me.  I am more concerned about what she would say about Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life,  Julie Dash’s Illusions or John Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows.  

Each film is different and employs racial existentialism and self-possession all quite differently, but in Cassavetes beatnik soap opera – a light skinned African American character (played by Leila Goldoni) who is at home with her Blackness (she doesn’t have a hang-up about it) is traumatized not by what she cannot be or is – but what OTHERS are. Realizing she has been dating a racist (he freaks out when he discovers she’s Black), her world is turned upside-down. A rite-of-passage moment becomes a sadly quotidian event in Cassavetes’ film, with the darker-toned eldest brother Hugh trying to not overwhelm or destroy everything for his sister. He knows she will get over it, that she and their light-skinned middle brother, played by a too-cool Ben Carruthers, will move through the racist world as he does – but there is so much more at stake. Their willingness to express themselves, to live, to work, to experience…to be free in their own way is the heartbeat of Shadows. To get from under society’s masks. What’s fascinating is that Leila Goldoni is white, and this absolutely has no bearing on the film whatsoever. Interestingly, Leila’s “Black” character - (played by a white Italian American!) is more interesting than Negga’s Black character who wants to be white. We will not get into why here\.

Imani Perry salivates over the sumptuousness of cinematography (as did virtually every other reviewer of this film) and how Passing expertly exhibits the Black people in the movie, showing their beauty, blah, blah, blah…

It is immoral to utilize “beautiful and seductive” photography for a film that is couched in shame and regret and unconscionable acts. Tumors are not beautiful and to deny their ugliness and terror is to deny the affliction. War, disease, famine, genocide, self-hatred – all these vulgar aspects of life should always be seen as such. Schindler’s List would have been 90% better if it had ugly cinematography. Think about it. 

I downplay incongruent production value or precious cinematography because they are perfunctory, crutches, and nothing more than bows on poorly wrapped gifts. They try to hide the lack of depth within. Perry does mention the 1934 Imitation of Life by John Stahl.  Both versions have their merits (Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington were unsung actresses; Washington could have penetrated something deeper in Passing other than Hall’s leads) but Douglas Sirk’s 1959 version is possibly more impactful - if only because his melodramatic “Brechtian” style (you never forget you are watching a movie) seems alien enough for such a heartbreaking tragedy that sensitively addresses the horror of passing.  The movie feels foreign and uncomfortable with all the kitsch of a Doris Day film but unwinds into one of the most powerful endings and last five minutes of a movie you’ve ever seen (thank you, Mahalia Jackson). But Sirk, a German expatriate who fled the Nazis, brings an alarming humanity to the film, with a stagy theatrical rigor. And while passing and Black self-hatred are marginal themes that get centerstage as the film progresses, never once do I get the impression that someone is putting me on, patronizing me and virtue signaling. Sirk is a humanist ultimately and, like Fassbinder and Bresson he reconciles the awfulness of life in style: form follows function. 

(I would be particularly curious what Perry would think of Fassbinder’s essay on Sirk’s Imitation of Life.)

Cassavetes similarly views all people as relatable and all circumstances as understandable, he doesn’t pretend to over intellectualize or have to pathologize: in Shadows, his Black actors developed the scenario their own characters are involved in ;Leila Goldoni didn’t study Black people — she understood the plight inherently by acting with Blacks who probably simply told her what the deal was, applying her humanity…and using her imagination.  Her performance ranks as one of the great unsung performances in cinema. And it shall continue to be a glaring elephant in the room for some time – especially in the age of identity politics that we are in. 

Rebecca Hall’s film is not a champion of “Blackness” or enabling a “Black gaze” (can someone explain what that would mean – especially…if Hall is a “white woman”? Or was that statement by Perry in Harper’s Bazaar a kind of welcoming admission that Hall is, in fact, a Black director? For how else can you have a “Black gaze”?)

I don't know what is going on. I am supposed to ingratiate myself with these people - who are play acting in sick rituals on screen and give another white actor an opportunity to say "Nigger!" 

Have we not grown? The movies might actually be our biggest cancer. Not Trump or Covid.

The golf course:  I shall never look at a golf course the same way. (I actually never looked at them to begin with unless I had a torch in my hand.) I discovered a relative of mine was passing in this new millennium and I left him and his white world at a golf course, where they belonged, I suppose. No ritual, pomp, or circumstance – he, like Tiger Woods on steroids, claimed his ancestry to be “multitudinous;” he rejected my appeal to our Black ancestry and my personal radical ideologies – I was not going to “infect” his family with my radical apostate ways nor my “penchant for poverty,” he decried. Like OJ, he came to believe that with the almighty dollar one could eclipse ancestry and historical tribes and social class and, like Anatole Broyard, be all that he can be as a “man” - not a “Black” man. Anyone cut to the corner of life by one who is passing; hemmed inside its shallow pocket knows – there is no talking to these creatures. There is no one to save them. You can try to love them from afar – but that is the very problem. They don’t want our love.

We are in trouble if these fetishistic movies exploiting the pathology involved in living in a racist world makes it look seductive & interesting. The phenomenon of passing is neither interesting nor stylish. It is tragic. The film is a Liberal exercise in tourism and “pathology porn.”  God help us all. 

*

I feel I cannot trust cinema any longer. At least not what is being offered to me. I am being presented with a flood of moving images, depressed icons, and imprisoned actors (who forgot THEY are the liberators FROM not enablers OF Pathologies of the White Racist Ruling Class cinematic proclivities: the curtailment of the African People of North America’s warm complexities in favor of their cold inability to face truth. 

“A white woman discovers she is Black. And suddenly the clouds lift.”

That’s the film I am waiting to see.

“Art is not a mirror to hold to reality but a hammer in which to shape it.” - Bertolt Brecht