White Screens/Black Images

In these essays, completed shortly before his death in 1989, James Snead offers a thoughtful inquiry into the intricate modes of racial coding in Hollywood cinema from 1915 to 1985. The text presents three major methods through which the racist ideology within film functions: "mythification", in which black images are correlated in a larger scheme of semiotic valuation where the dominant "I" needs the marginal "other" in order to function effectively; marking, in which the colour black is repeatedly over-determined and redundantly marked, as if to force the viewer to register the image's difference from white; and omission - the repetition of black absence from positions of autonomy and importance. The study offers an array of film texts, drawn from both classical Hollywood cinema and Black independent film culture.