Written and directed by two white men and performed by an all-black cast, Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) tells the story of a drifter turned family man who struggles with the pressures of small-town life and the limitations placed on him and his community in the Deep South, an area long fraught with racism. Though unmistakably about race and civil rights, the film makes no direct reference to the civil rights movement. Despite this intentional absence, contemporary audiences were acutely aware of the social context for the film's indictment of white prejudice in America. To help frame and situate the film in the context of black film studies, the book gathers primary and secondary resources, including the original screenplay, essays on the film, statements by the filmmakers, and interviews with Robert M. Young, the film's producer and cinematographer, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Written and directed by two white men and performed by an all-black cast, Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) tells the story of a drifter turned family man who struggles with the pressures of small-town life and the limitations placed on him and his community in the Deep South, an area long fraught with racism. Though unmistakably about race and civil rights, the film makes no direct reference to the civil rights movement. Despite this intentional absence, contemporary audiences were acutely aware of the social context for the film's indictment of white prejudice in America. To help frame and situate the film in the context of black film studies, the book gathers primary and secondary resources, including the original screenplay, essays on the film, statements by the filmmakers, and interviews with Robert M. Young, the film's producer and cinematographer, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The Politics & Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man
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The Politics & Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man
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Overview
Written and directed by two white men and performed by an all-black cast, Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) tells the story of a drifter turned family man who struggles with the pressures of small-town life and the limitations placed on him and his community in the Deep South, an area long fraught with racism. Though unmistakably about race and civil rights, the film makes no direct reference to the civil rights movement. Despite this intentional absence, contemporary audiences were acutely aware of the social context for the film's indictment of white prejudice in America. To help frame and situate the film in the context of black film studies, the book gathers primary and secondary resources, including the original screenplay, essays on the film, statements by the filmmakers, and interviews with Robert M. Young, the film's producer and cinematographer, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253018502 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2024 |
| Series: | Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora |
| Sold by: | OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 307 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
David C. Wall is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Utah State University.
Michael T. Martin is Director of the Black Film Center/Archive and Professor in the Departments of Communication and Culture and American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
Read an Excerpt
The Politics and Poetics of Black Film
Nothing But a Man
By David C. Wall, Michael T. Martin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michael T. Martin and David C. WallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01850-2
CHAPTER 1
Michael Roemer
THESE COMMENTS ABOUT NOTHING BUT A MAN REFLECT HOW it looks to me fifty years after we made it. If I had not come to see the film differently from the way it seemed at the time we shot it, I could not have gone on to make other films without repeating myself. Rendering our reality today seems possible only if we continually challenge our own assumptions. But I hope nothing I say here puts me out of touch with those who have been moved by it.
* * *
Robert Young and I became friends as undergraduates and stayed in touch after graduation but didn't actually work together until we were in our thirties. Though he was in documentaries and I in fiction, we shared a similar perspective and were not persuaded by most American movies at that time. In 1962 we shot a documentary about a generational slum in Palermo that we felt was the best film either of us had made. When NBC, who had sponsored it, pulled it off the air as unfit for the American living room, we left the network. We were determined to continue working together, and Bob suggested that the young African Americans he had met on his 1960 NBC White Paper documentary "Sit-In" would make a good feature film on a subject close to his heart.
I wouldn't have gone on what seemed a very uncertain project with anyone except Bob, and off we went in my old car. Armed with a letter of introduction from the NA ACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), we traveled through the Deep South on what seemed an underground railroad in reverse – passed from town to town and house to house by the young men and women working with SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). Since two white men with New York license plates consistently stayed on the black side of the railroad tracks, we were often trailed by the local sheriff. We happened to find ourselves in Oxford, Mississippi, on the day the effort to integrate the university exploded into violence, but we fortunately thought the town was peaceful and left before dark. If we had known what was about to happen, we-young and not risk averse – would have stayed, to no one's benefit. Two journalists were killed in the riot and cars with Northern license plates were vandalized and overturned.
Bob was convinced that my years as a writer would complement his own experience in documentary filming, but as we spent weeks traveling through the Southern states, meeting many brave and truly impressive people, I became concerned that though we were finding wonderful settings and backgrounds, we had no foreground – no story. Bob, whose native confidence and optimism offset my deep-seated pessimism, would say: "I know you'll come up with something," but I wasn't at all sure. Then, one morning in a Mississippi motel, it struck me that "The Last Frontier," a screenplay I had written two years earlier, had a central story about a young couple and the man's enraged alcoholic father that could be adapted to what we had seen and learned of black life. I believe this happened shortly after our stay with James Bevel and Diane Nash, and encountering them may have helped me make the connection.
Throughout my life, I had been haunted by difference, not only as a Jewish child in Germany but in an English boarding school during World War II, and among my fellow students at an American college. I was one of the few children I knew with divorced parents; my father had left my mother when I was three and when he died, at fifty-four, I – like Duff at the funeral parlor – knew only the barest facts about him. Though everyone in my family held him responsible for his own circumstances and actions, by the time I wrote "The Last Frontier," I saw that he had been the victim of circumstances – economic and psychological – over which he had no control. The parallel to the history and situation of some African American men seemed clear.
Bob brought his political awareness and ideals to our film, but I had grown up deeply suspicious of all politics and, indeed, of power not only in individuals but, more particularly, in groups. What I contributed, beyond the existing screenplay and some limited experience with directing actors, was a childhood subjected to virulent antisemitism. I was forever an outsider, invisible to others when not actually provoking them with my difference. Of course, many people see themselves this way, with their lives a ceaseless disputation between a sense of inadequacy and their often successful but sometimes costly effort to live up to majority expectations.
Bob – with his background in anthropology and the natural sciences – was as persuaded of sameness as I was a doubtful of it, though perhaps he had simply found a different way of redeeming his own sense of difference. At any rate, some of the strengths and the limitations of Nothing But a Man can be traced to its origins. It is clearly a middle-class film made by middle-class men, and unsurprisingly its appeal has been largely to the white middle class and the emerging black middle class. At the time of its first revival in 1994, the film had a brief showing at the Apollo Theater, but hardly anyone from the neighborhood came to see it.
* * *
During the production, the inevitable tensions that arise during a difficult low-budget shoot were complicated by race. There were, at the time, almost no African American film technicians – Bill Grier was the only black filmmaker I then knew – and so the crew was white with the exception of our production assistant, while the large cast was almost entirely black. Moreover, an inexperienced foreign-born white director was telling black actors what their motives and feelings were and how to shade their expression.
My own gravest error sprang from the misconception that Ivan Dixon (Duff) was "on our team," and that I could call on him for help when there were problems and tensions-particularly from the influx of New York day players, who were understandably angry about our poor working conditions. On two occasions when I turned to Ivan for help and then expressed disappointment that he couldn't cross the line between black and white, I put him in an impossible bind. Because of the close connection of the story to my own experience, I had a deeply personal identification with the central figure and failed to recognize the line of demarcation that the "racialization" of the original story entailed. From my subjective vantage point, the film was as much his as ours. Moreover, as a member of a white minority in Europe and with my limited experience with African American men, it did not occur to me that I might be seen as part of a power structure, though my role of director would have reinforced this perception.
The second time I imposed on Ivan almost ended the film, and it was our black production assistant who quite literally saved it. During the crisis I finally learned my lesson. When I turned to Abbey for help, she said: "Mike, when the chips are down, you are white and I am black."
* * *
Almost the moment we finished our work in the cutting room – where, as a member of the editors' union, I could function as Luke Bennett's assistant – I found myself overwhelmed by a sense of failure. The completed film suddenly seemed manipulative instead of looking as true as it had while we were shooting. I felt that an unconscious need to be liked and approved had compromised the work. I believe that – appearances and reviewers to the contrary – we had not done anything courageous, but had succeeded in pleasing the liberal art theater audience. I was troubled, moreover, by my very skill at manipulating their feelings. From the age of seventeen on, I had watched American films intensively, worked on them once I got out of college, and read Variety carefully for years. Though I was not nearly conscious of it at the time, I knew what audiences wanted and had become adept at affecting them.
No doubt my camouflaged manipulative skills had been forged in Berlin. They had helped me survive, and when I turned to filmmaking, they came usefully to hand without my being aware of them. But by the time our film was finished, I found myself no longer willing to survive by hiding and indirection. Psychologically, I had arrived at the point where Duff is at the end of the story.
* * *
Though manipulating the material and the performances, and calculating their effect, was largely unconscious, it wasn't altogether innocent. While we were casting, James Earl Jones came by to say that if he were to take the part of Duff he would have to play him angry from the start. I might have told him, legitimately, that the African American men we had met in the South had transmuted their anger, fully aware it would destroy them. Instead, I remember telling him that though his reading was true to the facts, our audience would need to see where the anger was coming from: we had to get them on Duff's side, and seeing him angry from the start would lose them.
I remember as well that when we added a third generation – Duff's son – to the core family of the original story and realized that Duff might pick him up at the end, I said: "That'll get to everybody!" Some cunning was clearly at work. I further remember a moment of triumph when we looked at the first cut. The industry had a saying that if you have a good – that is, effective – ending, the audience will forgive you a great deal, and leave emotionally satisfied. When I saw the ending in place, I knew we had a working movie. While we were shooting the last scene, Ivan – who asked for very few line changes – did not want to say: "Baby, I feel so free inside." Since we don't see his face when he speaks, I could tell him, and mean it, that we would decide on using or dropping the line in the cutting room. To my great regret, it remained in the film. I find it painfully embarrassing, though I've met people – all, I believe, white – who said it was their favorite line.
Ivan and Abbey are not only more beautiful than most of us, but the figures they play are more beautiful on the inside – clean, clear, and uncontradicted, not riven by the doubts and inner conflicts that trouble so many. Like the heroes and heroines of popular stories, Duff and Josie reflect the way we would like to see ourselves, reacting to every situation in a way we understand perfectly. We can always identify with them; in today's entertainment lingo, they are one hundred percent "relatable." The script was brave enough to let Duff push his pregnant wife to the floor and perceptive enough to show where the violence originated. But it never has him do any real wrong; neither Josie nor he make a single bad move. They do exactly what we would like to see ourselves doing under the circumstances. Duff is a popular hero who happens to be black. If he had been white, Paul Newman might have played him.
* * *
Since Bob could shoot and I had some experience working with actors, he became the cameraman and I the director. But I never said "print" without turning to him to make sure he felt as I did about the take. Without his and the actors' confidence in the work there was no way I could have done it. I have been criticized for the tight control I exercise over actors – not only on Nothing But a Man but on all my films. In part, no doubt, this has its source in anxiety, but on the first film it seemed justified by needing to turn a few experienced performers and a large group of nonprofessionals into an ensemble. There was at the time barely any work for African American actors, and our cast included men and women who made their living as dry cleaners, bartenders, social workers, and high school teachers – some of whom had always wanted to act, and others who looked and sounded right and were willing to join us.
The person who made it possible for me with my limited experience to direct actors was a man of the German theater at the boarding school where I spent the Second World War. He stoked the boiler, did the heavy work in the garden, and directed our plays. I had the good fortune of witnessing how – with infinite patience and persistence – he managed to get performances from children who were not the least bit interested in acting. Refusing to settle for anything less than the best we could do, he succeeded in making an ensemble out of our motley crew. His casting was uncanny, with girls frequently in the parts of men, and the performances he got from us were persuasive; during one production, we were startled to see adults in the audience weeping. It was this man who showed me a way of working. The slow, painstaking process he had used prompted me to spend three weeks with Julius Harris, often three or four hours a day, working on key moments in the script before we did his screen test. When Charles Gordone – whose name was unaccountably and inexcusably left out of the credits – introduced us to him, Julius was a male nurse – a deeply empathetic human being, who had seen a great deal of suffering and fully understood the part of Duff's father. I remember several occasions when his work on the set astounded the other actors. Without being aware of the discipline involved, he had turned himself into a method actor.
Since I am not a professional director and have never directed anything I didn't write, I invariably have a very specific picture of the way scenes should play. This is both useful and a limitation. It can certainly be hard on performers, who may well feel their own contributions are limited. But neither Ivan nor Abbey complained at the time, and Julius didn't feel hemmed in. They seemed completely comfortable with our approach and interpretations.
With respect to Ivan's comment that I used actors like puppets, I see myself as a puppet as well, both while I am writing and directing – enthralled to a story that allows me little freedom or choice. The process of writing is not, for me, an act of the will, but rather a process of discovering, over an extended period of time, what must happen. Everything seems conditioned – in part by my own limitations. At the outset of a project, I have no idea what will happen, but at the end it inevitably turns out to have been wholly determined by factors not subject to my will or preferences. Once the script is written, I try – as it were, "obediently" – to carry out the task of shooting it. I may well seem like a dictator on the set, but believe I have myself taken dictation. Of course every dictator could make this excuse.
I am well aware that this flies in the face of our fundamental American creed that each of us is free and empowered to make our own destiny – a creed that is clearly contradicted by our movies and by the stories that run on television twenty-four hours a day. Every one of them is over before it begins, with the actors speaking predetermined lines and doing what the script calls on them to do. We think of them as entertainments, but we may be addicted to them in part because they suggest the very opposite of what we believe. They may be real to us, albeit in a realm separate from everyday reality, just as those who believe in the sacred think of it as a realm that is separate from our physical existence. Significantly, both involve a surrender of the free will we subscribe to – or must subscribe to.
Film can beguile us into believing that it renders the world as it is. While the surfaces of Southern black life in our film look persuasive, what we really believe and lend ourselves to is the inner experience of Duff and Josie. Some surfaces are clearly erroneous. It seems surprising – and significant – that no one has ever questioned why the whites have Southern accents but the blacks don't. We knew that getting nonactors to master an unfamiliar accent would have absorbed all their energy and attention and focused their work on the surface. I never even asked them to try. Moreover, though humor has been a constant of black lifeand two Jews should have recognized the parallel with Jewish life – it is almost totally absent in the film. Bob came up with the one humorous moment while I, for deeply personal reasons, was preoccupied with the injuries and insults suffered by the figures and with the way they handle their anger.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Politics and Poetics of Black Film by David C. Wall, Michael T. Martin. Copyright © 2015 Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Nothing But a Man and the Question of Black Film / David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin
Filmmaker Statements
Michael Roemer
Robert M. Young
Essays
Demanding Dignity: Nothing But a Man / Bruce Dick and Mark Vogel
Nothing But a Man / Thomas Cripps
The Derailed Romance in Nothing But a Man / Karen Bowdre
Can't Stay, Can' Go: What is History to a Cinematic Imagination / Terri Francis
Civil Rights, Labor, and Sexual Politics on Screen in Nothing But a Man / Judith Smith
Interviews
Historicity and Possibility in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Khalil Muhammad / David C. Wall and Michael T. Martin
Cinematic Principles and Practice at Work in Nothing But a Man: A Conversation with Robert Young / Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall
Screenplay Nothing But a Man
Press Kit from Cinema V Distributing, Inc. (1965)
Filmographies
Michael Roemer
Robert M. Young
Select Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
We thought that the most powerful, useful political statement [in the struggle for civil rights] would be a human one.
The finest comment to date on the Negro revolution in the South, but its primary distinction is that the comment is made through a universal theme, that of a young man's coming to terms with himself and with society.1963