This essay demonstrates the stereotypes in black portrayals in American film culture and the limited changes that occured over the years.
1.1. Blackfacing and Film Shorts .
From the very beginning of American cinema in the 1890s, Afro-Americans appeared "through luck and accident on the screen" in a more positive light than they therefore had done in literature and theater. That Afro-Americans counted as "second-class" in society and no Anglo-American wanted to get in touch with, is demonstrated through .
the practice of using blackface Anglo-Americans to impose the models for what Afro-Americans were to represent in early film shorts made in America before World War One, .
a tradition taken over from theatre. The function of projecting black faces on the screen was more or less to teach the Anglo-Americans about the black inferiority and to tell them about the curiosity and periphery of the "African" race. Most early Negro appearances took their cue from the old Southern stereotypes "of the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal black buck" . These stereotypes that had existed since the days of slavery and the Civil War were already popularized in American life and mind. The black character types, all of them personified in"'darkies' of the 'Old Viginny' type" , were used with the same purpose: to entertain the white audience by making fun of the alleged inferior black race. The Afro-Americans were presented as "either a nitwit or a childlike lackey" . In early days when black roles were only portrayed by white actors made up in blackface there existed nothing but the former stereotypes, "keeping with literary and theatrical tradition" . Even later when "real" blacks were allowed to represent their own race on the screen there was nothing but the image of the "negro", "nigger" and "coon", indiscriminately used in American films, glorifying slavery and the inhuman treatment of blacks.
