Through both blackface and Negro minstrelsy and vaudeville the Afro-American folk images of plantation slaves and riverboat oarsmen were further deepened and spread. .
1.1.1. Early Vignettes.
At the beginning of commercial cinema a motion-picture industry itself didn`t exist and the movies were produced by primitive techniques without stars, studios, or sound. No editorial cutting and real screen narrative were possible until 1903, therefore the earliest vignettes, most of them produced by Thomas Edison, provided an exciting look on something in motion: "watermelon-eating contests, Negroes leading parades, black soldiers in Cuba., and fragments of anthropological ephemera such as" black women giving their baby a bath- "anything that provided visual stimulation" . The Spanish-American War in 1898, in which twenty Afro-American regiments served, brought in some cases positive appereances of black soldiers defending their country on the screen, as in The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses (1898), one of the the earliest films about troops on their march, and armed blacks "outside their prescribed 'place'" , marching in smart order before a fixed camera, shooting in the sky. Another catalogue featured the Colored Invicibles (ca.1898), fighting with as "much zeal as their white brothers" , and Colored Troops Disembarking, showing black men with weapons marching down a gangplank on their way to Cuba. .
1.1.2. The Coon.
The partly positive light that was thrown on Afro-Americans in this period of time was simultaneously destroyed by demeaning film shorts as Edison's Watermelon Contest (1899), which was laughed at as "four grinning Negroes who wolfed in melons and spat seeds with a will" . The stereotyped group of the coon was born, appearing in a series of black films, which presented the Afro-American as an "amusement object and black buffoon" . There was the real coon, a bit dim, just interested in lazing around and stealing and eating watermelons and chickens, and two variants of his type: the pickaninny and the uncle remus.
