Writing film history is not a straightforward enterprise; it involves interpretation and careful selection. The process is made more difficult because important dimensions of the past remain hidden to the historian. One approach is to excavate the cinematic past for undervalued contributions and traditions and to discover the unacknowledged antecedents of some of today’s diverse film practices. Such an approach tries to (1) consider different questions about the past and its artifacts, and (2) uncover which version of the past has been accepted and supplement this version with missing perspectives.
The American movie industry today remains male dominated, with women directing only 7 percent of the 250 top-grossing films in the United States in 2010. While women worked as writers and editors during the classical Hollywood period, very few women directed feature films. The avant-garde, documentary, and independent movements have been more accessible to women filmmakers than feature filmmaking.
Women entered contemporary Hollywood production slowly, with some of the first inroads to the prestigious position of director made by actresses who already had industry clout. Women directors are rarely assigned to the highest budget films, and are most often seen directing in such genres as youth films and romantic and family comedies.
Dominant Hollywood cinema has afforded only a limited range of representation for African, Asian, Latino, and Native Americans. When not absent from the screen altogether, these groups have traditionally been present in a small repertoire of stereotyped roles. The role of people of color behind the screen has historically been even more restricted.
Early independent African American film culture developed in response to various phenomena – from the “race consciousness” of African American audiences cultivated by the burgeoning literature of the Harlem Renaissance and recordings by black musicians, to the realities of racism and segregation in the South. In the early to mid-1900s, race movies featuring African American casts were circulated to urban African American audiences in the North and shown in special segregated screenings in the South.
After the studio system waned in the 1960s, new audiences for specialized films were sought by Hollywood, and the genre known as blaxploitation emerged. Although the term cynically suggests the economic exploitation of black film audiences (particularly an urban market likely to attend films about streetwise African American protagonists), the genre was also made possible in part by the black power movement.
In the final two decades of the twentieth century, Spike Lee helped to revive independent African American cinema aesthetically and financially through a sophisticated use of cinematic language and engaging storytelling. Lee paved the way for other African American directors such as John Singleton.
Looking at Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) film history can not only tell us about changing representations of same-sex desire, but also about continuity and discontinuity in definitions of sexual identity and community and the social regulation of sexuality and its representations.
During the classical era of Hollywood, the Production Code prohibited any representation or inference of homosexuality. During the 1980s, mainstream heterosexual stars began to appear in films offering more complex images of gay men and sometimes lesbians, such as William Hurt’s award-winning performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).
Much like the absence of LGBT representation onscreen, the contributions of LGBT filmmakers have often been erased or overlooked because of the stigma historically accorded homosexuality. Although sexual orientation does not necessarily impact a filmmaker’s work, knowing whether a filmmaker identifies him or herself as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered, or whether there is significant biographical evidence of same-sex erotic attachments, can make a difference in two contexts: (1) when his or her sexual identity arguably affects the filmmaker’s subject matter or aesthetic approach, and (2) when withholding information about a filmmaker’s sexual identity erases a specific historical legacy.
The history of indigenous media is perhaps even more concerned with self-representation, but it also challenges the purposes of the film medium as primarily about entertainment or communication. One of the earliest uses of film was to document other cultures for exhibition in the West, which helped spawn the ethnographic documentary. However, with the introduction of consumer video technology to indigenous peoples, they have been able to use it in several empowering ways, including documenting traditional practices for future generations, video activism, and as a new form of visual expression.