To what extent is it the responsibility of film and television practitioners to ‘fix’ previous issues in terms of race representation?

     The world we live in today has gravitated people of different ethnic groups to be invested in the entertainment sector. The film and television industry has had an influential impact on viewers worldwide, shaping and redefining our beliefs in certain traditions and cultures and how we view each other based on how various practitioners tend to display it in their films, positively or negatively. In this context, the term “representation” refers to someone standing in for a large group of people who all share similar beliefs. Now, when it comes to race in the film industry, it’s about how different identities are portrayed in movies and television shows, how they should be presented and how they shouldn’t be presented. Practitioners should be able to impose this by casting people of a specific ethnicity as stand-ins for that ethnic group’s right to a voice and visibility in society and culture. The social and political definitions of “race” are constantly being constructed and contested; whether in heated argument or subtle transactions, the negotiation of racial images, borders, and hierarchies has been a part of our nation’s life since its inception.

     Many people today learn what to think and how to think about other people from the movies they watch, which then influences how we act towards one another, whether it is the intention of the film maker or not, which is why reflecting on race representation is so very much important. As we all know from time, actions speak louder than words, and a short film can convey a very strong and powerful message about how two different ethnic groups perceive each other as being fundamentally different in some way. A situation in which a group of individuals believes they are superior to another and, as a result, sets high standards based on what they know or have been influenced by from watching old or modern day films, exercising unnecessary authority over another group of people of color, or making it known that their way of life is irregular and abnormal. The inclusion of modern racial discourses in films has opened up opportunities for critical involvement in popular cinema of today. In the American social psychology and media imagination, race is unquestionably one of the most emotionally and politically heated topics. In many cases, an existing film expresses various different points of view both positively or negatively . It is so very important to distinguish between viewers’ ability to understand a film in ways that the filmmaker makes it relatable to their daily lives and the specific persuasive methods that films use to imprint a particular picture on the minds of people especially when there is a particular target audience trying to be influenced. When it comes to making a film solely based on their ethnic backgrounds, beliefs, and their own color, there is a significant difference between a black filmmaker or, more accurately, a filmmaker of color and a white filmmaker in the industry. If anyone should be criticized by critics and the audience, it would be the filmmaker of color because it is assumed that there is a meaning and a cause to why such a film is being made, and they will be asked to justify their choices and to assume political accountability for the quality of their representations. When the tables are turned and a white filmmaker decides to make a film about white people, their ideas, culture, and race, it is viewed by the general audience as a work of art that depicts the world as they know it or, at the very least, as it fascinates them and will not at all be criticized by critics which is very unfair and passes across a bad message. This should be curtailed by using the same medium of communication, films, to demonstrate that it is perfectly acceptable for filmmakers of various races to create visual art that allows them to express their race ethnicity without thought or fear of sending a hidden message or to stoop low to cast a negative light to bring down another race of great prominence. In an age of rising illiteracy, filmmakers are perhaps more conscious of the impact of moving images than the general public. Movies can teach a lot since the pictures and words they utilize have a universal language; it is a very powerful medium. Fortunately, some white male filmmakers have begun to think critically about representations of race. It would certainly benefit all filmmakers if this group refused to accept the concept that they care more about artistic vision than other group. To further buttress on this point , the white filmmakers have begun to understand the impact and damage and how the public can be easily influenced with misleading information which causes the people of color to be judged and hated for . Research scholars such as Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, Ed Guerrero, and Mark Reid have aided African film production and black avant-garde film aesthetics by motivating a new generation of scholars of color and inviting colleagues who share the same interest from various ethnic and racial origins to talk about the situations that surround it. In terms of racial representation, Hollywood cinema has been extensively implicated in the process of propagating and developing new incorrect knowledge about various races, particularly black Americans, since its inception. All of this has instilled in the audience of a certain ethnicity the belief that everybody who enters their territory is expected to adopt their culture and adapt to the lifestyle that they supposedly live. A Film like “birth of a nation” by D. W. Griffith in the year 1915 is a very perfect example to show that white people are put against black people further laying heavy emphasis on the fact that people of color should be killed or defeated, and it all leads back to how cultural and social factors impacted the aesthetics and the narrative of films leaving the viewers influenced. When conservative black filmmakers make films, the images of blackness they create are frequently as influenced by internalised white supremacist aesthetics as images created by unenlightened white and nonblack filmmakers. Film blackness necessitates a higher level of ambition for the concept of black film as a critical capability rather than an agential power. View a black film in a way that is not just concerned with how cinema must coerce, presage, or emblematize social truth necessitates a focus on cinema as an art activity, with attendant and consequential problems of form and politics. The multiplicity of ways in which African Americans and other people of color’s images and historical experiences are symbolically portrayed in commercial cinema demonstrates the volatile force of race. The cinematic racial order and its widespread stereotypes were defined, embodied, and reproduced in part by a racially and ethnically separated society (education, leisure, job, religion, residence). A segregated film industry helped to promote these perceptions. Anti-black racism, white supremacy, and the Racial Contract are essential and systemic characteristics of American culture, and race as a constitutive, cultural fiction has always been a consequential element of American history and social life. This is consistent with the way race is engendered as a natural phenomenon. The entertainment models given by minstrels, vaudeville, and popular variety shows were significantly influenced by early films. Previously, it was expected that black filmmakers in the United States would generate resisting images, that their work would challenge dominant preconceptions. As a result, early narrative films with Black characters reflect many of those sources’ clichéd characterizations, themes, and narratives. Early developments in film editing, such as parallel cutting, made it feasible to introduce films with cohesive, complicated, and logical narratives that could meet evolving audience taste by manipulating time, location, and point of view. There were white-owned and controlled filmmaking companies that aimed to attract to Black viewers with Black cast movies, but African American filmmakers regarded themselves as engaging in the elevation of the race through motion picture creation. The phrase “race film” referred to a distinct cinema for a largely segregated audience, rather than a shared style, genre, or singular point of view. Film historians have been attempting to archive and critically examine race films since the late 1970s, focusing particularly on narrative fiction films screened in theatres to Black audiences. All too frequently, filmmakers from excluded groups grapple with the question of entitlement required to strike such a balance. Most black filmmakers raised in a white supremacist culture in which the vast majority of cinematic images are generated in ways that sustain and uphold this framework of dominance feel forced to take on the burden of making resisting images. However, now that black filmmakers are making films with the intention of gaining universal appeal, they are addressing the massive white moviegoing public by presenting them with recognizable images of blackness.

      So at the end of the day, film and television practitioners hold a very high position and have the advantage to fix the previous issues in race representation in the film industry due to the impact of television and social media in this generation, the materials and old  literature used to make films back then in which two races are put against each other should be scraped off and new material should be used to reshaped the mindset of critics and the audience so that the new way that they think will be passed down to their children therefore positively empowering the future generation with such outstanding knowledge of being together as one without having the same shade of complexion, we are all equal.

REFERENCES

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• Norman k, D 2001, Reading race: Hollywood and the cinema of racial violence. SAGE PUBLICATIONS. Available from: Vlebooks. [24 April 2022].