6 The Negro Soldier

It cannot be said that there is a clearly black mode or style in documentary film. Over the years, theatrical and television documentaries, and educational and classroom films have reported or depicted various elements of black life and history. Some, especially the more reportorial, were not only made by whites, but were intended for the instruction of white audiences. In treating documentary film, the defining criteria for black genre become blurred, or worse, serve as a procrustean bed by which the films are shaped to fit artificially designed categories. The reasons for this critical problem are clear. Films about American racial arrangements consider the common themes of segregation, caste, anatomies of black life, and use an appropriate set of visual symbols that permit the filmmaker to deal with racial matters.

Even if we isolate some broad trait, such as a radical point of view, the outlines of black documentary genre remain muddled. The advocacy of some fashionable black political issue, for example, would allow us to categorize a black film as "black" only so long as the issue remained popular. Thus in the case of documentary, the traits of black genre film may be used only as an aid to understanding, rather than as a means of establishing positive identification.

We only know what seems unblack. William C. Jersey's arresting A Time for Burning (1966), a film made for the largely white Lutheran Film Associates, attracted little attention among black audiences and reviewers. All of the commentators who wrote advertising blurbs were white. The film purported to deal with the gradual integration of William Youngdahl's Augustana Lutheran Church in a formerly lily-white neighborhood in Omaha. After viewing an equally probing follow-up, A Time for Building (1967), one reviewer felt that "a few more black" participants would have provided better balance. The visual reporting of white agony and resolution of white problems simply lacked interest for black audiences, except as evidence of white failings.

On the other hand, good films made by both blacks and white can be rooted in the tastes and techniques of either race. Certainly the previously discussed Sunday on the River by white filmmakers Ken Resnick and Gordon Hitchens, which evoked a touching, lyrical black church outing, does not lend itself to a precise labeling of its makers' racial identities. An equally fine film, St. Claire Bourne's Let the Church Say Amen, used every standard device of white filmmaking so that it muted any traits that might expose a racial identity. Bourne's urbane, northern sensitivity to a black southern church imparted the same thrill of discovery that might have inspired an anthropologist's film of a pristine tribe. Bourne, for this reason, gave the film the careful reportorial tone imposed by the outsider's eye.

In another film Bourne clearly scooped the entire corps of American filmmakers with his exclusive interview with Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the American Black Muslim movement. The intellectual fashion of the time dictated that if so required by black leaders, black and white centers of life were to remain separate. Thus, the film, which was shot according to the then current techniques of shooting "talking heads," was black chiefly in the sense that its subject, Elijah Muhammed, knew Bourne was black and therefore, found it ideologically possible to grant him an exclusive audience.

Another social documentary filmmaker, William Greaves, built a durable career on reportage and liberal sentiments. Of all the black filmmakers, he alone soaked up experiences that carried him into a broad stream of work that defied parochial limits. Beginning his career in race movies just after World War II, he won a role in the pioneering message movie, Louis DeRochemont's and Alfred Werker's Lost Boundaries (1949), then migrated to Canada in search of production experience where he became a pupil and colleague of Norman McLaren at the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced both compilation and photo-documentaries of uncommon merit.

Greaves's two most famous works, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968) and From These Roots (1975), illustrate the norms of style and subject that mark black documentary, while at the same time giving it an identity similar to that of white filmmakers. Many documentary filmmakers, like other liberal Americans, believe that liberal change is possible and to be hoped for, and feel that powerful interest groups are subject to influence, even defeat, by coalitions of minorities, youth, urbanités, organized labor, etc. If they do entertain hopes for revolution, they just as often fear to lose what has already been gained.

In this liberal sense, Greaves has been the classic Afro-American filmmaker for whom artful film advocacy of a black cause has led to success. His work is an indication that good, tough-minded advocacy film does not lead to black nationalist revolution, but to lucrative bookings, production grants, television contracts, and more good movies. This fact helps make black and white film indistin-guishably congruent, at least in their political rhetoric, if not their style.

If anything identifies black genre documentary film, other than perhaps accessibility to locations and subjects, it would be urgency of advocacy. Greaves's Still a Brother managed to emerge as a good anatomy of the black middle class. But the film's caste mark was its insistence that, despite the trappings of status and affluence described in E. Franklin Frazier's harsh polemic, Black Bourgeoisie, financially successful and well-placed blacks remained in the forefront of the civil rights movement. The effect was to pull one's punches, in keeping with the ancient commandment of the slave quarter, that no black man criticize a brother in the presence of the master class. With sometimes biting satire but overall evenhandedness, Greaves allowed the black bourgeoisie to indict itself, while pleading for a modicum of sympathy for their well-heeled plight as marginal men astride two cultures. With sensitivity his anatomy revealed the pretension and self-serving of the black middle class while verbally crediting the group with a social consciousness challenged by the preening images on the screen.

Greaves's From These Roots stood equally prominent as the finest film ever produced on the history of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and a tour de force that demonstrated the possibilities of the compilation technique for black subjects. But it also revealed that the same archival resources were available to whites, who might use them to construct similar segregated points of view, detailed anatomies of time and place, and a symbolic system that recreated he Harlem Renaissance as a mythic triumph of achievement over adversity. This fact of life, this accessibility of visual sources, meant that in documentary, talent mattered more than race. Greaves's work affected audiences because he was good, not because he was black. The same principle held for Bourne, television producers Madeleine Anderson and Tony Brown, and the generation of new black filmmakers.

Even advocacy fails as litmus paper. Ely Landau's documentary of Martin Luther King (1970) combined a fine journalistic sense, a dogged pursuit of forgotten footage, a sweeping, effective marketing device, and the urgency of a fund raising campaign for the Martin Luther King Foundation. Like a once-in-a-lifetime farewell tour of Jenny Lind, Landau sold it in a nationwide, supposedly one-shot saturation booking, after which the film was rereleased in sixteen millimeter format so as to earn, as Landau said, "continuing revenues from schools, colleges, churches and the like" for the future use of the Foundation. Advocacy of King's cause did not intrude upon the high-powered possibilities of the film as an early "crossover" event.

Clearly, fictional narrative film provided more opportunity for the cinematic expression of a segregated point of view, black heroes, whether pastoral or cool, and the anatomy of black society than did the documentary mode. By these standards an astonishing number of interesting black films appeared in recent years: the pastoral The Learning Tree and Sounder; The Harder They Come and Smile Orange, which offered Jamaican variations on American themes; Gordon's War and The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which used the anatomical mode as a means of expressing black attitudes toward urban violence; and Oscar Williams's Five on the Black Hand Side which attempted to depict the density of black urban life. In each case the fictional mode left the selection of incident and detail in the hands of the filmmaker rather than to the random accident of available library footage or evocative locations.

In most of these instances whatever power and conviction the movies possessed sprung from credibility built by the truths to be found in anatomical details of black life. That is, plot, incident, ambience, and character all proceeded from observation, memoir, or fictional distillations of black social life. The Learning Tree, for example, grew from black photographer Gordon Parks's reminiscences of rural black Kansas. Trevor Rhone's Jamaican movies rested on personal experiences and bearing witness to life in the island's recording industry and in the internecine strife among the waiters in a large hotel. Sam Greenlee's and Ivan Dixon's The Spook Who Sat by the Door seemed a primer for putative street fighters, an anatomy for guerrillas. Five on the Black Hand Side satirized anatomical details of black bourgeois life.

Each of these films borrowed from documentary style in order to fuse the reportage of visual reality with the artist's need to imitate life. Parks shot on location in Kansas. Rhone's films drew ambience from the authentic locations and awkward working conditions and facilities in Jamaica. The Spook Who Sat by the Door was shot on location in the streets of Gary, Indiana with the cooperation of black mayor Richard Hatcher. And Five on the Black Hand Side used Los Angeles exteriors to refurbish a script intended for an East Coast ghetto. But if they exploited documentary style, they were judged as art. The Spook Who Sat by the Door suffered from a shrill lack of restraint that helped undermine the credibility of its gritty locations while the others wanted for better selectivity and control over detail, incident, and pacing. Nevertheless, the wider choice of imagery and materials allowed these filmmakers to create sharply etched black genre film in ways unavailable to documentary filmmakers for whom keen-edged advocacy, or propaganda, provided the main means of identity.

An exception to this apparent dichotomy which presents fictional rather than documentary film as more capable of becoming black genre might be a tiny group of musical documentaries. Because of their musical subjects, these films lent themselves to exploitation by adroit marketeers. From the earliest days of sound film, the Hollywood studios' short subjects' units had turned out two-reelers that, although they recorded actual performances of Negro orchestras, seldom reached black audiences and possessed few traits of black genre film. The style lasted until the war years when it grew into more self-consciously artful documentary trends represented by Gjon Mili's Jammiri the Blues, Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, and others as well. Westinghouse Broadcasting and several commercial sponsors tried without success to bring the genre to television. But by the 1950s, the genre had been enervated and became dependent on one-camera setups of jazz band routines. Not until 1964, when Lee Savin and William Sargent, Jr., through an ineffective device that transferred videotape to film, brought The TAMI (Teenage Awards Music International) Show to the screen, did the genre revive as an exploitation of teenage markets. The formula provided the way to bring Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, and other black stars to a new audience. In 1971 D. A. Pennebaker's and Richard Leacock's Monterey Pop broadened singer Jimi Hendrix's market in the same way, although with greater attention to artful production values. Of the exploitation films the most patently black was Ed Mosk's Soul to Soul, an attempt to merge the markets for "soul" singles records, Ike and Tina Turner's nightclub ecstasy, and African performers, by intercutting shows performed in Africa and in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

27. After World War II, documentaries such as Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day depicted more artful than political black themes. (© Bert Stern; Nederlands Stichting Filmmuseum)

Unfortunately for their fans, few of these musical documentaries were cinematically exciting. Mosk's Soul to Soul, for example, spoiled its own strategy by throwing away opportunities to cut away from performers to audiences, to cultivate the social cohesiveness expressed in the exploitation campaign.

In 1973 Mel Stuart and Columbia brought to the screen the finest attempt to make music and documentary speak to a black audience. On the surface Wattstax appeared to be no more than a concert on film, but actually created a genuine social ritual. The film captured a seven-hour concert in Los Angeles Coliseum that capped the annual Watts Festival. Shrewd cutting, especially to audience reactions, helped shape the film into more than a movie recounting a community fund raiser, but a national black ritual of unity. Less-celebrated acts intercut with a "running commentary of community people offering their views of the Black experience" were combined with footage of famous recording stars such as the Staples Singers. As a visual plea for credibility, the cutaways to the black community revealed the derelicts and defeated, as well as the celebrated and successful. The climax came through Reverend Jesse Jackson's famous black litany, "I Am Somebody," the crescendo cadence of which was paralleled by the cutting tempo. By emphasizing pride rather than aggression, Wattstax also invited white "crossover" audiences into the celebration. The result was the finest of a fewdocumentary anatomies of black life in America—too few as yet to constitute a genre.

28. Wattstax used Jesse Jackson (left) as a living symbol of its social message. (© Columbia Pictures Industries)

Clearly such musical and fictional anatomies of black social life have drawn larger audiences and reached higher levels of technical competence. But Carlton Moss's and Stuart Heisler's The Negro Soldier stands among the first films to use the documentary mode to transform anatomy into social advocacy, and deserves attention as an exemplar of the black documentary subgenre. The Negro Soldier, while certainly not the best black documentary, holds its place as a pioneer, not of technique like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, but as a model of cinematic advocacy.

In retrospect the United States Army training film made in 1943 seems an unlikely wellspring of black advocacy. Indeed, because so much has happened to alter American racial arrangements since its release in 1944, the film seems dated. A few recent black audiences have received it with undisguised contempt. Nevertheless, overcoming the biases of its sponsor, the U.S. Army, at the height of World War II required such persistence and clarity of vision that the film stands as one of the finest statements of integrationist thinking ever released to a broad audience. More than any other film, The Negro Soldier combined black advocacy with the intelligent use of the best techniques offered by wartime Hollywood.

For many years, neither independent or government filmmakers had been attracted by Negro subjects, save for a few bits of New Deal propaganda. But with the coming of World War II, New Deal rhetoric fused with the high-flown if vague anticolonial and antiracist tone of such statements of Allied war aims as the Atlantic Charter. Even then, black critics like Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press found federal documentaries on racial matters "insipid."

By late 1942 the Army had determined to make film a major medium for troop training. Among its objectives was a means of dealing with deteriorating race relations in and around southern posts where whites responded to the presence of black troops with more than usual resentment and hostility. Afro-Americans had already split into factions that either refused to participate in a "white man's war" or that shared a hope for a "Double V," a simultaneous victory over foreign enemies and domestic racism. Thus the times called for a strong propaganda vehicle that spoke to black and white soldiers and civilians, giving them a reason to fight in common cause while assuaging white fears of black social gains.

Unhappy with an early script by Marc Connelly, the author of The Green Pastures, the Army turned to Carlton Moss, a young black worker in the Federal Theatre project. The Army initially rejected the militant ring of his first draft, Men of Color to Arms, eventually choosing a softer version doctored by Jo Swerling and Ben Hecht, directed by Stuart Heisler, and loosely supervised by Frank Capra, who was already caught up in the production of the famous Why We Fight series.

Moss knew that the segregated Army was not dedicated to leading the nation toward racial liberalism; therefore, the script necessarily prescribed a celebration of black pride of accomplishment under adversity, while deferring demands for liberal social change. Moss chose a traditional Negro church as a setting because it provided an unthreatening image for white viewers and a source of social pride and identity for blacks, and a flashback device which depicted "all the normal activities of Army life." Even then, the Army felt its "glorification" of the Negro soldier made it a "doubtful" subject for viewing by the troops. But the Army's white consultants supported Moss, even to the point of insisting on a neutral black bourgeois identity for all characters, rejecting racially identifiable dialects, dress, or manners, shouting Baptists, and "mammy" types in the flock. In the resulting debates, the even-tempered Moss seemed to Capra to be beset by "angry fervor" and wearing his "blackness like a bloody bandage." In the end Moss and the liberals won out.

The completed movie unfolded in classic studio style, set off by flawless lighting and technically perfect optical effects, and carried by a narrative in flashback. Except for its brevity and its unknown black actors, it might have been a good studio programmer that merited a week in Manhattan and a Times review.

A wide establishing shot puts us in a good grey gothic church. From the point of view of the congregation, we see a singing black soldier. On the last notes he is thanked by a young robed preacher played by Moss. Inspired by the song, the minister puts aside his sermon and introduces other soldiers in the pews. The example they have set calls up an allegory: in newsfilm we see black boxing champion Joe Louis regain his title from the German, Max Schmeling. The lesson is clear—in world conflict, the American way of life is at stake. A close-up of Moss reading racist cant from Mein Kampf is used to broaden Louis's fight into worldwide terms.

The heart of the film sketches almost two centuries of Afro-American combat drawn from historic pictures and studio reenactments: the Granary burial ground in Boston, the Boston massacre and the death of Crispus Attucks, the rebels at Concord Bridge, Bunker Hill, Trenton, and Valley Forge. The pulpit rings with the names of the black warriors. Close-ups of black and white hands building give the audience iconic reinforcement of the narrative. The march of black heroes accelerates across the years: in the Navy in 1812, at the battle of New Orleans, aboard the armored ram Monitor, in Lincoln's army, in the pioneer wagons of the westward movement, in prairie railroad gangs, on oil rigs, and in the ranks of the Buffalo soldiers during the Indian Wars.

The chronicle of American wars mounted to a well-made climax that used actual newsfilm of blacks in the Spanish-American War ("We cleaned up in Cuba," say a voiceover), of blacks digging the Panama Canal, and in a variety of roles in World War I as labor troops, Poilus in the French Army, the New York National Guard (which, a voiceover tells us, never lost a foot of ground nor a single soldier to enemy prisons while earning the first American Croix de Guerre) . After the war, blacks march down Fifth Avenue where we see in close-up their two most famous heroes, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts. A voiceover and a montage of monuments carries the theme into a peacetime roll call of heroes: Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Matthew Henson, Jesse Owens, and the anonymous students of Howard, Hampton, Fisk, and Tuskegee.

29. William Greaves's From These Roots revived the use of compilation footage and library stills. This photograph of a Marcus Garvey parade was taken by James VanderZee. (Courtesy William Greaves Productions)

Returning to the theme established by the Louis-Schmeling fight, the film broadens to include the Japanese, in rebuttal to the propaganda assertion that "Japan is the saviour of the colored races." One sequence centered on a black sailor at Pearl Harbor, whom black audiences would certainly take to be Dorie Miller. Miller, a steward in the segregated Navy, had leapt into a fallen deckgunner's seat and became, perhaps, the first Afro-American to fire a shot in anger in World War II.

30. The Negro Soldier depicted blacks in every conceivable combat role as though to symbolize a widening of opportunity that made the fight worthwhile. (War Department; Museum of Modern Art)

As though Moss's attempt to make history speak to Negroes needed an "amen," a woman rises from the flock and begins to read a letter from her son. Like other characters in the movie, she is prim and a little stiff, but projects the prescribed dignity. We cut away from her, as we did from the preacher, and follow her dutiful son through training camp, drills in the snow, and the typically segregated dance where he meets a girl. The son, like Joe Louis, personifies the black army and its new duties.

Through the soldier's letter we see improbably large numbers of Negroes in West Point, Officers Candidate School, the 99th Pursuit Squadron based at Tuskegee, black-armored cavalry outfits, and a black pilot in single combat. The son, speaking through his mother, moves the congregation to rise as one and sing a rousing "Onward Christian Soldiers" which segues into "Joshua Fi't the Battle of Jericho" and other black traditional music. The singing carries over into the upbeat ending, a split screen filled with the serried ranks of marching soldiers.

31. Stuart Heisler (left) was responsible for The Negro Soldier from script, to screen, to previews. (War Department; Heisler Papers, Research Library, UCLA)

No single group of respondents unanimously admired The Negro Soldier. Black journalists at a preview sat in momentary silence before acknowledging its merit. While troops themselves seemed to like it, the message was so mild that only a ten percent gap separated the opinions of northern and southern white soldiers. Opinion leaders were also divided in their views: Abe Hill and Langston Hughes, two black literateurs, for example, approved, while Lawrence Reddick, curator of the Schomburg Collection, disapproved.

Even liberal white critics quarreled with the film, finding that even though it may "mean more to Negroes than most white men could imagine," its thrust was "pitifully, painfully mild." Nevertheless, despite its modulated message, the Army balked at releasing the film, thereby forcing Moss and black allies in the War Department to campaign for broad civilian distribution.

By the summer of 1944 The Negro Soldier had taken an early stride toward the use of documentary film as a vehicle of advocacy set in the mode of social anatomy. The movie could not be said to have radicalized America or even lectured the country on its racial duties, but it had tested an important new means of black expression. If it has endured more as a landmark event rather than a great film, it still remains an exemplar of its genre; years later its maker and the film itself provided models of racial consciousness and expression for later generations of black filmmakers and advocates. The film's vision of the anatomy of Afro-American life, its rendering of the American achievement myth as a thread of Afro-American history, and its blending of the black experience into the broader fabric of history made it a model of its genre.