Film images reflect and illuminate American culture in a characteristic way. Successful and popular films are designed for audiences and so they have to be reflections of what can be understood and accepted by people of the time in which the film was produced.

Afro-Americans have overall been more incisively affected by film than any other racial group. The black image, though not always a presentation of cultural realities, is often a reflection and description of cultural legends, myths and fantasies. This is especially true for Afro-Americans who have always been negative values in American society. The Afro-American image in film may have been the widespread image of blacks in America, but this image had little or nothing to do with reality.One should always keep in mind that it was predominantly for Anglo-Americans

Besides there were occasional bits, such as Biograph's A Bucket of Cream Ale (1904), which plays a joke on a Dutchman, who angrily throws a glass on a Negro servant woman, and is hit in revenge, without a pause to consider, in the face with a growler of beer tossed by the blackface maid. In another nameless movie a vender, who has shortly before refused to serve "two smartly dressed black men" , is blackened by kids while she takes a nap outside, and "learns the viciousness of racism by becoming black and experiencing it firsthand" by getting laughed at and spanked by passers-by. No one knows how popular such film bits were at this time, but it is more or less certain that these movies, providing a remarkable variety of black imagery, went unnoticed by audience and society.

The plot of Free and Equal, that was at the time of its appearing in 1925 clearly an anachronism, "details a black man's inability to act in a civilized manner and condemns miscegenation and intermarriage" . It bears out D. W. Griffith's depiction of blacks as rapists, and also uses a white man in blackface as the leading actor. The unpopularity of the film in the 1920s indicates that it was a product of its time, which was in its obtrusive way fading from acceptance, although the images of the Afro-Americans were still negative and stereotyped at this time.

Usually the mulatto [was] made likeable - even sympathetic...and the audience believe[d] that the girls' life could have been productive and happy had she not been a 'victim of divided racial inheritance'.

Some topics in this essay:
Birth Nation, Al Jolson's, Cream Ale, Civil War, Uncle Tom, Tragic Mulatto, Tom's Cabin, Watermelon Contest, INTRODUCTION Film, Bloomingdale Asylum, birth nation, american films, tragic mulatto, blackface tradition, uncle tom, uncle tom's cabin, uncle tom's, tom's cabin, film shorts, black film, black white, 114 tragic mulatto, 13 jesters 1920s, 11 blackfacing film, blackfacing film shorts,