Brief history on Black American Cinema: Black Panther is a 2018 film with the majority of the cast being African American and people of colour. Black American Cinema has a rich history but I will briefly talk on this. Historically, this type of cinema has been largely targeted towards other people of colour as the main audience, the cast of these movies have also been of colour. From the beginning, Black films have been used to challenge stereotypes of race, tell great stories, and create laughs. Furthermore, the reason these films were made and gained publicity was for a political and social movement to fight for equality and fight back against negative and oppressive stereotypes. The category of 'Black films' came to be around the year 1915 to combat stereotypes as stated earlier.
Black Representation in cinema: With any film, representations are taken from it somehow, characters and actions will not be taken just for fiction, they are still a representation of the film makers views. As such black people have been represented many times in films whether that be positively like Black Panther or Negatively like Fantasia (features a half-man, half-donkey centaur who is black). However, I personally want to search through the roots of the Black Panther series, the ever loved MCU and how Marvel have represented people of colour throughout their films. When thinking about the first Black superhero, most people point to Black Panther, the Jack Kirby and Stan Lee character who first appeared in Fantastic Four #52 in July 1966. However, the first Black superhero in US comics was actually Lion Man. The first black MCU character is The Falcon played by Wilson, a central figure in the MCU, having appeared in six films as of 2022 and taking a lead role in the miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021). The character is noted for being the first black Captain America in the MCU, and Mackie's portrayal of Wilson has been met with positive reception. Extremely recently, black women are getting represented heavily as the latest film in the Black Panther series Black Panther Wakanda Forever has a main lead being a woman of colour, the new Black Panther is Shuri, T'Challa's genius younger sister played by Letitia Wright
This change happened due to the tragic death of the original actor Chadwick Boseman who embodied a movement in cinema as a whole due to him starring as the brilliant character of Black Panther.
Why Black Panther is an amazing representation and gained success: Black Panther represents people of colour in an amazing way and here are the ways I think make it so. The animal black panther symbolism is linked to grace, protection, beauty, night, magic, inner power, and even the secrets of life and death.
This animal being used to represent black people shows that black people are strong independent and beautiful all at the same time. Black Panther is an unqualified success for Marvel and the superhero genre as a whole, but it's important to note that its success is due precisely to the fact that a filmmaker like Ryan Coogler was allowed to make a deeply personal movie that was actually about something, while still delivering the thrills and spills of the typical Marvel film making it enjoyable to long time fans and new ones even expanding their audience to people of colour.
Recent Issues/campaigns: A famous campaign relating to film is the #OscarsSoWhite campaign. This campaign started due to there being a distinct lack of black actor(esses)s winning awards, since 2000, there have been 72 actors and actresses who won Academy Awards. 60 are white. Only 12 are people of colour.
In this video the primary focus was on Chris Rock, a Black American comedian, almost stepping down from the Oscars due to the recent issues.
However, due to much encouragement and protesting he ended up going to the Oscars and even made a comment on this hashtag while there.
I cannot talk about recent issues without talking about the (purely hypothetical) elephant in the room, the BLM movement. BLM has effected film and the whole world films must adapt and improvise to support the movement and keep a positive representation. Others have questioned how many more movies we need about African-American trauma before fatigue sets in and people will not be as emotionally taxed for watching them therefore mitigating the message/meaning of the entire film.
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