Colonial Intertitles: Unraveling the Reels/Reals of Colonial Domination in the Silent Film Era

• In Event: 20410 - Unsettling Race and Gender Through Indigenous Sociologies

Abstract

Within the colonial empire, the film industry is a legacy of colonial domination. Film media has been used as a tool to create and reproduce narratives that maintain Settler supremacy against Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. Silent film has been a particular genre of film that was heavily utilized to spread Colonizer ideals. Within the lands known as the “United States”, the colonized relationality between Black and Indigenous peoples is especially absent from historical discourse and current memory. These silences (Trouillot 2015) are an intentional component of colonial film media, which relies on our isolation and internalized colonization to prevent collective consciousness and revolution. As part of a larger dissertation project, I discuss in this paper the findings of a historical analysis where I explored The Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) and The Vanishing American (Seitz 1925) as origins of Black and Red film tropes. These tropes, I argue, are part of a larger phenomenon of colonial images, or as literal and theoretical imaginaries and narratives that are intentionally false and utilized for the purposes of furthering colonization. I begin with a discussion of Black and Red film tropes, highlighting their near identical features, as a means of establishing colonial empire tactics. Then, I discuss the plots of The Birth of a Nation and The Vanishing American, focusing on the particular scenes that embody silences of Black and Indigenous histories and relationalities. Next, I aim to break these silences through my dual roles as Sicangu Memory Keeper and scholar-activist by sharing counter-narratives of Black and Indigenous relationalities from archival data surrounding resistance to colonial intertitles.

Author

• Rowan Greywolf Moore, Arizona State University-Tempe