Miriam El Abbassi | Arts Editor
Featured Image: Representation of minority groups in film is still a pressing issue in 2019. | Courtesy of Pixabay
The representation of various minority groups in film, since the inception of movie making, has had a questionable past. Films made within the last one hundred years can be found littered with stereotypical tropes, and sometimes outright racist depictions. Filmmaking has since come a long way, moving away from the blatant misrepresentation, and towards inclusivity, which is very much a reflection of how far society has progressed.
Now, more than ever, there has been a push for diverse filmmaking, not only on but off the camera as well. In addition to the everyday person petitioning in online forums for a more diverse pool of films and filmmakers, various institutions, such as the Toronto International Film Festival, have used their power to legislate actual change. Although it is safe to say many strides have been made since then, certain instances have made it apparent that there is still more work to be done.
If one were to look back at early films, it would give the viewer a pretty good indication of the cultural climate at that time. Racism was rampant and incredibly commonplace in early films. One of the earliest depictions was in 1915, with the film A Birth Of A Nation.
This film follows the United States during the Civil War, and the period of reconstruction that follows afterward. The Klu Klux Klan is then presented as this heroic force that brings the United States back to greatness. The film enforced the ideals of white supremacy, and also featured many white actors in blackface, playing black men, and portraying them as unintelligent and aggressive.
In 1921, Paramount Pictures released The Sheik, a film about an adventurous British woman who is kidnapped by an Arabian sheik and taken to his home in the Saharan desert. This film depicts Arabs to be savages who have distorted cultural practices such as auctioning off their own women.
In the 1920s, Hollywood created the “Charlie Chan” character, a Sherlock Holmes-type Honolulu police detective, who directly juxtaposed the “bad Asian” character of Fu-Manchu. In 1923, the silent film series, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, was released to further enforce the Yellow Peril metaphor. The Yellow Peril was the belief that the people of East Asia posed some kind of threat to the western world. East Asian people, like many non-white minority groups, were viewed as savages and barbaric, even subhuman. It was also commonplace to have white actors portray people of colour.
While more recent films don’t ever dare to espouse such hateful rhetoric, Hollywood’s exclusion of different minority groups today is much more underhanded and subtle. For example, an article by Marissa G. Muller from W Magazine wrote “People of colour accounted for 13.9 percent of film leads, 12.6 percent of directors, 8.1 percent of film writers, 7.1 percent of creators of broadcast scripted shows, 7.3 percent of creators of cable scripted shows, and 15.7 percent creators of digital scripted shows.” This means the majority of films that today’s audience can see, or will ever have a chance to see, contain a white lead actor or actress.
However, when breaking those statistics down further into the representation of different minority groups, the findings become even more abysmal, according to the UCLA study Muller cites: “Latinos made up just 2.7 percent of film roles in 2016, while Asians accounted for 3.1 percent, mixed race accounted for 3 percent, and Native Americans accounted for 0.5 percent. Black Americans had 12.5 percent of lead film roles. By comparison, whites dominated film roles at 78.1 percent.”
In an attempt to try and combat these statistics, organizations like TIFF created concrete plans of action. The organization began fundraising in 2017, with a goal of $3 million, which would go towards supporting different initiates involving women in film, “The goal is to champion diversity of gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and physical and cognitive ability within gender equity initiatives,” according to Kevin Ritchie’s article in NOW Toronto.
“Those initiatives,” Ritchie goes on, “includes a three-month residency for emerging female creators, a new producers’ accelerator program for women, a speaker series on gender equality and identities, a plan to design education tools about women and gender in cinema and data to track career trajectories.”
Even this year’s selection of films at TIFF are a diverse bunch that will surely appeal to a wider variety of audiences, as Ritchie breaks down to, “333 titles to be screened, 21 of them will be LGBTQIA stories, and 84 countries and regions will be represented in all. Thirty-six per cent of the titles are directed, co-directed, or created by women… Notably, a high amount of Indigenous work is to be screened.” This starkly contrasts the current landscape of mainstream films that most people can go out and see at their local theater. Such diversity may only be able to exist in festivals like TIFF, since even big production houses still get it wrong.
Whitewashing is one of those issues in Hollywood films that always seems to come up every couple of months, and almost break the internet with the discourse that ensues. Whitewashing is the practice (a very old one at that) of casting a white actor for a role written for a person of colour. Historically, this was done in Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961), where, white actor, Mickey Rooney, played a Japanese landlord. However one doesn’t need to look too far back to see the plethora of examples that exist of whitewashing in film currently. The film Ghost In The Shell (2017) was based off of a Japanese manga, and anime of the same name, but featured Scarlett Johanssen, a white woman, in the leading role.
It seems like with every advancement comes more work that needs to be done. Yes, we may no longer be dealing with overt racism in films, but the subtle ways Hollywood continues to choose to exclude minority groups and their stories from the big screen only serves to perpetuate the very systems of inequality that many are fighting against.
