Whatever floats your boat...
(Wait Until You're) (I Don't Wanna Be) Married
I wanted to use a small piece of a Fred Astaire number in a video. The problem was that he was performing in blackface. I'm not shocked to find blackface in a 1936 Hollywood musical but I didn't want it one of my videos. The beginnings of this "black and white" vlog are in my attempts to digitally obscure the actual footage. Of course, I ended up using and wildly emphasizing the contrast between black and white.
Views: 69
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Comment by Trimaddog on July 2, 2012 at 11:52am
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Very cool! Love the clip at the end!
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Comment by BlancheNoE on July 4, 2012 at 12:26am
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That was pure awesome and I LOVED the extra contrast.
You really did make it look brand new.
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...forgot to say : It's hard to go wrong with Fred and I think he himself would be very tickled by this.
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Comment by NatureJunkie on July 22, 2012 at 3:03pm
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This was a visual treat, Geoff. I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end.
Ya got me thinking though. I understand your not wanting to use a clip of blackface in your video. But when I watch Fred, I see some moves of the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway, and other black entertainers. I haven't seen Swingtime, so I don't know whether or not that movie was laden with racist overtones. But just seeing this clip makes me think that what Fred was doing was homage. Is blackface necessarily racist by definition? I'm not making an argument one way or the other. You simply have me pondering when racial overtones become racist overtones.
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Comment by Geoff on July 30, 2012 at 3:45pm
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NJ, the piece I stole and re-edited is definitely a homage to Bill Bojangles Robinson (it's called "Bojangles of Harlem"). Astaire admired Bojangles quite a lot. But the style of dancing and the loud costume is actually very unlike Robinson and derived from other black entertainers. I think there is a mild, and not necessarily unfriendly, kind of racism present in the sense that personal identity is effaced by racial identity. Bojangles can stand in for all other black entertainers because that is what he basically is, a BLACK entertainer.
I'm not someone who goes sniffing after racial slights and I really don't think any less of Fred for sharing or at least reflecting what would have been very standard attitudes about African Americans in the 1930s. But I believe from the little reading that I've done that attitudes like Astaire's were part of the problem, even if they weren't the biggest part.
In the opinion of many people the greatest blackface entertainer of all time was Bert Williams who played with the Ziegfeld Follies. Williams wanted to do Shakespeare but that was out of the question in the 1910s. W.C. Fields said Williams was the funniest comedian he ever saw and the saddest man he ever knew.
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That was very eloquently said, Geoff. And more intelligent than much of what I learned in my film history courses.
Just watched the video again. Still a delight.
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