Short Films/Performance/the Star

The short films I found most interesting were the two Louis Armstrong pieces, A Rhapsody in Black and Blue and I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You. The first piece was interesting for the elements we've already talked about in class, that Armstrong is a sort of jungle king, and the bookends of the story. We get to see what life is like on the inside of a black household. But, even inside the household, the characters are types. From the domestic context, the couple seems like either a husband and wife couple or a mother and son couple. With the sexual ambiguities, the familial eroticism we discussed in class last week seems within the context of this short film also. But, there is no physical affection between this couple in the way that we got to see in The Jazz Singer. The man does refer to the wife as honey. There also seems to be a bit of an age difference. If anything, the action itself gives us this impression. The mother or wife, in full mammy fashion, is full breasted and aproned up for housework. She is also dressed in a simple house dress with a common pattern. Maybe from "honey", they are married, and we are supposed to assume that the life of hard manual labor has aged her a bit faster than her Jim Crowish counterpart. The Jim Crow character is obviosly a production of his type. He is first on the scene, grinning big, banging on pots and makeshift instruments. And, he's listening to jazz, Louis Armstrong. He's avoiding the mopping his mother/wife figure is adament in demanding that he does. He, however, is not interested in work. We accompany him in a daydream of sorts where he is a king, dressed less like a monarch in traditional robes and more like the leader of a marching band, complete with headdress and uniform. He goes to heaven where clouds bubble similarly to the mop bucket and Louis Armstrong and his band play for him in attire that is, I suppose, intentioned for us to take as traditional African attire. I think that the obvious articles that could inform these images are the Goffman and Dyer pieces, but the Carlson chapters also, to a lesser extent, inform. According to Goffman, Armstrong has to, somewhat, believe in the image he is presenting as his character. Opposingly, Dyer would have us believe that he has more power over his image because of his "star" quality, his ability to influence because of his popularity. I think that both of these pieces come into play by emphasizing that this short film came early in Armstrong's career. Because of this position in the chronology, we can possibly assume that Armstrong has less of the influence of "start" power that he will have later in life which means that he has less control over the characteristics of his parts. With this in mind, he may have been less concerned with the image he was portraying and more concerned with the fact he was getting paid and could add this to the publicity that would allow him to attain more "star" power.
Besides these things, I think it's important to notice the nature of the heaven that we see a Jim Crow type envisioning. This may or may not have influenced this image, since we know that most who were doing minstrelsy and film careers had little actual contact with South, but slaves were taught that the highest heaven they could acheive was a kind of black heaven. If they were loyal and hardworking for their masters, they could go to a heaven that was lower, hierarchically, than the heaven of their white masters and mistresses. With this in mind, it is interesting to see that there are no whites in the heaven of the Jim Crow. It's simply leisure, music.
Interesting.
I don't want this to be too long, so I'll quickly visit the second film, I'll be Glad When You're Dead You rascal You. There's a few things that quite obviously stick out as cliches of this genre. The white chick gets kidnapped by the local "savages" who are characterized as grinning cannibals, a commonly held assumption at the time. But, I think the fading between the face of the singing Armstrong and the disembodied head of the thick lipped and animal like tongue of the "savage" is quite interesting. Not only are we supposed to assume that the "savage" and Armstrong are not just similar but the same, but the movements of lips and tongue of the "savage" and armstrong are almost in sync, which pulls this image and juxtaposition of this image.
Anywho, I'll sure we'll discuss this more in depth during class. I'd also like to see what people have to say about the Bessie Smith short film as well as how these readings play off and inform each other.
That's all folks!