Carmen Jones: Black Feminist Film

For black feminists and their spectatorship, Carmen Jones and the styling of its main characters was a pivotal and critical film to be analyzed through the perspective of African-Americans during the war period. It also became a paramount in the Black feminist community, as this was one of the first movies to successfully show a black woman beyond roles that were over sexualized, as well as breaking the mold of the common black role of "mammy". “Her conscientiously crafted wardrobe accentuates her breasts, hips, and legs, and her laud bawdy language and lipstick highlight her mouth.” The mouth of a black woman was a symbol of cultural anxiety as demonstrated by the ban on interracial kisses. Carmen’s commentary in the film is bold and suggestive,

Despite being praised for giving black women a “voice”, and a musical that featured an all black cast, only one of the actors perform without in the film. White actors despite Dandridge, Belafonte, having musical backgrounds dubbed their singing voices. Hollywood movies of the era previously dubbed actors/actresses for commercial appeal as evident in films such as Singin in the Rain (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Preminger and Hammerstein represented larger narratives of blacks finding their “voice” through racial prejudices and injustices within Hollywood and the world. Since Carmen’s incarnation in the mid nineteenth-century, over fifty versions of the tale have been produced but only one film produced in the early twentieth century took direct inspiration from Carmen Jones. In 2001, black director and playwright Robert Townsend and MTV produced the second African-American adaption of the opera titled Carmen: A Hip Hopera (fig. 23), which sets the plot in modern day Philadelphia, featuring an original hip-hop and R&B score that references west Californian styles of rap which burst out onto the scene in the 1990s and early 2000s when the film was released. Filmed in a