Film Analysis Of Imitation Of Life

10416 Words21 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Women in classical hollywood essay

While Imitation of Life 's main story involves the fortunes and loves of a central female character, this story intersects with the racially charged trials and tribulations of an African-American woman and her light-skinned daughter. Both films offer the view that a white woman can improve her circumstances with enough guts, ingenuity, and physical attractiveness, but that African Americans, even those light enough to pass for white, are inherently unable to realize the rags-to-riches dream of the self-made person that infects Americans to this very day. Stahl’s film, a faithful adaptation of the Hurst novel, centers on Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), a widow barely supporting herself and her three year old daughter, Jessie, by running her …show more content…

Sirk’s use of musical conventions reminds us that this is Hollywood’s classical period, a time when the motto of the movies was to “make ‘em big”. Sirk’s version epitomizes this classic mentality through the use of extravagant sets and costumes. One of the major advertising points of the film was the cost of Turner’s wardrobe and jewels. In a clipping released by Universal International to theaters around the nation, Turner’s jewels were so valuable “she was accompanied by two armed guards at all times while the color production was being filmed” (. With a script much more layered and explicit in regards to the evils of the world, it depicts a greater distance between Lora and Annie, white and black. Even though racial tension has been featured in films before, Sirk confronts issues of race more aggressively then Stahl. The complex discussions of race in Imitation of Life go way beyond Sarah Jane’s integration into American society. Lucy Fischer explains:
Her rejection of a black doll invokes research on children’s racial identification; her anger with her mother bespeaks her generation’s rejection of domestic work; her affair with a white man reminds us of loosening prohibitions against screen miscegenation; Mahalia Jackson’s presence at Annie’s funeral sparks associations to the singer’s participation in civil rights demonstrations, and her role in mainstreaming of black gospel music” (Fischer

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Suffering Mirrored By Nikky Finny

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present? Abstract Nikky Finney (1957- ) has always been involved in the struggle of southern black people interweaving the personal and the public in her depiction of social issues such as family, birth, death, sex, violence and relationships. Her poems cover a wide range of examples: a terrified woman on a roof, Rosa Parks, a Civil Rights symbol, and Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, to name just a few. The dialogue is basic to this volume, where historical allusions to prominent figures touch upon important sociopolitical issues. I argue that “Red Velvet” and “Left”, from Head off & Split, crystallize African-Americans’ /African-Americans’ suffering and struggle against slavery, by capturing events and recalling historical figures from the past.

    Read More

  • Coming of Age in Mississippi and Segregation

    1314 Words  | 3 Pages

    Moody’s position as an African American woman provides a unique insight into these themes through her story. As a little girl, Moody would sit on the porch of her house watch her parents go to work. Everyday she would see them walk down the hill at the break of dawn to go to work, and walk back up when the sun was going down to come back home. At this time in her life, Moody did not understand segregation, and that her parents were slaves and working for a white man. But, as growing up poor and black in the rural south with a single mother trying to provide for her family, Moody quickly realized the importance of working. Working as a woman in the forties and fifties was completely different from males. They were still fighting for gender equality, which restricted women to working low wage jobs like maids for white families. Moody has a unique insight to the world of working because she was a young lady that was working herself to help keep herself and her bother and sister in school. Through work, Moody started to realize what segregation was and how it impacted her and her life. While working for Mrs. Johnson and spending the nights with Miss Ola, she started to realize basic di...

    Read More

  • Maya Angelou

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    This piece of autobiographical works is one of the greatest pieces of literature and will continue to inspire young and old black Americans to this day be cause of her hard and racially tense background is what produced an eloquent piece of work that feels at times more fiction than non fiction

    Read More

  • Contrasting Native Son and Their Eyes Were Watching God

    4138 Words  | 9 Pages

    This paper examines the drastic differences in literary themes and styles of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, two African--American writers from the early 1900's. The portrayals of African-American women by each author are contrasted based on specific examples from their two most prominent novels, Native Son by Wright, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. With the intent to explain this divergence, the autobiographies of both authors (Black Boy and Dust Tracks on a Road) are also analyzed. Particular examples from the lives of each author are cited to demonstrate the contrasting lifestyles and experiences that created these disparities, drawing parallels between the authors’ lives and creative endeavors. It becomes apparent that Wright's traumatic experiences involving females and Hurston's identity as a strong, independent and successful Black artist contributed significantly to the ways in which they chose to depict African-American women and what goals they adhered to in reaching and touching a specific audience with the messages contained in their writing.

    Read More

  • Civil Rights, Equality and the Music of Nina Simone

    2383 Words  | 5 Pages

    Nina Simone used music to challenge, provoke, incite, and inform the masses during the period that we know as the Civil Rights Era. In the songs” Four Women”, “Young Gifted and Black”, and Mississippi God Damn”, Nina Simone musically maps a personal "intersectionality" as it relates to being a black American female artist. Kimberly Crenshaw defines "intersectionality" as an inability for black women to separate race, class and gender. Nina Simone’s music directly addresses this paradigm. While she is celebrated as a prolific artist, her political and social activism is understated despite her front-line presence in the movement.

    Read More

  • slaverybel Morrison’s Beloved as Chronicle of Slavery?

    1094 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is ridiculous to say that Tony Morrison’s book is a good account of history. It would be nearly impossible for a black woman to try to write about the history of prejudices against black slave women without having bias views. Stanley Crouch, in his essay “Aunt Medea”, talks about how language is counterfeit and those who tell history only tell their perspective (Crouch, 39); the view is entirely biases because of what they have been through. Morrison even stated herself, as noted in Maggie Sale’s article “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved”, that she “wanted to write literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black” (Sale, 42). Cynthia Griffin Wolff, author of “‘Margaret Garner’: A Cincinn...

    Read More

  • Nina Simone: A Sophisticated Musical Goddess

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    Over and over again critics write about Nina Simone’s power and charisma throughout the Civil Rights Movement. She sang the words of an entire movement, “All I want is equality/ for my sister, my brother, my people, and me./ Yes, you lied to me all these years”(Simone Mississippi). She sang out for her entire race, and with a “smoky- toned” voice, when four young girls were killed in a church bombing (Lewis). She sang “Will my country fall, stand or fall?/ Is it too late for us all?/ And did Martin Luther King just die in vain? (Simone Why?) after the death of MLK. Nina Simone… a singer with many different voices, a singer who denies categorization, a woman who is genre-less to prove a point.

    Read More

  • Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

    1511 Words  | 4 Pages

    Her life seems like it has been so long when in reality it has only been a short twenty-three years. The book ends with Annie on a bus with other, young protesters singing. "We shall overcome, We shall overcome, We shall overcome some day. I WONDER. I really WONDER." (Moody, 1968, p. 424). While Annie is still determined to close the racial gap, she ponders whether or not if blacks really will overcome racism. I believe the youth and enthusiasm of the other passengers represent the hope for the future, that one day they will overcome.

    Read More

  • Zora Neale Hurston - Celebrating the Culture of Black Americans

    2150 Words  | 5 Pages

    In her life and in her writings, Zora Neale Hurston, with the South and its traditions as her backdrop, celebrated the culture of black Americans, Negro love and pride with a feminine perspective that was uncommon and untapped in her time. While Hurston can be considered one of the greats of African-American literature, it’s only recently that interest in her has been revived after decades of neglect (Peacock 335). Sadly, Hurston’s life and Hurston’s writing didn’t receive notoriety until after her death in 1960.

    Read More

  • Overcoming Struggles: A Study of 'The Help'

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    She shows how these fictions are woven into the fabric of everyday life in Jackson, from the laws to ordinary conversations, and how these beliefs get passed from generation to generation. It shows a deep mistrust of whites on the part of the black community, who have been betrayed by them again and again. It also shows how powerful and how dangerous it can be to challenge the stereotypes and dissolve the lines that are meant to separate people from each other on the basis of skin

    Read More

  • Film Analysis: The Lives Of Others

    1151 Words  | 3 Pages

    Within the German Democratic Republic, there was a secret police force known as the Stasi, which was responsible for state surveillance, attempting to permeate every facet of life. Agents within and informants tied to the Stasi were both feared and hated, as there was no true semblance of privacy for most citizens. Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the movie The Lives of Others follows one particular Stasi agent as he carries out his mission to spy on a well-known writer and his lover. As the film progresses, the audience is able to see the moral transformation of Stasi Captain Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler primarily through the director 's use of the script, colors and lighting, and music.

    Read More

  • Lena Horne Research Paper

    1668 Words  | 4 Pages

    Lena Horne was an African American entertainer and civil rights activist, born in Brooklyn, New York. She, like many other African Americans in general, and African American women in particular, born in 1910’s, saw many evolutions of race and racialized gender relations in America. She was able to transition to glory at the ripe age of 92 years old, passing away from congestive heart failure in 2010. Lena Horne’s height of her career, while predating Womanism being named but not actualized, embodies the four tenets that are, radical subjectivity, critical engagement, redemptive self-love and traditional communalism, by way of her commitments to hope in perilous times. She is quoted saying many things that will be highlighted in this paper,

    Read More

  • Issues of Racial Identity during the Harlem Renaissance

    2024 Words  | 5 Pages

    The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset, and Wallace Brown.

    Read More

  • Gattaca

    1385 Words  | 3 Pages

    We can relate the discrimination and the prejudice to the color discrimination and prejudice in our reality. When some people say black skin people are not good and treat them bad and without respect. The difference between the movie and the realty was that in the movie the invalid was normal people and the valid was people created in laboratories without sickness of birth defects. The similarity was the way of one group sees another. The way the invalid looked to the valid as perfect and they never will be like them or have jobs like they had, and also the discriminatory way that the valid sees the invalid in the movie as degenerated

    Read More

  • Racial Dynamics in Stahl's 'Imitation of Life'

    519 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the primal inauguration of human civilization to today`s modern world, racial and cultural ties have played a crucial role in determining human interactions. John`s Stahl`s Imitation of Life (1934) epitomizes this principle through its parallel accounts of two mothers: Beatrice Pullman, a white business magnate, and Delilah Johnson, a black homemaker. Although both women work together in creating a pancake empire, Delilah is always perceived as subservient to her mistress resulting in her becoming an Other.

    Read More

More about Film Analysis Of Imitation Of Life

Open Document