Mixed Race Studies

Ruth Negga Crafted a ‘F*ck-You Machine’ to the Establishment with Her Radiant Turn in ‘Passing’

IndieWire
2021-11-05

Jude Dry

Negga’s provocative and strong-willed character in Rebecca Hall’s film highlights the actress’ singular talent.

Ruth Negga’s radiant performance in “Passing” is almost unrecognizable from her last Oscar-nominated role. Those who only know the Irish and Ethiopian actress as Mildred Loving, the soft-spoken, steady heroine of 2016’s romantic drama “Loving,” are in for a delightfully rude awakening when they meet Clare Bellew, the destabilizing force whirling through director Rebecca Hall’s new film.

While Mildred was resolute and composed in the face of injustice, Clare is provocative and strong-willed, a sunny seductress determined to live life exactly on her terms. Though they live in very different worlds, Clare has a lot more in common with Negga’s hot-headed “Preacher” character Tulip than she does with Mildred — and with the charismatic Negga herself.

In an interview with IndieWire, Negga explained why she embraced her latest onscreen character. “Everything about Clare for me is a fuck-you to an establishment, any kind of establishment,” she said. “A Black woman wanting something, being fully invested in her ability to seduce anyone, her enjoyment of it, her enjoyment of flirting with danger, but also, at the same time, acknowledging that she cannot be safe.” She described Nella Larsen’s original novella, which inspired the movie, as “a fuck-you machine … but also a very human one, because everything about her is a worry to the status quo.”…

Read the entire article here.

Using black and white [media] also allowed [Rebecca] Hall to cast Black actresses in the roles. She’s not trying to “fool” anyone into thinking that Negga or Thompson is white, she’s simply trying to turn the film’s deeply metaphorical ideas into a practical experience. The audience will have “very fixed ideas about Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga’s racial identity,” Hall said, “which gives me a position from which to destabilize those ideas and point out the limits of just reducing them to that one definition.”

Kate Erbland, “‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund It,” IndieWire, October 28, 2021. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/10/passing-rebecca-hall-interview-1234674475/.

‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund It

IndieWire
2021-10-28

Kate Erbland

For nearly a decade, the actress-turned-filmmaker tried to get her ambitious Nella Larsen adaptation made. As she tells IndieWire, she knew there was only one way to make it happen.

Every word that first-time feature filmmaker Rebecca Hall uses to describe the genesis of her “Passing” vibrates with intensity. Her first experience reading the Nella Larsen novella she eventually adapted for the black-and-white period piece was like “being in a fever,” the pages flipping by as if she was “slightly possessed.”

More than 13 years after first reading Larsen’s book, Hall has kept up that same passion for the material, enough to propel her through years of denials from Hollywood brass and the distinct possibility that the film would never get made the way she saw it.

Much has been made of Hall’s personal connection to the material — the film, like Larsen’s seminal work, follows the fraught reunion of a pair of friends (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga), both of whom are Black, though one of them has crossed the color line and lived her life “passing” as a white woman (Negga as Clare). Hall herself is of mixed racial heritage and her own maternal grandfather “passed” for the majority of his life. But for the long-time actress, Larsen’s slim book spoke even more deeply about much larger ideas…

Read the entire article here.

Race in Post-War German Cinema in Drama ‘Toxi’ (Video)

IndiWire
April 2016

Sergio

For anyone interested in foreign films, one of the most interesting periods of German filmmaking was the post war period between 1946 to the mid 1960’s.

In effect, only two types of films were being made: pure escapist film such as musicals and comedies that were designed to make the audience completely forget the ugly events of the recent past. And then there were films like “The Lost One,” “Germany Year Zero,” and “Murderers Among Us” which explicitly dealt with the aftermath of the horrors of World War II and Germany’s guilt and repercussions.

But of all the films, one of the most fascinating, and worthy of rediscovery, is the 1952 film “Toxi,” co-written and directed by Robert Stemmie, who was a major and very successful director of the period. It was one of the very few German films made then, and even now, which seriously tried to deal with race. No doubt a very touchy and controversial subject considering Germany’s Nazi “racial purity” agenda.

For years the film was very difficult to see. I first saw it a few years ago during a film series of post-war German films. However, the film was eventually remastered and released on DVD and is available from the DEFA Film Library DVD series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The film centers around an abandoned German “occupation baby,” which was the term for children of U.S. soldiers (stationed in Germany after the war) and German women, who were abandoned by their parents. It was estimated that there were some 3000-5000 of these children, many of whom were biracial…

Read the entire article here.

The Agonies Of “Passing” – Considering the Murder Mystery ‘Sapphire’

IndieWire
July 2014

Sergio

The Agonies Of “Passing” – Considering the Murder Mystery ‘Sapphire‘

Starting in the late 1940’s, and continuing through to the end of the ‘50’s, Hollywood seemed to be obsessed with the concept of “passing” –light skinned black people passing for white. Though it wasn’t new, of course, somehow it caught Tinseltown’s attention and a slew of films were made, almost all them dealing with women in particular, who passed for white and the tragedies and sorrow that they encountered.

Elia Kazan’s “Pinky,” “Lost Boundaries,” “Imitation Of Life,” “Band of Angels,” “The Night of the Quarter Moon,” “I Passed for White,” and the would-be “Gone with the Wind” rip-off, “Raintree County,” with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, which, technically may not be a “passing” movie, though it deals with a pre-Civil war, antebellum Southern belle (Taylor), who goes slowly insane because she believes her real mother was a slave, who was her father’s lover (turns out that she wasn’t, but Taylor dies anyway for all her grief).

But, for my money, the real doozy of the passing-for-white films wasn’t from Hollywood, but came instead from the U.K.

I’m referring to the 1959 British mystery detective film “Sapphire,” directed by Basil Dearden, who specialized, during the late 50′s and 60′s, in films with controversial subject matter, such as his 1961 film “Victim,” which dealt with a successful and closeted gay barrister who is being blackmailed, and fights back against his tormentors. It is credited for being the first movie in which the word “homosexual” was actually used in a film.

But “Sapphire” is in another realm altogether…

Read the entire review here. Watch the entire film, Sapphire here.