Mixed Race Studies

Imitation of Life: On Passing Between

The Criterion Collection
2023-01-10

Miriam J. Petty, Associate Professor in the department of Radio/Television/Film
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

In 2005, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress added the 1934 version of Imitation of Life to the National Film Registry, its roster of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films. Archivist Ariel Schudson’s essay marking the occasion touts the film as “a defining moment in the history of women in film and a watershed moment for African American casting in Hollywood.” Directed by John M. Stahl for Universal Pictures, and based on Fannie Hurst’s best-selling 1933 prefeminist rags-to-riches novel of the same name, the film raises issues of gender roles, labor, race, identity, and the American dream in a melodramatic framework that might have otherwise been regarded as that of a mere “ladies’ picture.” Indeed, much of the film’s action focuses on the domestic sphere and the intimate, homey matters regularly dismissed as women’s work. But Stahl, like Hurst, uses domestic spaces to give audiences a closer perspective on such intimacies, employing the themes of interracial friendship and racial passing as metaphor and provocation…

Read the entire article here.

Early in your career you were working on a TV show and pitched an episode about a white family trying to adopt a Black child, and it was rejected. Why did you never pursue adoption as subject matter again?

That was my third show on television. I had written the script and loved it. It was so personal, as you know. And to have the network come back and say, “We’re not shooting this because it’s too controversial”—that was the beginning of the end for me on that show. Imagine writing something that means so much to you, and you’re the only Black writer on this show. Most of my time was spent trying to give agency to the one Black character, and to call out atrocious dialogue and story lines connected to that character—when they decided to write for that character at all. So now I’m going to focus on that character and tell this personal story. Then to have white people tell me that I can’t tell my own story . . . It is traumatizing. That shit hurts. But I have to think that had to have been a part of what pushed me to keep going.

Rebecca Carroll, “Beyond Visible: Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Necessity of Black Women’s Cinema,” The Criterion Collection, October 15, 2021. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7567-beyond-visible-gina-prince-bythewood-on-the-necessity-of-black-women-s-cinema.

Beyond Visible: Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Necessity of Black Women’s Cinema

The Criterion Collection
2021-10-15

Rebecca Carroll

There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved all this without losing her sense of self as a Black woman in America, and while continuing to fight to get personal projects made in Hollywood.

Prince-Bythewood has recently reached new heights by becoming the first Black woman to direct a major comic-book movie. That film—The Old Guard, starring KiKi Layne and Charlize Theron—premiered on Netflix in the summer of 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, to widely favorable reviews. Prince-Bythewood, though, is still best known for writing and directing her 2001 feature debut, Love & Basketball, which tells the indelibly original story of a young Black woman ballplayer. The film is not just a love letter to basketball but a paean to the complexity, ambition, and perseverance of Black womanhood. After writing for shows like A Different World and Felicity, Prince-Bythewood went on to direct for TV, including episodes of Girlfriends and Everybody Hates Chris. She returned to the big screen in 2008 with The Secret Life of Bees, and again in 2014 with Beyond the Lights, which is when we first met.

I had known and admired Gina’s work; I don’t know a single Black woman who did not obsess over the love scene in Love & Basketball set to Maxwell’s “This Woman’s Work.” But Beyond the Lights, from the opening scene, hit different. Here was the story of a young Black girl with a white mother who couldn’t see her daughter outside of her own white gaze. It echoed my own experience. I reviewed the film for an online blog and then requested an interview with Gina, which very quickly turned into a conversation that felt uncannily familiar. We were born within a month of each other, in 1969, and were both adopted into white families three weeks after being born. We had both spent our youth navigating all-white environments, desperately in search of a reflection of ourselves. We both turned to storytelling as a career path and a way to make sense of that experience.

Gina has written herself into the narrative—in the movies she’s brought to the screen, the family she’s made, and the world she’s created around her. In celebration of the new Criterion edition of Love & Basketball, we got together to catch up, reflect, and get into it…

Read the entire interview here.