A Nigger in the Woodpile (1904) User Reviews

Come, come people, is your Google broke?

[charlesg-629-659286 · 22 September 2013]

"I think its ridiculous to decide to use a black person for the villain but as my professor said: "The director was looking for a quick way to symbolize the person stealing the wood with a villain."

"Why was it necessary for them to use a black person? They could have used white people!"

Just a little bit of Googling would've turned up the fact that the title is a play on words of an old figure of speech. A "n_gger in the woodpile" is a no-longer-politically-correct term meaning "some fact of considerable importance that is not disclosed — something suspicious or wrong". The sort of thing our modern-day politicians do when they propose a law by playing up all the good points and keeping all the "gotchas" carefully hidden so the public supports it...and only find out all the gory details after the bill has become law. Those hidden, but significant, details are "the n_gger in the woodpile."

According to Wikipedia: "Both the 'fence' and 'woodpile' variants developed about the same time in the period of 1840–50 when the Underground Railroad was flourishing. The evidence is slight, but it is presumed that they were derived from actual instances of the concealment of fugitive slaves in their flight north under piles of firewood or within hiding places in stone walls.[1] Another possible origin, comes from the practice of transporting pulpwood on special rail road cars. In the era of slavery, the pulpwood cars were built with an outer frame with the wood being stacked inside in moderately neat rows and stacks. However, given the nature of the cars, it was possible to smuggle persons in the pile itself; possibly giving rise to the term."

So...there is a Very Good Reason why the thieves could not be White. And it was not intended as political propaganda foisting the notion that all black people were dishonest. While tasteless by the standards of over one hundred years later, the title capitalized on a well-known (for that time) phrase. Entitling the film "Whitey in the Woodpile", or the "Caucasian Firewood Thieves" would've completely negated the (admittedly tasteless) stab at humor. This was, after all, 1904, not 2013.

I did not get it

[Horst_In_Translation · 2/10 · 20 July 2017]

"A N!gger in the Woodpile" (shame I have to censor the title or IMDb won't let me send this review) is a live action short film from 1904, so this one is already way over a decade old and at four minutes, it is longer than most other films from that time. If I remember correctly, 1904 was a fairly prolific year in terms of (short) filmmaking. Of course, it is a black-and-white silent film. This one struggles from something many many other films from the early 19th century do. The complete lack of intertitles here made it basically impossible to understand the story. At least for me. It's not racist I believe, the N word was just common back then. But as for the story, I had no idea what was going on. It is listed as a comedy here, but I have seen many comedies from that era that were considerably funnier and more entertaining, some even from the late 19th century still. With the very last scene, you could maybe call it an action film too. Anyway, as a whole, this was not a rewarding watch by any means. Even at under five minutes, this is a waste of time. I am pretty sure many people who gave this a 10 here on IMDb only did so because of the N word being used in the title, not because they actually saw it. No quality in here. Stay away.

Well...

[tcasey-2 · 25 October 2005]

Just heard about this movie in my film class... I think its ridiculous to decide to use a black person for the villain but as my professor said: "The director was looking for a quick way to symbolize the person stealing the wood with a villain." So by using the early 20th century stereotypes they decided to make the villain black instead of white since it is a silent film and the use of screen cards is very plaguing to the flow of a 10 minute film. This is what I've heard and from what it sounds like it seems to be correct, other than the racial problems that could be implied from this movie it is very good for a 10 minute short.

Or they could have been just very racist...

It could have been funny if they didn't use "black" people...

[sandra836 · 7 August 2001]

........But maybe I'm being too touchy. Filmed in black and white, about 10 seconds, this is about a man dressed in blackface. (For those who don't know, BLACKFACE is a term used for white actors who painted their faces black. They then do skits or act in short films that are usually racist and stereotypical towards black people, that's why I put quotation marks around the word "black". They weren't even black!) He steals a woodpile(whatever the hell a woodpile is---probably a pile of wood) from some farm. There then is a big explosion. A black lady(most likely in blackface too)comes out and she seems to be yelling or something. Then, some white farmer guy comes out, and thanks to the after math of the explosion, he catches the black man that stole the woodpile. Why was it necessary for them to use a black person? They could have used white people! But you know what, for it's time, it was pretty good----with the fake explosion and whatnot. But I still think caucasoid actors could have been used.

Something Wrong

[Cineanalyst · 29 February 2020]

This film from the Biograph company is an example of the sort of negative racial stereotypes depicted in early cinema. Its structure follows a familiar pattern of screen comedy of the era of a prank and punitive ending, a formula that dates back to at least, perhaps, the very first film comedy skit, the Lumière brothers' "L'Arroseur arrosé" ("The Sprayer Sprayed") (1895). There, the gag was more innocuous, of a boy being spanked after tricking a gardener into spraying himself in the face with water from a hose. Films became more vicious from there, as this two-scene Biograph short demonstrates. It's also a play on a then-popular idiom--literalizing it as a sort of visual pun. With the trick photography (there's a stop-substitution for the explosion), there's another, less troubling double meaning with one trick in the film being by and against characters within the film and another trick being pulled on the spectator.

In the film, two white men chopping wood plant a stick of dynamite in their woodpile. After they depart, two black characters (white actors in blackface), a sinful deacon and an Uncle Remus type, steal from the woodpile. In the second and last shot-scene of the film, they've taken the wood home, where a mammy type also occupies, for their stove. The dynamite explodes in the fire, thus exposing and punishing them for their theft, as the white men enter the space to laugh at their expense. This minstrelsy representation of African Americans as habitual thieves seems to have been a popular negative stereotype at the time. After this production, Biograph made another racial punitive picture, "The Chicken Thief" (1904), while Edison produced "The Watermelon Patch" (1905). Besides perpetuating the thievery trope, these later films also employ food-based stereotypes of African Americans regarding fried chicken and watermelon.

Jacqueline Stewart begins the introduction to her book, "Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity," with an examination of this film, partly because of the meaning of its titular slang expression that it treats both figuratively and literally. Today, as its Wikipedia entry points out, phrases with similar meanings would be "skeleton in the closet" or "fly in the ointment." In other words, it means that there's something suspiciously concealed, something amiss, something wrong. Supposedly, the figure of speech originated with the actual hiding of runaway slaves in woodpiles along the Underground Railroad. Regardless, its roots are in racism. Aptly and ironically, however, this title may take on a different meaning in how, as Stewart says, such films (and film history) conceal and reveal black figures.

As an early film such as "Something Good - Kiss" (1898) offers, though, a blanket excusing of past racist depictions as being entirely universal doesn't hold true. Indeed, early on, with white filmmakers making films for predominately white audiences, negative racial stereotypes were common, but they weren't accepted by everyone, and by the following decade, including African American filmmakers with African-American casts, took to creating alternate representations on screen. But, here, even the cinematic gaze, as Stewart also illustrates, works to support the racial hierarchy of the picture. The dynamite trick provides a form of white surveillance over the black transgression, allowing the presumed-white audience to both follow the aced crime and identify with the looks and retribution of the white men. There is something wrong in the woodpile of this 1904 film, and it's not the characters; it's the characterizations, the negative racial stereotypes and representation

credit where credit is due

[kekseksa · 30 October 2018]

Blackface is not exclusively a term for white actors who made themselves up to be black. It was a form of stylised make-up (essentially similar to "clown" makeup) that was used by black actors themselves (even when performing for black audiences) as well as, in imitation. by whites blacked up in minstrelsy or comedy. It looks to me as though the actors here are black and I find it very strange that people would wish there not to be black actors in a film when the opportunities open to African American actors were notoriously few. The film is not very politically correct, the parts are mildly - but only mildly - caricatural, the stereotype of black thieving is re-inforced but at least in a context where one can appreciate, from the state of the house, that they are genuinely poor. And let us say - the one thing politically correct whites, while complaining about racism, seem always somehow to forget to say - that it is good to see African Americans with reasonably substantial roles in a comedy and that the three actors involved, even if we do not know their names, do a pretty good job.

An Urban Legend?

[siouxlandobserver · 30 April 2021]

This is a film short about a man of wealth. It's a comedy of errors that sadly ignored marginalized peoples' plight. Many had to steal to keep their families warm because there were so few genuine opportunities to make an honest living.

Haha! They finally caught those rascals.

My stepfather was a good man for his time and place in history. But he was a spinner of "humorous tales." One involved Native American eating habits, which he heard about on a delivery route in Nebraska. It illustrates how urban legends last and last. It's called, for lack of a title, "Dig Deep, Doggy in the Bottom," an urban legend so common that Black Elk, in "Black Elk Speaks," felt the need to counter it.

Black Elk said, and I paraphrase, that whenever the white man joined them to eat on the Great Plains, Native Americans spitefully told them to dig deep in the stew pot because the dog meat was on the bottom. My stepfather shared his version of the urban legend as late as the 1990s, especially delighting in the shivers of faux disgust his daughter expressed whenever he shared the story at the holiday dinner table.

So too, he shared his version of "Ni**** in the Wood Pile," which was all about (in his telling) an African American stealing coal on Third Street, which was where people bought coal for their basement furnaces in the 1940s here. I do not remember the story exactly, but it had to do with my stepfather, a night watchman at the time, seeing the man steal coal. He followed him for a while and then make him carry his hulking sack of coal back to the warehouse yard. Once the man returned the coal to its rightful place, my stepfather called the police. I won't share my stepdad's facial expressions and faux dialect, but gee wilikers, it was funny:

"If I'd known you were going to arrest me, I wouldn't have carried the coal back here."

Haha! I finally caught that rascal.

I liked my stepdad lots. But the thought of him laughing at the 1904 film reviewed here, which now has 33,821 YouTube viewers, makes me sad. It is a depressing historical film short now, but it would have delighted Americans in movie theaters everywhere back in the day. Why? Because many did not care, and it was fun to laugh at the underdogs. Sadly, such "comedic fodder" could fuel hate and violence. And probably did.