"Through a Lens Darkly" presents fascinating images of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in abolitionist propaganda portraits, and of black Union soldiers and black Reconstruction legislators, to support the idea that photography allowed black people to represent themselves and counter racist stereotypes. The film's organizing concept is inherently an elitist and limiting one, however, with an increasingly narrow focus on the few who could afford to have the camera record their accomplishments and their prosperity.
The labor of slaves, sharecroppers and then millions of industrial workers made possible the country's development and the black elite's rise. Yet black labor as a huge social force is airbrushed from this director's "emergence of a people." There's no trace of the growing class conflict between owners and workers, black and white, that fueled racist pogromism. There's little representation of overwhelming black poverty, little of black struggle. In the film, lynching is "answered" by black moral outrage but there's hardly any record of anti-lynch journalist Ida Wells. The most basic social realities are ignored and a vaguely nationalist sensibility is imposed on a necessarily incoherent parade of icons, with no hint of what these icons stood for politically.
There are some pictures of nationalist Marcus Garvey, few of accommodationist M.L. King. Photogenic and photography-promoting B.T. Washington gets a bit more time than W.E.B. DuBois, with nothing to indicate that the former promoted black menial training and subservience to white rule while the latter challenged him from the left and fought for black civil rights. Similarly, pictures of Black Panthers and Malcolm X share a segment with the March on the Washington, though they considered it a farce.
Elitism and nationalism are a blindfold. Is it progress that a black filmmaker can be just as self-absorbed and socially clueless as any white director? Maybe. But one might have hoped that a black creative intellectual, as an outsider, would bring a wide-angle lens to bear on our hardly post-racial society.
Rita Freed
