jobeterob
11-19-2012, 08:09 PM
Since last August, bloggers have been going crazy over the forthcoming unauthorized biopic Nina, about jazz singer Nina Simone. Actress Zoe Saldana has been cast to play her. Saldana, who is of Puerto Rican and Dominican parentage, is a light-skinned black woman with European features, while Simone was a dark-skinned black woman with African features. Photographs from the set released last month showed that Saldana will wear full-body “blackening” makeup, a prosthetic nose and a large Afro wig.
Since Saldana’s casting, a petition on change.org has been created demanding that the film’s writer and director, Cynthia Mort, among others, replace her with someone whose pigmentation is more in line with that of Simone. Names like Kimberly Elise from Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls [[2010) or Viola Davis from The Help [[2011) have been thrown around. And while on the surface the debate may seem trite — we’re arguing over which black women are “black enough” to portray a black woman — the issue is more complex.
When Cate Blanchett portrayed Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator [[2004), she was as authentic as it gets: she looked like Hepburn, spoke like her and walked like her. Similarly, when Julia Roberts won an Oscar in 2000 for portraying the legal crusader Erin Brockovich in the movie of that name about the groundwater-contamination case against Pacific Gas and Electric Company, she might not have looked exactly like the real-life Brockovich, but she was allowed to make the film “her own.” Even when Angela Bassett portrayed Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to do With It [[1993), her body may have resembled that of the legendary singer, but other than that, she looked nothing like her.
This is not the first time Hollywood has produced a biopic about an African-American singer. Diana Ross famously portrayed Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues [[1972), Jamie Foxx truly embodied Ray Charles in Ray [[2004), and Beyoncé Knowles sang just like Etta James in Cadillac Records [[2008). So what makes the Nina biopic so different?
Nina Simone was not just a jazz singer; she was a political figure. In her 1964 recording Mississippi Goddam, she openly embroiled herself in the civil-rights movement by using her music to shed light on the racial violence that was being perpetrated against African Americans. From there on, Simone unabashedly made her music “pro-black” with songs like To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and Four Women. In the latter, she openly talked about four stereotypes of black womanhood. In the first verse of Four Women, Simone sang, “My skin is black/My arms are long/My hair is woolly/My back is strong,” and in verse two she added, “My skin is yellow/My hair is long/Between two worlds/I do belong.” If the pitting of black women against one another was something Simone herself fought so adamantly against, why now, after her death [[in 2003), is the very thing she never compromised, her dark skin, being altered?
There is a long history of black performers “darkening” their skin. On the minstrel and vaudeville stage, black actors [[male and female) had no choice but to apply burnt cork to their faces; if they wanted to perform in theatre houses to white audiences, it was their only option. Spike Lee brilliantly captured this in the satirical film Bamboozled [[2000). Until the 1970s, if dark-skinned women wanted to act in Hollywood, their choices were few: either they played a cook, maid or menial [[for example, Hattie McDaniel’s role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind) or they did not act. And so the fact that in 2012 an actor like Saldana has to “blacken” in order to play a leading role [[she has never carried a film on her own) just feels like Hollywood is going backward, not forward.
When Simone performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1992, she wore no makeup and a braided hairstyle, and the mostly white audience loved her. If the producers of Nina actually looked hard enough, they could have found a Simone lookalike. And something tells me that if they had, audiences would have loved her, too.
© Copyright [[c) The Montreal Gazette
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Opinion+Hollywood+choice+betrays+Simone+legacy/7560919/story.html#ixzz2CiVN9pUR
Since Saldana’s casting, a petition on change.org has been created demanding that the film’s writer and director, Cynthia Mort, among others, replace her with someone whose pigmentation is more in line with that of Simone. Names like Kimberly Elise from Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls [[2010) or Viola Davis from The Help [[2011) have been thrown around. And while on the surface the debate may seem trite — we’re arguing over which black women are “black enough” to portray a black woman — the issue is more complex.
When Cate Blanchett portrayed Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator [[2004), she was as authentic as it gets: she looked like Hepburn, spoke like her and walked like her. Similarly, when Julia Roberts won an Oscar in 2000 for portraying the legal crusader Erin Brockovich in the movie of that name about the groundwater-contamination case against Pacific Gas and Electric Company, she might not have looked exactly like the real-life Brockovich, but she was allowed to make the film “her own.” Even when Angela Bassett portrayed Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to do With It [[1993), her body may have resembled that of the legendary singer, but other than that, she looked nothing like her.
This is not the first time Hollywood has produced a biopic about an African-American singer. Diana Ross famously portrayed Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues [[1972), Jamie Foxx truly embodied Ray Charles in Ray [[2004), and Beyoncé Knowles sang just like Etta James in Cadillac Records [[2008). So what makes the Nina biopic so different?
Nina Simone was not just a jazz singer; she was a political figure. In her 1964 recording Mississippi Goddam, she openly embroiled herself in the civil-rights movement by using her music to shed light on the racial violence that was being perpetrated against African Americans. From there on, Simone unabashedly made her music “pro-black” with songs like To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and Four Women. In the latter, she openly talked about four stereotypes of black womanhood. In the first verse of Four Women, Simone sang, “My skin is black/My arms are long/My hair is woolly/My back is strong,” and in verse two she added, “My skin is yellow/My hair is long/Between two worlds/I do belong.” If the pitting of black women against one another was something Simone herself fought so adamantly against, why now, after her death [[in 2003), is the very thing she never compromised, her dark skin, being altered?
There is a long history of black performers “darkening” their skin. On the minstrel and vaudeville stage, black actors [[male and female) had no choice but to apply burnt cork to their faces; if they wanted to perform in theatre houses to white audiences, it was their only option. Spike Lee brilliantly captured this in the satirical film Bamboozled [[2000). Until the 1970s, if dark-skinned women wanted to act in Hollywood, their choices were few: either they played a cook, maid or menial [[for example, Hattie McDaniel’s role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind) or they did not act. And so the fact that in 2012 an actor like Saldana has to “blacken” in order to play a leading role [[she has never carried a film on her own) just feels like Hollywood is going backward, not forward.
When Simone performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1992, she wore no makeup and a braided hairstyle, and the mostly white audience loved her. If the producers of Nina actually looked hard enough, they could have found a Simone lookalike. And something tells me that if they had, audiences would have loved her, too.
© Copyright [[c) The Montreal Gazette
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Opinion+Hollywood+choice+betrays+Simone+legacy/7560919/story.html#ixzz2CiVN9pUR