wfn.org | TV special focuses on movie images

["Barb Powell"<powellb@ucc.org>]

United Church of Christ                       
Laurie Bartels, press contact                    
(216) 736-2213
bartelsl@ucc.org
On the World Wide Web:
http://www.ucc.org
For immediate release
September 4, 1998
      
Movie images as powerful messengers
topic of television special
      
     CLEVELAND -- Contrary to the folk wisdom which advises us to
'believe nothing of what we hear and only half of what we see,' we
tend to believe images presented to us. And larger-than-life movie
images can carry more powerful messages than what we
experience in our daily lives.
     "Images of Race At The Movies" is a one-hour television
special which captures those powerful messages and puts them in
the context of current thought on matters of race, history, culture
and regional diversity.
     The television special, produced by the
United Church of Christ Office of Communication in association
with the National Council of Churches, uses images from three
contemporary films, The Apostle, Amistad and Chinese Box, to
illustrate how film helps to shape our perception of other cultures,
other regions, other races and even other times.
     "Going to the movies is more than entertainment," says
Arthur Lawrence Cribbs Jr., producer and narrator of the project
and the Office of Communication's executive director.  "Movies
capture us.  They influence the way we see the world and even how
we see ourselves." 
           Movie industry insiders like Robert Duvall, Steven
Spielberg, Debbie Allen and Ruben Blades, all interviewed for
"Images of Race At The Movies," agree that movies shape our
perception.  Being aware of that influence has helped each of them
decide what movie projects to get involved in.
     For Debbie Allen and Steven Spielberg, the decision to
make Amistad was influenced by the historical story that needed to
be told about opposition to the American slave trade.  "I look at
all the Black men in my family and the struggles that they've gone
through . . . and [I see] that we need more empowering role models
and we need to be able to know who we are and what we've come
through," Allen says.
     In making The Apostle, Robert Duvall wanted to portray a
southern preacher with dignity -- a difficult task in Hollywood
where the South is caricatured and dismissed.  "I heard a director
talk about 'fly-over-people'," a label used by those who often jet
between Los Angeles and New York to identify those living in
between those two coasts.  "They are dismissed.  That's always
been the case, I feel, in movies, especially regionally in the South .
. . it is caricatured by Hollywood." Duvall says he wanted to make
a movie that did not ridicule or stereotype Southern evangelical
Christians.  "I always figured if I was going to do it [make this
movie], I wanted to do it right."
     For Ruben Blades, the roles he was offered as a Latino
began to impress upon him the distortions that movies can
represent.  Blades believes that, without even being aware of it,
those distorted images can make us believe what we are seeing is
an accurate representation of a whole group of people.
"Unconsciously they [movie images] went in.  That is why film is
so important and there is a tremendous need to have representation
that is not stereotyped," Blades cautions.
     The film clips and accompanying interviews -- including
North Carolina School of the Arts film students, ministers,
directors and Motion Picture Association President Jack Valenti  
make "Images of Race At The Movies" more than a documentary
or retrospective on cinema.  "This television special gives a
positive look at Hollywood's potential to make successful films
about real life.  It also encourages future generations of movie
makers to tell their own stories as they help shape what this visual
art, which is only 100 years old, will become," says Cribbs.
     "Images of Race At The Movies" will be fed via satellite to
NBC-TV affiliate stations on Wednesday, Sept. 9.  Interested
viewers are urged to call their local NBC-TV station for airing
information.
     The 1.4-million-member United Church of Christ, with
national offices in Cleveland, has more than 6,000 churches across
the United States and Puerto Rico.  It was formed by the 1957
union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the
Evangelical and Reformed Church.
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