When’s the last
time you saw someone dark-skinned in a South Asian film. I don’t mean “dusky.”
But really, really dark? To say that Indian subcontinental cinemas have
a predilection for actors who are light of complexion is, well, hardly
enlightening.
Such beauty
standards are reinforced by the appearance of female and male Bollywood
movie stars in commercials where they shill skin-lightening products. There’s
no subtlety in the message here: one cannot be dark and lovely. To be as
beautiful as the movie stars, these advertisements urge, one has to chemically (ouch!)
transform something as
fundamental as their skin colour.
Beauty standards
apart, the very technology of film has itself been historically predisposed to
whiteness as the norm. Kodak, which in the mid-twentieth century monopolized
the sale of colour film in the United States, used what was known as the
Shirley Card to decide on the right skin colour balance when developing film in
labs. Named for an employee who served as its model, the woman on the card is a
white brunette whose skin tone became the “normal” against which film was
colour corrected. There was no equivalent system to determine if the skin tones
of people of colour were properly represented photographically.
Though by the
1990s Kodak created a Shirley Card featuring Asian, Black, and Latina women,
the upsurge of digital photography ensured that this more racially diverse
yardstick fell by the wayside. “The result was film emulsion technology that
still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions,” Harvard’s
Sarah Lewis writes in “The Racial Bias Built into Photography” for The New
York Times (25 April 2019).
Though more
research needs to be done on how skin colour standardization in photography was
calibrated in other parts of the world, the global reach of Kodak likely
proliferated the colour canon that company originated in the United States;
other non-US film-producing companies may similarly have been partial to
lighter skin tones as the default. These biases that normalized lighter skin
hues as standard also informed moving film technology.
Lewis finds that
though advancements in digital imaging are better suited to shooting diverse
skin tones, television shows and films that feature darker skinned people
employ a variety of lighting techniques to ensure accurate representation. As
an example, she cites the work of Black American director Ava DuVernay, but
also Insecure where, in addition to special lighting, the HBO show uses
reflective moisturizer on its actors because “dark skin can absorb more light
than fair skin.”
Developments in
the more precise depiction of skin colour on film not only speak to the growing
diversity of filmic storylines and cultural representation, but also its
importance. “Why does inclusive representation matter so much?” Lewis queries;
she concludes: “You can’t become what you can’t accurately see.”
In 2013, actor
Nandita Das endorsed the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign which counters
Bollywood’s over-representation of light-skinned talent. Taking issue with the
equation of beauty and representation, Anjali Rajoria writes for Round Table
India (21 August 2013), that while “Dark is Beautiful” may challenge
industry bias, it perpetuates dominant notions that divide women based on
looks, class, and caste. In turn, this leaves no room for something as
challenging as the subject of acid-attack victims, which is the basis of Uyare
(2019), a Malayalam film at the festival. By over-valuing the “commodity of ‘Beauty,’ we create a
sense of insecurity in the women belonging to the out-group,” Rajoria avers.
Cinematic
representation, then, is most effective when it captures the multiple shades of
diverse lives. The beauty of such potential is more than skin deep.
From The Peacock.
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