One of the movies I most enjoyed in 2021 is Passing, Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s classic 1929 novel. Passing, in both its prose and cinematic iterations, tells the story of Clare Bellew, a light-skinned African American who presents herself to the world as white.
Hall’s movie deserves in depth discussion, not only for the masterful way it adapts Larsen’s novel but also for how it fits into a longstanding cultural fascination with passing. I invited my friend Megan Kelley, a film historian and author of Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960 onto the podcast to discuss the film. Megan’s book examines the way passing became pervasively used as a metaphor for identity crisis during the Cold War.
In our conversation, Megan and I take up Hall’s movie, Larsen’s novel, the real life passing of critic Anatole Broyard and cartoonist George Herriman. We also get into the the 1949 Elia Kazan movie Pinky —a very different treatment of the theme.
(Podcast produced by Julia Elinore Peterson; post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Podcast: Black and White