Centering Blackness on Film and on Screen: Haskell Wexler, Sidney Poitier and In the Heat of the Night

A lecture by Dr Aaron Hunter (Film Studies) as part of the School of Creative Arts Research Forum.

While 1967 was a landmark year in Hollywood cinema, most historical accounts focus on Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Featuring audacious editing strategies, unlikeable heroes, and anti-establishment themes fronted by glamorous members of the youth generation, both met with critical and commercial success–the epitome of zeitgeist films. In the Heat of the Night, also a commercial success and the recipient of several awards, has had a less laudatory historical reception. Unlike Bonnie and Graduate, most contemporary critics focus solely on the film’s narrative–decrying its soft liberalism and the pat resolution of its examination of southern racism.
In this paper, I reapproach the film’s formal ingenuity based on an analysis of Haskell Wexler’s cinematography. While Wexler was known mainly for shooting low-budget features and political documentaries, his work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had raised his clout in Hollywood. In the Heat of the Night would be his first film shot in color, and he was determined to take a new approach to filming Black performers for the screen – an approach that would help center Sidney Poitier’s Tibbs formally, in terms of blocking and staging, but also center Poitier’s Blackness in a way that had not been done in Hollywood.
Wexler used a combination of low lighting, slow film, and a variety of lenses and cameras to avoid washing out Poitier’s dark skin tones, as was industry practice in Hollywood at the time. This endows the film and performance with a haptic quality that enhances key skin-to-skin moments. The presentation of these shots, often in close-up, is a vital complement to the film’s analysis of 1960s American racism. Poitier’s Tibbs is a reluctant participant in investigating the film’s central crime. In contrast, shots of him performing a post-mortem exam, comforting the wife of the deceased, or slapping the town’s racist patriarch all insist upon his presence in the narrative, his importance in the investigation, and his difference from the people he is assisting despite their suspicion of him. This formal paradox enhances the film’s narrative tension.
Drawing on film analysis, archival investigation, and interviews, this paper demonstrates how the cinematography of In the Heat of the Night re-conceived of filming Black performers in a way that not only enhances the film’s narrative and thematic development, but that would also prove immensely influential on subsequent American filmmaking.

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