EN
“This was really a fantasy, as was Porgy and Bess (1959). The all-black world shown in these films doesn’t exist, at least not in the United States. We used the musical-fantasy quality to convey 'something of the needs and aspirations of colored people.”
Otto Preminger
“Despite itself, Carmen Jones is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced. [...] This is an opera having nothing to do with the present day, hence, nothing, really, to do with Negroes. [...] The script failed to require the services of any white people. This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger. The color itself then becomes a kind of vacuum which each spectator will fill with his own fantasies. [...] The characters could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as “clean” and as “modern” as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up.”
James Baldwin
