Product Description: The early years of the twentieth century were a formative time in the long history of struggle for black representation. More than any other medium, movies reflected the tremendous changes occurring in American society. Unfortunately, since they drew heavily on the nineteenth-century theatrical conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the "Uncle Tom Show" traditions, early pictures persisted in casting blacks in demeaning and outrageous caricatures that marginalized and burlesqued them and emphasized their comic or servile behavior...read more

Product Description: From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as "blaxploitation," the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It in 1986...read more

Product Description: Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective--if fraught--culture of freedom...read more

Product Description: The Spike Lee Enigma is an exploration of ideology and political economy in the films and career of one of America's most controversial filmmakers. Since the 1980s Spike Lee has created numerous films that are socially challenging, some would even say radical, while simultaneously maintaining a collaborative relationship with mainstream Hollywood and the global advertising industry...read more

Product Description: In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff.  But what if the money itself is color-coded?  What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns?  This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case...read more

Product Description: The sixties were a tremendously important time of transition for both civil rights activism and the U.S. film industry. Soul Searching examines a subject that, despite its significance to African American film history, has gone largely unexplored until now...read more

Product Description: Using a rich compendium of evidence and a provocative perspective, SLAVE CINEMA takes a thorough and uncompromising look at African-American cinema, African-American social identity and the American film industry. This book addresses the specific artistic, ideological and moral challenges that face every African-American filmmaker...read more

Product Description: Focusing on two film traditions not normally studied together, Maria Pramaggiore examines more than two dozen Irish and African American films, including Do the Right Thing, In the Name of the Father, The Crying Game, Boyz N the Hood, The Snapper, and He Got Game, arguing that these films foreground practices of character identification that complicate essentialist notions of national and racial identity...read more

Product Description: Money Shot chronicles the African American porn industry's steady rise to the mainstream. Lawrence Ross, a prominent journalist and lecturer, details a year in the life of porn star Lexington Steele, whose eleven-inch penis and $75,000 per-movie-fee made him one of the most famous figures in the porn industry...read more

Features reviews of every movie from the 'new wave' in black film, and presents interviews and essays that examine the role these films have played in global and American culture.

Product Description: The triple crown of Oscars awarded to Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002 seemed to mark a turning point for African Americans in cinema. Certainly it was hyped as such by the media, eager to overlook the nuances of this sudden embrace...read more

Black Lenses, Black Voices is a provocative look at films directed and written_and sometimes produced_by African Americans, as well as black-oriented films whose directors or screenwriters are not black. Mark Reid shows how certain films dramatize the contemporary African American community as a politically and economically diverse group, vastly different from film representations of the 1960s. Taking us through the development of African American independent filmmaking before and after World War II, he then illustrates the unique nature of African American family, action, horror, female-centered, and independent films, such as Eve's Bayou, Jungle Fever, Shaft, Souls of Sin, Bones, Waiting to Exhale, Monster's Ball, Sankofa, and many more.

Product Description: The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema...read more

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Looks at African American involvement in the motion picture industry and offers profiles of prominent black producers and directors. (view table of contents)

Looks at African American involvement in the motion picture industry and offers profiles of prominent black producers and directors.

(view table of contents)

The essays in this collection provide a variety of perspectives on black representation and questions of racial authenticity in mainstream as well as African American independent cinema. This volume includes seminal essays on racial stereotypes, trenchant critiques of that discourse, original essays on important directors such as Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett, and an insightful discussion of black gay and lesbian film and video. The contributors include Donald Bogle, Thomas Cripps, Jane Gaines, Nathan Grant, Stuart Hall, Tommy L. Lott, Wahneema Lubiano, Mike Murashige, Valerie Smith, James Snead, and David Van Leer. This volume is an important contribution to the Depth of Field series and should be indispensible for courses and individual scholars in film and multicultural studies. The book contains a mix of original and previously published pieces.

Product Description: This is a study of the cinematic traditions and film practices in the black Diaspora. With contributions by film scholars, film critics, and film-makers from Europe, North America and the Third World, this diverse collection provides a critical reading of film-making in the black Diaspora that challenges the assumptions of colonialist and ethnocentrist discourses about Third World, Hollywood and European cinemas...read more

Looks at the history of Black filmmakers, and shows how the motion picture industry controls and influences Black films (view table of contents)