Oscar Micheaux and His Circle

Oscar Micheaux and His Circle

Author: Charles Musser

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-03-28

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0253021553

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Oscar Micheaux—the most prolific African American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period—has finally found his rightful place in film history. Both artist and showman, Micheaux stirred controversy in his time as he confronted issues such as lynching, miscegenation, peonage and white supremacy, passing, and corruption among black clergymen. In this important collection, prominent scholars examine Micheaux's surviving silent films, his fellow producers of race films who alternately challenged or emulated his methods, and the cultural activities that surrounded and sustained these achievements. The relationship between black film and both the stage (particularly the Lafayette Players) and the black press, issues of underdevelopment, and a genealogy of Micheaux scholarship, as well as extensive and more accurate filmographies, give a richly textured portrait of this era. The essays will fascinate the general public as well as scholars in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and African American history. This thoroughly readable collection is a superb reference work lavishly illustrated with rare photographs.


Black Masculinity on Film

Black Masculinity on Film

Author: Daniel O'Brien

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1137593237

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This book provides wide-ranging commentary on depictions of the black male in mainstream cinema. O’Brien explores the extent to which counter-representations of black masculinity have been achieved within a predominately white industry, with an emphasis on agency, the negotiation and malleability of racial status, and the inherent instability of imposed racial categories. Focusing on American and European cinema, the chapters highlight actors (Woody Strode, Noble Johnson, Eddie Anderson, Will Smith), genres (jungle pictures, westerns, science fiction) and franchises (Tarzan, James Bond) underrepresented in previous critical and scholarly commentary in the field. The author argues that although the characters and performances generated in these areas invoke popular genre types, they display complexity, diversity and ambiguity, exhibiting aspects that are positive, progressive and subversive. This book will appeal to both the academic and the general reader interested in film, race, gender and colonial issues.


The Othering of Women in Silent Film

The Othering of Women in Silent Film

Author: Barbara Tepa Lupack

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2023-11-06

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1666913979

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In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.


Expanding the Black Film Canon

Expanding the Black Film Canon

Author: Lisa Doris Alexander

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2019-08-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0700628401

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If the sheer diversity of recent hits from Twelve Years a Slave and Moonlight to Get Out, Black Panther, and BlackkKlansman tells us anything, it might be that there's no such thing as "black film" per se. This book is especially timely, then, in expanding our idea of what black films are and, going back to the 1960s, showing us new and interesting ways to understand them. When critics and scholars write about films from the Blaxploitation movement—such as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Shaft, Superfly, and Cleopatra Jones—they emphasize their importance as films made for black audiences. Consequently, Lisa Doris Alexander points out, a film like the highly popular, Oscar-nominated Blazing Saddles—costarring and co-written by Richard Pryor—is generally left out of the discussion because it doesn't fit the profile of what a black film of the period should be. This is the kind of categorical thinking that Alexander seeks to broaden, looking at films from the 60s to the present day in the context of their time. Applying insights from black feminist thought and critical race theory to one film per decade, she analyzes what each can tell us about the status of black people and race relations in the United States at the time of its release. By teasing out the importance of certain films excluded from the black film canon, Alexander hopes to expand that canon to include films typically relegated to the category of popular entertainment—and to show how these offer more nuanced representations of black characters even as they confront, negate, or parody the controlling images that have defined black filmic characters for decades.


The Silent Cinema Reader

The Silent Cinema Reader

Author: Lee Grieveson

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780415252843

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The Silent Cinema Reader brings together key writings on cinema from the beginnings of film in 1894 to the advent of sound in 1927, addressing the development of film production and exhibition technologies, methods of distribution, film form, and film culture during this critical period on film history. Thematic sections address: film projection and variety shows; storytelling and the Nickelodeon; cinema and reform; feature films and cinema programs; classical Hollywood cinema and European national cinemas. Each section is introduced by the editors, and contains suggestions for further readings and film viewings.


Documenting the Black Experience

Documenting the Black Experience

Author: Novotny Lawrence

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-11-07

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0786472677

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History taught at the elementary, middle, high school and even college levels often excludes significant events from African American history, such as the murder of Emmett Till or the murder of four black girls by the Ku Klux Klan in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Such events are integral parts of history that continue to inform America's racial politics. Their exclusion is a problem that this work addresses by bringing more visibility to documentary films focusing on the events. Books treating the history of documentary films follow a similar pattern, omitting the efforts of filmmakers who have continued to focus on African American history. This book works to make documentary discourse more complete, bringing attention to films that cover the African American experience in four areas--civil rights, sports, electronic media, and the contemporary black struggle--demonstrating how the issues continue to inform America's racial politics.


Prove It On Me

Prove It On Me

Author: Erin D. Chapman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0199877203

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In the wake of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the scattered hamlets and farms of the rural South to the nation's burgeoning cities, a New Negro ethos of modernist cultural expression and potent self-determination arose to challenge white supremacy and create opportunities for racial advancement. In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.


Empire and Black Images in Popular Culture

Empire and Black Images in Popular Culture

Author: Joshua K. Wright

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2018-05-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1476632502

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FOX's musical drama Empire has been hailed as the savior of broadcast television, drawing 15 million viewers a week. A "hip-hopera" inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear and 1980s prime-time soap Dynasty, the series is at the forefront of a black popular culture Renaissance--yet has stirred controversy in the black community. Is Empire shifting paradigms or promoting pernicious stereotypes? Examining the evolution and potency of black images in popular culture, the author explores Empire's place in a diverse body of literature and media, data and discussions on respectability.


African American Cinema Through Black Lives Consciousness

African American Cinema Through Black Lives Consciousness

Author: Mark A. Reid

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2019-01-12

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0814345506

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The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike.


In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation

In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation

Author: Melvyn Stokes

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3031047370

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This collection brings together many of the world’s leading scholars on race and film to re-consider the legacy and impact of D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. While this film is often cited, there is a considerable dearth of substantial research on its initial impact and global reach. These essays fill important gaps in the history of the film, including essential work on its sources, international reception, and African American responses. This book is a key text in the history of the most infamous and controversial film ever made and offers crucial new insights to scholars and students working in film history, African American history and the history of race relations.