Black Film as Genre PDF Download

Author: Thomas Cripps
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780835772884
Category : African Americans in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Author: Thomas Cripps
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780253375025
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Author: Lisa Doris Alexander
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700628401
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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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.

Author: Mark A. Reid
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742526426
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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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.

Author: Michael Boyce Gillespie
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373882
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Author: Novotny Lawrence
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135900361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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This book examines a number of blaxploitation films – including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Blacula (1972), and The Mack (1973) – and illustrates the manner in which 'blaxploitation' came to be understood as a separate genre.

Author: Robin R. Means Coleman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136942947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers a representational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself. Horror Noire presents a unique social history of blacks in America through changing images in horror films. Throughout the text, the reader is encouraged to unpack the genre’s racialized imagery, as well as the narratives that make up popular culture’s commentary on race. Offering a comprehensive chronological survey of the genre, this book addresses a full range of black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, as well as art-house films, Blaxploitation films, direct-to-DVD films, and the emerging U.S./hip-hop culture-inspired Nigerian "Nollywood" Black horror films. Horror Noire is, thus, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.

Author: Ed Guerrero
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439904138
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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A challenge to Hollywood's one-dimensional images of African Americans.

Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271046880
Category : African American motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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"Examines how African-American as well as international films deploy film noir techniques in ways that encourage philosophical reflection. Combines philosophy, film studies, and cultural studies"--Provided by publisher.

Author: Gerald Martinez
Publisher: Miramax Books
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
"From Shaft to Superfly, Foxy Brown to Cleopatra Jones, What It Is...What It Was! presents a vivid pictorial and oral history of the best movies to emerge from a singularly American film movement. The book explores this film explosion. Between 1970 and 1980 over 200 films with Black themes including family dramas, mysteries, horror films, comedies, and action films, were released by both major and independent studios. The book preserves cinema history with the first book to highlight the movie poster artwork while presenting the people who created this history on screen. With the increased use of photography, this period would be the last time that top artists would draw and paint the vibrant bold movie poster images that in themselves were classics. Groundbreaking producer-director-writer Melvin Van Peebles, actors Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, and William Marshall, composer Isaac Hayes, along with many other artists, talk about this body of cinema that has withstood the test of time and influenced American culture. The films are described as powerful, funky, sexy, exuberant, violent, hip, and just plain fun. They also became a target of debate as some coined the sweeping term "blaxploitation." Samuel L. Jackson, John Singleton, Reginald Hudlin, Ice-T, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Quentin Tarantino, and others offer insightful commentary into the history and impact of the films in their work."--back cover.