BLACKS and AMERICAN FILM (bibliography)

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2016

Cinema Journal, 2018

This presentation examines the vicissitudes of African-American Cinema as a diverse yet cohesive body of work which spans the history of American Cinema as such.

2007

Photo used in Michel Fabre's The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, reveals what the censored cut doesn't-the kiss between Bigger and Mary…………………………..…251 22-Bessie fades into the darkness of a night darker than noir in Native Son (1950)…………..………...256 23-Senza Pieta (1948)……………………………………………………………………………………......………………...262 24-In this powerful film, The Burning Cross (1947), the home owned by Charlie West (Joel Fluellen) and his wife (Madie Norman, is overrun by Klan members………………………………………………………………………………………….……………………………..268 25-Standing under the Rock Point sign, two African American men have a brief cameo in Storm Warning (1951), something the PCA noted in its Film Analysis chart on the film.

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema (Oliver C. Speck. ed.), 2014

We can agree that the notion of a unitary black man is as imaginary (and as real) as Wallace Stevens's blackbirds are; and yet to be a black man in twentieth-century America is to be heir to a set of anxieties: beginning with what it means to be a black man. All of the protagonists of this book confront the "burden of representation, " the homely notion that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race or honor it …. Each, in his own way, rages against the dread requirement to represent; against the demands of "authenticity. " 1

Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2018

This dataset covers silent " race films " : films created before the year 1930 featuring African-Americans for primarily African-American audiences. The data was collected through research utilizing a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. It contains records on films, actors, production companies, and other key components of the early race film industry. The data is primarily stored on the research data repository site Zenodo and additionally within a relational database on Airtable. Reuse potential of the data includes pedagogical purposes, social network analysis and as a support for the extant study of silent era and race films. The data will also enable further research in film studies, African-American history, the history of film exhibition, and the digital humanities. Context This dataset was produced over the course of one academic quarter by a research team of five undergraduate students, one graduate student, and a faculty member in the Digital Humanities program of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Taken as a whole, the dataset contains information on films, actors, production companies, and other aspects of early silent-era African-American race films. The database is intended to allow scholars, researchers, and broader public to learn about this period in film history that is too rarely discussed in popular or academic settings. The data contains the 303 silent race films we identified in our research, linked to 759 actors and other film personnel and 176 race film companies, each record bolstered with descriptive and archival information. The project's website (http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/) also contains a number of maps and visualizations, designed to show how this data might be used, along with a set of beginner-friendly tutorials to aid users' work with the data set. The data is contained within four linked spreadsheets: People, Film, Companies, and Sources. Each of the fields is described in the data dictionary available in the project's README file. A " race film, " as many scholars have noted, is notoriously difficult to define, since various experts give different criteria for the definition and since a film's connotations often change depending on its exhibition context. Indeed, scholarly consensus on race filmmaking is that its personnel constitute not a Early African-American Film Database, 1909–1930

Bowdoin Journal of Cinema, 2022

This paper comparatively analyzes the productions and self-referential narratives of the films Putney Swope (1969), Illusions (1982), and Sorry To Bother You (2018) in relation to their respective cinematic and cultural contexts around the black speaking voice. Discussed are are racialized filmic trends such as the blaxploitation film, the ethnic avenger narrative, and the nineties sell-out films that were created for black audiences and were often controlled by white studio executives and auteurs, complicating the political messaging of the films. Utilizing the cinematic histories and prominent filmmakers of the New Hollywood era, The L.A Rebellion, and modern studio agit-prop, this essay discusses Hollywood's dominant racial ideologies that seek to both simultaneously fetishize and erase the black speaking voice on and off screen.

2019

Journal of American History, 2017