Making Movies Black

Making Movies Black PDF Author: Thomas Cripps
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9781280526312
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Cripps's Slow to Fade To Black: The Negro In American Film, 1900-1942, is considered the basic work on blacks' involvement in film, both in Hollywood and outside it. Making Movies Black continues the story up into the 1950s. It discusses the greater attention to black life in films of the early war years, including the all-black Cabin in The Sky, indicates the difficult time black leaders had with Hollywood studios in bringing pressure for better depictions of blacks on screen, describes the discovery of race-related subjects in such postwar films as Pinky and Intruder in the Dust, and depicts the rise of black stars like Sidney Poitier in Hollywood. As in Slow Fade to Black, these events are put into a broader social context.

Making Movies Black

Making Movies Black PDF Author: Thomas Cripps
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9781280526312
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book

Book Description
Cripps's Slow to Fade To Black: The Negro In American Film, 1900-1942, is considered the basic work on blacks' involvement in film, both in Hollywood and outside it. Making Movies Black continues the story up into the 1950s. It discusses the greater attention to black life in films of the early war years, including the all-black Cabin in The Sky, indicates the difficult time black leaders had with Hollywood studios in bringing pressure for better depictions of blacks on screen, describes the discovery of race-related subjects in such postwar films as Pinky and Intruder in the Dust, and depicts the rise of black stars like Sidney Poitier in Hollywood. As in Slow Fade to Black, these events are put into a broader social context.

Making Movies Black

Making Movies Black PDF Author: Thomas Cripps
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195360346
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This is the second volume of Thomas Cripps's definitive history of African-Americans in Hollywood. It covers the period from World War II through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, examining this period through the prism of popular culture. Making Movies Black shows how movies anticipated and helped form America's changing ideas about race. Cripps contends that from the liberal rhetoric of the war years--marked as it was by the propaganda catchwords brotherhood and tolerance--came movies that defined a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large. He argues that the war years, more than any previous era, gave African-American activists access to centers of cultural influence and power in both Washington and Hollywood. Among the results were an expanded black imagery on the screen during the war--in combat movies such as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara; musicals such as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky; and government propaganda films such as The Negro Soldier and Wings for this Man (narrated by Ronald Reagan!). After the war, the ideologies of both black activism and integrationism persisted, resulting in the 'message movie' era of Pinky, Home of the Brave, and No Way Out, a form of racial politics that anticipated the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Delving into previously inaccessible records of major Hollywood studios, among them Warner Bros., RKO, and 20th Century-Fox, as well as records of the Office of War Information in the National Archives, and records of the NAACP, and interviews with survivors of the era, Cripps reveals the struggle of both lesser known black filmmakers like Carlton Moss and major figures such as Sidney Poitier. More than a narrative history, Making Movies Black reaches beyond the screen itself with sixty photographs, many never before published, which illustrate the mood of the time. Revealing the social impact of the classical Hollywood film, Making Movies Black is the perfect book for those interested in the changing racial climate in post-World War II American life.

Why We Make Movies

Why We Make Movies PDF Author: George Alexander
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307419592
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
A sparkling collection of interviews with African American directors and producers. Bringing together more than thirty candid conversations with filmmakers and producers such as Spike Lee, Gordon Parks, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Robert Townsend, Why We Make Movies delivers a cultural celebration with the tips of a film-school master class. With journalist George Alexander, these revolutionary men and women discuss not only how they got their big breaks, but more importantly, they explore the creative process and what making movies means to them. Why We Make Movies also addresses the business of Hollywood and its turning tide, in a nation where African Americans comprise a sizable portion of the film-going public and go to the movies more frequently than whites. In addition, Alexander’s cast of directors and producers considers the lead roles they now play in everything from documentaries and films for television to broad-based blockbusters (in fact, the highest-grossing film in Miramax history was Scary Movie, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans). For film buffs and aspiring filmmakers alike, Why We Make Movies puts a long-overdue spotlight on one of the most exciting and cutting-edge segments of today’s silver screen. INTERVIEWS INCLUDE: MELVIN VAN PEEBLES • MICHAEL SCHULTZ • CHARLES BURNETT • SPIKE LEE • ROBERT TOWNSEND • FRED WILLIAMSON • ERNEST DICKERSON • KEENEN IVORY WAYANS • ANTOINE FUQUA • BILL DUKE • FORREST WHITAKER • JULIE DASH • KASI LEMMONS • GINA PRINC-BLYTHEWOOD • JOHN SINGLETON • GEORGE TILLMAN Jr. • REGINALD HUDLIN • WARRINGTON HUDLIN • MALCOLM LEE • EUZHAN PALCY • DOUG McHENRY • DEBRA MARTIN CHASE • St. CLAIR BOURNE • STANLEY NELSON • WILLIAM GREAVES • KATHE SANDLER • CAMILLE BILLOPS • HAILE GERIMA • GORDON PARKS

Migrating to the Movies

Migrating to the Movies PDF Author: Jacqueline Najuma Stewart
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520936409
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book 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. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.

Colorization

Colorization PDF Author: Wil Haygood
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525656871
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown. Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

Hollywood Black

Hollywood Black PDF Author: Donald Bogle
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 076249140X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The films, the stars, the filmmakers-all get their due in Hollywood Black, a sweeping overview of blacks in film from the silent era through Black Panther, with striking photos and an engrossing history by award-winning author Donald Bogle. The story opens in the silent film era, when white actors in blackface often played black characters, but also saw the rise of independent African American filmmakers, including the remarkable Oscar Micheaux. It follows the changes in the film industry with the arrival of sound motion pictures and the Great Depression, when black performers such as Stepin Fetchit and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson began finding a place in Hollywood. More often than not, they were saddled with rigidly stereotyped roles, but some gifted performers, most notably Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind (1939), were able to turn in significant performances. In the coming decades, more black talents would light up the screen. Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American to earn a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carmen Jones (1954), and Sidney Poitier broke ground in films like The Defiant Ones and1963's Lilies of the Field. Hollywood Black reveals the changes in images that came about with the evolving social and political atmosphere of the US, from the Civil Rights era to the Black Power movement. The story takes readers through Blaxploitation, with movies like Shaft and Super Fly, to the emergence of such stars as Cicely Tyson, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, and of directors Spike Lee and John Singleton. The history comes into the new millennium with filmmakers Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Ava Du Vernay (Selma),and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther); megastars such as Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Morgan Freeman; as well as Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, and a glorious gallery of others. Filled with evocative photographs and stories of stars and filmmakers on set and off, Hollywood Black tells an underappreciated history as it's never before been told.

The Hollywood Jim Crow

The Hollywood Jim Crow PDF Author: Maryann Erigha
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147980231X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The story of racial hierarchy in the American film industry The #OscarsSoWhite campaign, and the content of the leaked Sony emails which revealed, among many other things, that a powerful Hollywood insider didn’t believe that Denzel Washington could “open” a western genre film, provide glaring evidence that the opportunities for people of color in Hollywood are limited. In The Hollywood Jim Crow, Maryann Erigha tells the story of inequality, looking at the practices and biases that limit the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities. She examines over 1,300 contemporary films, specifically focusing on directors, to show the key elements at work in maintaining “the Hollywood Jim Crow.” Unlike the Jim Crow era where ideas about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for segregation, Hollywood’s version tries to use economic and cultural explanations to justify the underrepresentation and stigmatization of Black filmmakers. Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood’s racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it. Erigha questions the notion that increased representation of African Americans behind the camera is the sole answer to the racial inequality gap. Instead, she suggests focusing on the obstacles to integration for African American film directors. Hollywood movies have an expansive reach and exert tremendous power in the national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. The Hollywood Jim Crow fully dissects the racial inequality embedded in this industry, looking at alternative ways for African Americans to find success in Hollywood and suggesting how they can band together to forge their own career paths.

Black and White Bioscope

Black and White Bioscope PDF Author: Neil Parsons
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
ISBN: 9781783209439
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Black and White Bioscope recovers a neglected chapter in the histories of world cinema and Africa. It tells the story of movie production in Africa that long predated francophone African films and Nollywood that are the focus of most histories of this industry. At the same time as Hollywood was starting, a film industry in Southern Africa was surging ahead in integrating production, distribution, and exhibition. African Film Productions Limited made silent movies using technical and acting talent from Britain, the United States, and Australia, as well as from Africa. These included not only the original "long trek movie" and the prototype for the movies Zulu and Zulu Dawn but also the first King Solomon's Mines and the original Blue Lagoon, featuring African actors such as Goba, Tom Zulu, and Msoga Mwana, who starred as the black revolutionary in Prester John. In this lavishly illustrated book, fifty movies are reconstructed with graphic photographs and plot synopses--plus quotations from reviews--so that readers can rediscover this long-lost treasure trove of silent cinema.

L.A. Rebellion

L.A. Rebellion PDF Author: Allyson Field
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520960432
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group—including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis—shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.

Creating Black Americans

Creating Black Americans PDF Author: Nell Irvin Painter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195137558
Category : African American artists
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Blending a vivid narrative with more than 150 images of artwork, Painter offers a history--from before slavery to today's hip-hop culture--written for a new generation.