Black Film and Television

The definitive, deluxe art book from costume design legend Ruth E. Carter. Ruth E. Carter is a living legend of costume design. For three decades, she has shaped the story of the Black experience on screen--from the '80s streetwear of Do the Right Thing to the royal regalia of Coming 2 America. Her work on Marvel's Black Panther not only brought Afrofuturism to the mainstream, but also made her the first Black winner of an Oscar in costume design. In 2021, she became the second-ever costume designer to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In this definitive book, Carter shares her origins--recalling a trip to the sporting goods store with Spike Lee to outfit the School Daze cast and a transformative moment stepping inside history on the set of Steven Spielberg's Amistad.

Documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression.

Today, black directors are making films in all popular genres, while inventing new ones to speak directly from and to the black experience. This book offers a first comprehensive look at the work of black directors in Hollywood, from pioneers such as Gordon Parks, Charles Burnett, Melvin Van Peebles, and Ossie Davis to current talents including Spike Lee, John Singleton, Kasi Lemmons, and Carl Franklin. Discussing 67 individuals and over 135 films, Melvin Donalson thoroughly explores how black directors' storytelling skills and film techniques have widened both the thematic focus and visual style of American cinema.

The author explores cinema as part of the Black cultural tradition.

Applying a Black feminist perspective, this book examines the ways that Black women filmmakers have made a way for themselves and their work by resisting the dominant cultural expectations for Black women and for the medium of film, as a whole. Includes chapter on "Women of the L.A. Rebellion."

From Madea to Media Mogul makes the argument that Tyler Perry must be understood as a figure at the nexus of converging factors, cultural events, and historical traditions. Contributors demonstrate how a critical engagement with Perry's work and media practices highlights a need for studies to grapple with developing theories and methods on disreputable media. These essays challenge value-judgment criticisms and offer new insights on the industrial and formal qualities of Perry's work.

Maryann Erigha 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.

Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films like In the Heat of the Night, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Super Fly, Claudine, and Blue Collar, this volume considers how issues of race and labor played out on the screen during the tumultuous early years of affirmative action.

Projecting Race presents a history of educational documentary filmmaking in the postwar era in light of race relations and the fight for civil rights.

This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema.From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed--for various purposes and intentions--the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood.

In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film

Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986.

Draws on interviews with African-American directors and producers, including Julie Dash and Charles Burnett.

In Black Hollywood Unchained, Ishmael Reed gathers an impressive group of scholars, critics, intellectuals, and artist to examine and respond to the contemporary portrayals of Blacks in films. Using the 2012 release of the film Django Unchained as the focal point of much of the discussion, these essays and reviews provide a critical perspective on the challenges facing filmmakers and actors when confronted with issues on race and the historical portrayal of African American characters.

Images of violent black masculinity are not new in American culture, but in the late 1980s and early '90s, the social and economic climate in the country contributed to an unprecedented number of films about ghetto life. And while Hollywood reaped financial gains from these depictions, the rest of the country saw an ever widening "opportunity gap" between marginalized groups and mainstream society, as well as an increase in juvenile violence. These events added to the existing discomfort of the viewing public with representations of young black males living in urban ghettos.

Christopher Lehman traces the evolution of racial caricatures in American cartoons during the first half of the 20th century. He shows how the depiction of African Americans in particular became so inextricably linked to the cartoon medium as to influence its evolution through five decades from the 1900s to the 1950s.

In Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances

This book pays tribute to the sacrifices and achievements of seven individuals who made difficult and controversial choices to ensure that black Americans shared in the evolution of the nations cultural heritage: Lorenzo Tucker, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Clarence Muse, Woody Strode, Charles Gordone, and Frederick Douglass.

Judith Weisenfeld explores cinematic representations of African American religion and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity.

The book provides a rich and thorough overview of Tyler Perry's media works. In so doing, contributors represent and approach their analyses of Perry's work from a variety of theoretical and methodological angles. The main themes explored in the volume include the representation of (a) Black authenticity and cultural production, (b) class, religion, and spirituality, (c) gender and sexuality, and (d) Black love, romance, and family.

This book examines a popular, divisive, and celebrity-endorsed filmic depiction of a troubled African American girl, focusing on the concept of African American youth film and genre hybridity; the adaptation of the film from its source novel; how it deals with issues of identity such as race, gender, and body size; the film's use of music and pop stars as spectacle; and how the film's critical reception brought back, and moved beyond, the old debates around positive representation of race.

Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to historical and current racial issues in America.

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.

Struggles for Representation examines over 300 non-fiction films by more than 150 African American film/videomakers and includes an extensive filmography, bibliography, and excerpts from interviews with film/videomakers. In eleven original essays, contributors explore the extraordinary scope of these aesthetic and social documents and chart a previously undiscovered territory: documentaries that examine the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans, as seen from their perspectives.

This book includes the entire 20th century through black images in film, from the silent era to the unequaled rise of the new African American cinema and stars of today. From Gone with the Wind and Carmen Jones to Shaft, Do the Right Thing, and Bamboozled, Donald Bogle reveals the way the image of blacks in American cinema has changed--and also the shocking way in which it has often remained the same.

Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter brings together perspectives on violence and its representation in African American history from slavery to the present moment.

Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry's Productions examines Perry's works from interdisciplinary perspectives and provides a necessary response to Perry's current prominence regarding black representation, black religion and black cultural production

This book uses a black/white interracial lens to examine the lives and careers of eight prominent American-born actresses from the silent age through the studio era, New Hollywood, and into the present century: Josephine Baker, Nina Mae McKinney, Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Lonette McKee, Jennifer Beals and Halle Berry.