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Black women film and video makers have been producing shorts, documentaries and films since the early part of this century. Unfortunately, not only has their work been overlooked by distributors, but critical reviews have been few and far between. Conceived to redress that omission, Black Women Film and Video Artists is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this genre. Gathered here are noted scholars and critics, as well as the film/video makers themselves who offer insight into the work of underexplored artists. The discussions range from pioneering to contemporary film makers and include artists such as Madeline Anderson, Monica Freeman, Jacqueline Shearer, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Camille Billops, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Michelle Parkerson, among others. Contributors include: Jacqueline Bobo, Carmen Coustaut, Gloria J. Gibson, C.A. Griffith, Monique Guillory, Carol Munday Lawrence, O. Funmilayo Makarah, Ntongela Maselila, Jacqueline Shearer, P. Jane Splawn.
Documentary and feminist film studies have long been separate or parallel universes that need to converse or collide. The essays in this volume, written by prominent scholars and filmmakers, demonstrate the challenges that feminist perspectives pose for documentary theory, history, and practice. They also show how fuller attention to documentary enriches and complicates feminist theory, especially regarding the relationship between gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Feminism and Documentary begins with a substantial historical introduction that highlights several of the specific areas that contributors address: debates over realism, the relationship between filmmaker...
By contrast, in the works of black writers from Oscar Micheaux to Toni Morrison, the black experience has been more fully, more accurately, and usually more sympathetically realized; and from the early days of film, select filmmakers have looked to that literature as the basis for their productions.".
A history of the early 1900s southern-born, white filmmaker and the silent films he created for black audiences. In the early 1900s, so-called race filmmakers set out to produce black-oriented pictures to counteract the racist caricatures that had dominated cinema from its inception. Richard E. Norman, a southern-born white filmmaker, was one such pioneer. From humble beginnings as a roving “home talent” filmmaker, recreating photoplays that starred local citizens, Norman would go on to produce high-quality feature-length race pictures. Together with his better-known contemporaries Oscar Micheaux and Noble and George Johnson, Richard E. Norman helped to define early race filmmaking. Maki...
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.
Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture is a collection of 17 essays that analyze representations in popular culture of African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American women. The anthology is divided into four parts: film images, beauty images, music, and television. The articles share two intellectual traditions: the authors, predominantly women of color, use an intersectionality perspective in their analysis of popular culture and the representation of women of color, and they identify popular culture as a site of conflict and contestation. Instructors will find this collection to be a convenient textbook for women’s studies; media studies; race, class, and gender courses; ethnic studies; and more.
Tyler Perry has become a significant figure in media due to his undeniable box office success led by his character Madea and popular TV sitcoms House of Payne and Meet the Browns. Perry built a multimedia empire based largely on his popularity among African American viewers and has become a prominent and dominant cultural storyteller. Along with Perry’s success has come scrutiny by some social critics and Hollywood well-knowns, like Spike Lee, who have started to deconstruct the images in Perry’s films and TV shows suggesting, as Lee did, that Perry has used his power to advance stereotypical depictions of African Americans. 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. Perry’s critical acclaim is also explored.
Black women have long recognized the power of film for storytelling. For far too long, however, the cultural and historical narratives about film have not accounted for the contributions of Black women directors. This book remedies this omission by highlighting the trajectory of the culturally significant work of Black women directors in the United States, from the under-examined pioneers of the silent era, to the documentarians who sought to highlight the voices and struggles of Black women, and the contemporary Black women directors in Hollywood. 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.
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"A quarterly journal of film history, theory, criticism, and practice" (varies slightly).