Black City Cinema

African American Urban Experiences In Film

Paula Massood

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781592130030, 9781592130023
• eBook ISBN: 9781439905654
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Migrations, Movies, and African American Cities on the Screen
• 1. The Antebellum Idyll and Hollywood's Black-Cast Musicals
• 2. Harlem is Heaven: City Motifs in Race Films from the Early Sound Era
• 3. Cotton in the City: The Black Ghetto, Blaxploitation, and Beyond
• 4. Welcome to Crooklyn: Spike Lee and the Rearticulation of the Black Urbanscape
• 5. Out of the Ghetto, into the Hood: Changes in the Construction of Black City Cinema
• 6. Taking the A-Train: The City, the Train, and Migration in Spike lee's Clockers
• Epilogue: New Millennium Minstrel Shows? African American Cinema in the Late 1990s
• Notes
• Index