Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film (Culture And The Moving Image)

This work 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 20th century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture. The text 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, it 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 the hood films as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the 20th century 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. 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. Films discussed in Black City Cinema include Hallelujah, The Green Pastures, Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather, Scar of Shame, Within Our Gates, Two Gun Man From Harlem, Dark Manhattan, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Superfly, Bush Mama, She's Gotta Have It, Do The Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, Posse, Clockers, Down in the Delta, and Shaft (2000).\ Shows how films reflected the 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 3 decades of twentieth century. This title probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an element of African American film.