Film Blackness

American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

Author: Michael Boyce Gillespie

Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, seeing it not as the representation of the black experience, but as the visual negotiation between film as art and the social construction of race, as well as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture.

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Summary

Description

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Critic Reviews

“"What is black film? Does it involve a black director and a black cast? Is it meant for a black audience? Michael Boyce Gillespie directs us beyond these all-too-familiar questions to an ever expansive and spiraling investigation of the work that cinematic blackness does for visual culture and public life. Beautifully written, meditative, and richly insightful, Film Blackness critically intervenes in the slippages between representational systems, aesthetic and genre conventions, and racial discourse. Building off the work of art historians, visual theorists, and scholars of affective economies, Gillespie brings a remarkable attention to detail and sustained and revelatory readings to open up scenes, dialogues, and figurations of black/ness. Film Blackness is a major contribution to cinema and genre studies, American studies, black cultural studies, and visual culture."”

"This astonishingly comprehensive, compact book does nothing less than synthesize nearly the entirety of thought to date on black cinema, blackness in the cinema, and scholarship in this vital area of film studies. . . . Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals."
- G. A. Foster (Choice) “A necessary book. Film Blackness gives us an inspired sense of a much-needed analysis of race in film, an analysis that has so far-true to form-eluded us.” - Courtney R. Baker (Cinema Journal) “This book blew my mind.... Michael Boyce Gillespie’s Film Blackness sparks a necessary conversation about the art of Black film and its indefinable quality. He invites the reader to challenge themselves to perceive all Black film and art as individually distinct pieces of an endless puzzle of Blackness. Reader Meter: Five Stars." - Mercedes K. Milner (Write or Die Chicks)

About the Author

Michael Boyce Gillespie is Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Media and Communication Arts and the Black Studies Program at the City College of New York, City University of New York.