African Americans in Cinema
The First Half Century
The tracing of the history of blacks and black film in the US over the first half of the 20th Century. Includes an interactive searchable database, over 100 photographs, posters, filmclips, production stills, voiceover introductions, and a 32 page guide with suggested classroom exercieses and user instructions.
Containing a rich body of reference information, critical essays by prominent film scholars, biographies, film reviews, and multimedia elements such as movie clips, this CD-ROM traces the history of black filmmakers from 1894 to 1950. The CD-ROM is easy to navigate and is accompanied by a thirty-two-page guide, which contains suggested classroom exercises as well as user instructions. Filled with a trove of primary and secondary source material, this CD-ROM is an invaluable resource for film scholars as well as anyone with a desire to explore in detail this fascinating and often-overlooked chapter of cinema history.
Black film studies lends itself readily to historical inquiry regarding such issues as enterprise, representation, and race relations, and African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century visually demonstrates these connections by organizing historical data into four chronological periods that reflect landmarks in the history of the country and/or the history of cinema: "1894-1914, Emerging Images"; "1915-1928, Bold Beginnings"; "1929-1940, Hollywood Beckons"; and "1941-1950, End of an Era."
It also contains hundreds of photographs, posters, production stills, and film clips, as well as voiceover introductions that help contextualize the first half century of black cinema. In addition, the CD-ROM features an interactive searchable database that contains more than 3,300 movies emphasizing the contributions of African Americans to cinema.
Essay topics focus on film directors and actors, genres and companies, early silent films, Chicago origins, The Birth of a Nation, The Birth of a Race, minstrelsy, segregation at the movies, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Oscar Micheaux, the Norman black-cast films, Paul Robeson, animated shorts, black women in film and behind the camera, musicals, black gangster films, Spencer Williams, and Sidney Poitier. Among the scholars providing the essays are Jacqueline Bobo, Thomas Cripps, Jane Gaines, Phyllis R. Klotman, Charles Musser, Charlene Regester, Mark A. Reid, Henry T. Sampson, Adrienne Lanier Seward, Michele Wallace, and Gladstone Yearwood.
To order online:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/uip0252028929.html
To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)
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