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.
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.
Reviews
"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 *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822362265
Author Michael Boyce Gillespie
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
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.
Reviews
"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 *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822362265
Author Michael Boyce Gillespie
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
