Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era Review

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Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era Reviewi liked how this book captured the time period and showed the images and spoke on how preception was. you feel the atmosphere and see a shift from the way things were. of course hollywood is and will always be color struck, however there was a certain manner at presenting actors and actress's during this time. very compelling book.Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era OverviewThis is the second volume of Thomas Cripps's definitive history of African-Americans in Hollywood.It covers the period from World War II through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, examining this period through the prism of popular culture.Making Movies Black shows how movies anticipated and helped form America's changing ideas about race.Cripps contends that from the liberal rhetoric of the war years--marked as it was by the propaganda catchwords brotherhood and tolerance--came movies that defined a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large.He argues that the war years, more than any previous era, gave African-American activists access to centers of cultural influence and power in both Washington and Hollywood. Among the results were an expanded black imagery on the screen during the war--in combat movies such as Bataan, Crash Dive, and Sahara; musicals such as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky; and government propaganda films such as The Negro Soldier and Wings for this Man (narrated by Ronald Reagan!).After the war, the ideologies of both black activism and integrationism persisted, resulting in the 'message movie' era of Pinky, Home of the Brave, and No Way Out, a form of racial politics that anticipated the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Delving into previously inaccessible records of major Hollywood studios, among them Warner Bros., RKO, and 20th Century-Fox, as well as records of the Office of War Information in the National Archives, and records of the NAACP, and interviews with survivors of the era, Cripps reveals the struggle of both lesser known black filmmakers like Carlton Moss and major figures such as Sidney Poitier. More than a narrative history, Making Movies Black reaches beyond the screen itself with sixty photographs, many never before published, which illustrate the mood of the time.Revealing the social impact of the classical Hollywood film, Making Movies Black is the perfect book for those interested in the changing racial climate in post-World War II American life.

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Slow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) Review

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Slow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) ReviewEverything arrived in perfect orderSlow Fade to Black (Galaxy Books) OverviewSet against the backdrop of the black struggle in society, Slow Fade to Black is the definitive history of African-American accomplishment in film--both before and behind the camera--from the earliest movies through World War II.As he records the changing attitudes toward African-Americans both in Hollywood and the nation at large, Cripps explores the growth of discrimination as filmmakers became more and more intrigued with myths of the Old South: the "lost cause" aspect of the Civil War, the stately mansions and gracious ladies of the antebellum South, the "happy" slaves singing in the fields.Cripps shows how these characterizations culminated in the blatantly racist attitudes of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and how this film inspired the N.A.A.C.P. to campaign vigorously--and successfully--for change.While the period of the 1920s to 1940s was one replete with Hollywood stereotypes (blacks most often appeared as domestics or "natives," or were portrayed in shiftless, cowardly "Stepin Fetchit" roles), there was also an attempt at independent black production--on the whole unsuccessful. But with the coming of World War II, increasing pressures for a wider use of blacks in films, and calls for more equitable treatment, African-Americans did begin to receive more sympathetic roles, such as that of Sam, the piano player in the 1942 classic Casablanca.A lively, thorough history of African-Americans in the movies, Slow Fade to Black is also a perceptive social commentary on evolving racial attitudes in this country during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

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Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry Review

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Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry ReviewChances are you don't know who Lincoln Perry is, and chances are you do know who Stepin Fetchit is, even though you may never have seen any of Fetchit's movies. Fetchit was Perry's stage persona, famous for playing the "shiftless darky," the slow-talking, drowsy shuffler that was the comic bane of his white masters. Perry was as full of contradictions as the character he portrayed, and both get a full biography in _Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry_ (Pantheon) by Mel Watkins. Watkins has previously written a history of African American comedy, and so is well acquainted with Fetchit, his fellow performers, and the social changes of the twentieth century that led to the changes in feeling about Fetchit's screen character. This biography is not just about the man and character, but about a particular aspect of twentieth century American race relations.
Perry was born in 1902 in Key West, Florida, and followed his father into performing, working tent shows, carnivals, and eventually vaudeville. Movies were not a career that black performers considered at the time, because if depicted, blacks were played by whites in blackface. Perry may have taken a job as a porter at MGM, and in 1927 he acted in _In Old Kentucky_, his first film appearance, one which got him some critical notice. Perry did not invent Fetchit's "torpid physical presence and halting, meandering speech," but he performed the role with meticulous attention and timing. When onstage before an audience, a key part of his act (it sounds like the sort of transformation for which Andy Kaufman was famous) was to come meandering out, looking lost and confused, and start a whining, incoherent monologue. He would then suddenly burst into a spirited dance that showed that the sloth and stupidity were nothing but pretense. Watkins makes the point that on the screen, there was no such transformation; Perry's sluggard, always performed with skillful languor, was the only role he got to play. He became the first true black movie star, and one of the first to have a studio contract. Like so many actors of his time, he spent lavishly and foolishly. Throughout his movie career, he would irritate studio executives so much that he would get fired from a movie or from his contract, whereupon he would go back to the road for work on the stage. He was criticized by the civil rights movement in the 1940s, and was unemployable because of it, although he could have made a comeback in drama in the sixties. He died in a home for Hollywood actors in 1985.
Watkins has provided a full picture of a complex man of real talent who used it in a timely way, a way that simply became unfashionable as times changed. Perry's aggressive demands to be treated (and paid) like white stars branded him a troublemaker. His fame opened doors for other black actors in less controversial roles, but his name stands for a now-regrettable image. This entertaining biography shows that there was more to him than the image.Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry Overview

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Redefining Black Film Review

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Redefining Black Film Reviewtook forever to ship to me. i wish i would've just bought it in the store bc i missed out a week of reading for class. Order in advance in order to get it on time or else just buy in the store.Redefining Black Film Overview

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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday Review

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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday ReviewDavis work is a powerful re-reading of Blues women, and firmly places them in the center, rather than the margin, of Black oppositional and autonomous culture discourse. The book is mostly devoted to the work of Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith, but there are important sections devoted to Billie Holiday as well. In each case, the Davis argues for a more complete contextual understanding of Blues women music as introducing gender issues, breaking discursive taboos, and forging meaning within the context of an imagined community of Black women's lives.

To begin with, Davis convincingly argues that Blues women were on the vanguard in breaking down taboos concerning domestic violence and male subjugation, as many Blues songs concerned these matters. Davis uses powerful works such as "Rough and Tumble Blues," "See See Rider Blues," and "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair," to demonstrate that Blues women were willing to engage in oppositional, if allegorical, violence in the service of personal autonomy. Even man songs that seem to demonstrate acquiescence, even masochism, in the face of male abuse can be seen to have an ironic, subversive, or didactic quality that belies a simplistic surface reading.

Davis also takes on the common notion that Blues music doesn't include social protest, an interpretation that has been pushed by white commentators, such as Samuel Charters, and black commentators, such as Albert Murray. Davis argues that Blues music inherits from Slave musical culture a coded approach to naming and resistance that demands more than a surface analysis of the lyrics, and takes into account the role of music as a lyrical interlocuter. Focusing on tunes such as "Backwater Blues" and "Washwoman's Blues," Davis almost always effectively demonstrates that coded protest is still protest, and that women's blues historically anticipated and grounded mass movements in the areas of civil rights and feminism, while remaining linked with West African hermeneutic structure of naming and interpretation, such as "nommo."

In terms of Religious content, Davis forcefully recounts how women reconfigured a secular existential (or even "Devil's") music as prayer itself, magically and aesthetically conjured to exorcise emotions such as "the blues." At the same time, she harshly criticizes the Black church for adopting Christian dualisms concerning the moral status of body and spirit, which she sees as sexualized forms of racism and sexism--- since both blacks and women have been semiotically linked with earthiness and body as opposed to spirit by while male elites. Celebratory Sexuality, on the other hand, has always, according to Davis, been an oppositional aspect of black working-class consciousness. This extends beyond sexuality to an affirmation of Black folk religious life (such as Hoodoo) and crossing of class boundaries in the Blues, which Davis contends is a major reason Blues music was ignored and even distanced by Black elites during the Harlem Renaissance.

Davis's discussion of Billie Holiday is short (two chapters) but powerful, in which she argues that Holiday subversively appropriated the saccharine Tin Pan Alley love song format she was given as Slaves would have appropriated the English language upon their arrival in the North Americas. Holiday worked little in the formal Blues, but was nontheless grounded in the Blues idiom, from which she drew inspiration, and a subversive presentation of white romantic life to Black audiences. In this vein, such songs as "Strange Fruit" fit more coherently, and the ironic (and yet utopian) edge in her voice professes to the truth of Black women's lives, even in ways that on the surface seem to be feministically regressive.

There are isolated examples where Davis is less successful than at other times, but on the whole, her argumentation is strong and fearless, and her analogical and narrative analysis of the music along with lyrics adds, rather than detracts, from her argument.Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday Overview

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Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture Review

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Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture ReviewWomen of Blaxpolitation is an important treatise into an often overlooked topic in film studies and broader cultural studies. Exploitation cinema was a major force in 1970's culture that yields its influence on modern film and popular culture in movies like Quentin Tarrantino's Death Proof and thousands of B-grade films produced on the independent front. Too often people assume that women in these films were simply eye candy or lambs to the slaughter but in reality power exudes from many of these women . . . super heroes of the feminine upheaval that came with the women's liberation movement. It is refreshing to see a book on this subject exploring the power to transfrom that these women had written by a female scholar, rather than the male perspective. This is a thoughtful book worth adding to your library.Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture OverviewWith the Civil Rights movement of the sixties fresh in their perspective, movie producers of the early 1970s began to make films aimed toward the underserved African American audience. Over the next five years or so, a number of cheaply made, so-called blaxploitation movies featured African American actresses in roles which broke traditional molds. Typically long on flash and violence but lacking in character depth and development, this genre nonetheless did a great deal toward redefining the perception of African American actresses, breaking traditional African American female stereotypes and laying the groundwork for later feminine action heroines. This critical study examines the ways in which the blaxploitation heroines of the early 1970s reshaped the presentation of African American actresses on screen and, to a certain degree, the perception of African American females in general. It discusses the social, political and cultural context in which blaxploitation films emerged. The work focuses on four African American actresses—Pam Grier, Tamara Dobson, Teresa Graves and Jeanne Belle—providing critical and audience response to their films as well as insight into the perspectives of the actresses themselves. The eventual demise of the blaxploitation genre due to formulaic plots and lack of character development is also discussed. Finally, the work addresses the mainstreaming of the action heroine in general and a recent resurgence of interest in black action movies. Relevant film stills and a selected filmography including cast list and plot synopsis are also included.

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Global Cities Review

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Global Cities ReviewAbrahamson's Global Cities is a welcome new book: It provides a truly global perspective on urban life, examining both the economic and cultural dimensions of globalism. It provides especially thorough examinations of immigration and the effects of foreign investment upon global inequality. It is a very well-written book, with little un-necessary jargon.Global Cities OverviewGlobal Cities examines the distinctive commercial, residential, and spatial features of the major cities of the contemporary world--cities housing the financial and cultural activities that are most consequential for everyone, regardless of where they live. The development of these influential cities is intimately related to the emergence of modern telecommunications, the growth of multinational corporations, the internationalization of economic activity, and the increased movement of cultural symbols and artifacts across national lines. Accessible to readers with little background in sociology or social science, Global Cities analyzes numerous contemporary issues to illustrate concepts and processes pertaining to the most significant global cities. These concrete examples facilitate students' general understanding and show them the contemporary relevance of the material. The book offers a detailed and multifaceted picture of such leading urban centers as London, New York, Tokyo, and Paris, but also branches out to other important cities in the world. It analyzes both the internal features of the cities and the nature of their connections with each other. Global Cities is ideal for undergraduate courses in urban sociology and other social sciences.

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