SCHWEITZER HUMANITIES FELLOWSHIP POSITIONS 1987-1989
The State University of New York at Albany, in conjunction with the
Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities, is offering two Schweitzer Fellowships
beginning September 1, 1987. The purpose of these Fellowships is to enable
talented humanities scholars and/or writers at the beginning of their careers
to spend two years in residence at SUNY-Albany. Schweitzer Fellows will
engage in major projects developed in consultation with Schweitzer Professor
Toni Morrison and will have regular opportunities to review their progress with
her. Candidates with projects in American literature and culture, feminist
literary theory, black, women and third world writers, and creative writing are
encouraged to apply. Schweitzer Fellows will also have contacts with other
distinguished faculty members at the University and will be invited to par-
ticipate in a variety of University activities, depending upon their fields of study.
The SUNY-Albany/Schweitzer Fellowships carry a stipend of $17,000 for a
ten-month obligation. Applicants must have completed a graduate degree
(M.A., M.F.A., D.A., or P.h.D.) after June, 1984 and have some prior teaching
experience. Persons enrolled in degree programs as of September 1, 1987 are
not eligible. Fellows will be expected to teach one course per semester and
give a public lecture each year. They will be entitled to departmental affilia-
tion, health insurance benefits, and will be expected to reside in Albany for
the duration of the Fellowship.
Applications will be accepted after September 1, 1986 and until December
30, 1986. To apply please send your resume, a statement of purpose, and three
letters of recommendation to:
Schweitzer Humanities Fellowships
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Humanities 355
The State University of New York at
Albany
Albany, New York 12222
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a symposium on the
new black cinema
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November 17, 18 & 19, 1988
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
ALL EVENTS ARE HELD AT PAGE HALL, 135 WESTERN AVENUE, UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CALL (518) 442~5622 OR (518)442~5620
THIS PROGRAM IS BEING FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS.
CO-SPONSORED BY SCHWEITZER CHAIR/TONI MORRISON
..-------------.AND THE NEW YORK STATE WRITERS INSTITUTE,_..----------...,
.QCHWEITZER/,
n~HAIR
/ TONI MORRISON
New York State~itute
of the State University of New York
UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY • STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Film Viewing Guide
PRODUCEDBYSUZANNELANCE
Each excerpt printed here is the sole property of the author whose name appears at the end of the piece.
No use is granted or permitted without the express permission of the author.
Welcome
------~~--- ----
The Birth of Black Cinema Symposium is designed to examine the
origin and artistic development of one of the newest, most provocative and
often misunderstood segments of the film genre-black cinema. The
concept of this project is novel because it concentrates on black cinema in
its own context-- forged within black artistic traditions and cultural charac-
teristics.
Because the black presence on screens is surfacing in unexpected and
unexplored ways, we have chosen a title (The Birth of Black Cinema) that
begs several questions that could not legitimately be asked before the
1960's. What is black cinema? When did it begin? What forces compelled,
facilitated and informed its origins? How should it be judged? What informa-
tion is needed to articulate those judgments? What are its critical, cultural
and aesthetic premises?
By addressing these questions, this symposium expects to clear away
some of the emotional and intellectual debris surrounding the black pres-
ence in film. In this way, one can develop the cinematic literacy necessary
for deliberating on, understanding, and participating in the future of an art
form that, to a large extent, shapes our thinking in a number of areas. This
symposium hopes to direct attention to the powerful, risk-ladden alliance of ,
art and society at its most critical moment-when a specific culture begins
to shape that alliance.
The Birth of Black Cinema Symposium, therefore, centers on the
artistic strategies and choices available to black filmmakers in a highly
culture-sensitive medium.
The Schweitzer Chair has devoted all of its resources to a vision of
education of which this project is a part: to enhance humanistic studies
through the joining of artists, scholars, and the community in a three-way
dialogue.
The Schweitzer Chair and the New York State Writers Institute are
grateful for your participation.
Toni Morrison
,I
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,·1
Table of Contents
/
Welcome .............................................................................. i
by Toni Morrison
The Birth of Black Cinema: Overview ........................... i -4
by Clyde Taylor
From: Bright Moments ................................................... 5-8
by St. Clair Bourne
From: Playing the Changes:
In Motion: Amiri Baraka ................................................ 9-1 0
by James Snead
From: The Making of Ashes and Embers ................. ii-15
by Haile Gerima
Notes on School Daze ................................................ 16-20
by Spike Lee
Critics' Notes ............................................................... 21-23
Toni Cade Bambara ................................................. 21-22
Hortense Spillers ..................................................... 22-23
Biographical Sketches ................................................ 24-25
Glossary of Film Terms ...................... ~ ....................... 26-33
Black Cinema Bibliography ........................................ 34-36
ii
The Birth of Black Cinema: Overview
~Y Clyde Taylor
/
The films and discussions in this symposium carry on a distinct burst
of African-American Image-making, the fuse of which was lit during the
black awakening of the 1960s. Before or alongside this new cinema
movement lie three major episodes of black imagery in American films.
The first of these is the long pageant of Blacks as servile stereotypes,
gunbearers, weirdos, scowling heavies and grinning sidekicks that Holly-
wood has projected around the world from its earliest years to the present
day.
Then, as a kind of competition to this reign of shady caricature came
the early black independent films, from roughly 1913 to 1948.
Like a fiery comet, the third definable episode in black characteriza-
tion, the black exploitation movies, burned and then fizzled-lasting
roughly from 1969 to 1975. They died when white producers discovered
that black audiences would come to see white male adventure movies, and
white filmgoers would not pay to see the black versions.
Were any of these epochs forerunners of the present day black
independent film movement? The early black independents were forerun-
ners in form but not really in substance. The contemporary African-
American image-makers can look back to Oscar Micheaux and other early
directors for the inspiration of their enterprise and ingenuity in surmounting
obstacles to bring Blacks to the screen and to create a marginal market of
black audiences to see them. Yet when one looks at the content of these
movies to learn who African-Americans were, are, or were going to be, the
yield is slight. Their tidy achievement was to take black imagery out of the
submissive, shadowy margins of subhumanity and recreate it in roles such
as cowboys, dentists, socialites, classical composers and chorus girls.
They leaped, in other words, over the mainstream of struggling black
people into the a-political, bourgeois cover-up of Hollywood commercial es-
capism.
Who are the new independent filmmakers, where did they come from
and how does their work differ from the other chapters in the delineation of
black people?
Most broadly, the new movement towards independence in filmmak-
ing can be traced to the world-wide groundswell towards decolonization
after World War II, which also set the stage for many national cinema
movements. The immediate background of its birth was the black awaken-
ing of the 1960s. Television news agencies found themselves at a disad-
vantage trying to cover stormy events in black communities with all-white
crews. And film schools and departments, shocked (or persuaded) into
1
"The latest black inde-
pendent film movement
(roughly from 1964 to
present) represent!J the
most concerted effort to
establish black cinema
and to distinguish it Jrom
images of,blacks in
films."
Clyde Taylor, from "The
L.A. Rebellion: A Turning
Point in Black Cinema"
social responsibility by the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, finally
opened their doors to black candidates.
So, the new independents, unlike the old, are university trained. As
students of film art, the new image-makers have participated in a denser,
broader film culture than was possible before World War II. They have
incubated in the atmosphere of film study courses that set before them the
example of Japanese cinema, Italian nee-realism, the French New Wave,
Brazilian cinema novo, Cuban cinema, the works of Ousmane Sembene,
Med Hondo, and other African directors. Their teachers in some cases
have been pioneers in the direct cinema style of documentary filmmak-
ing. In short, they became filmmakers in an intellectual climate that
nurtured ideas of film far more vast and supple than the formulaic routines
of the U.S. movie industry-a climate that makes possible gestures
towards the portrayal of national culture on film.
Even during its brief history since the 1960s, the new black cinema
has experienced specific clusters of development. The first wave of
independents, for instance, arose mainly in and around Black Journal.
This television magazine, aired by the government-funded Public Broad-
casting Service, gathered entrants into the field under the experienced
leadership of William Greaves (Still a Brothel). Among them were
Madeline Anderson (I Am Somebody; Malcolm X), St. Clair Bourne (Let
the Church Say Amen; Black and Green; In Motion: Amiri Baraka), Stan
Lathan (Long Day in Novembel], and Horace Jenkins (Asundi: Sudan's
Pyramids).
At the Black Journal office at Columbus Circle, New York City, these
first-footers wrestled with issues of a new black film aesthetic and
translated their ideas into weekly documentaries that are still unrivaled in
bringing a sharply focused view of their world to black television watchers.
Mainly, these Black Journal graduates have set the pace in black
documentaries, shifting only gradually to dramatic films.
The University of California at Los Angeles in the early 1970s was
the fertile ground for another outbreak of black film independence. With
Haile Gerima as the most provocative advocate, and most of them
collaborating on each other's projects, startling works came from Larry
Clark, Charles Burnett, Ben Caldwell, and slightly later, Julie Dash, Bill
Woodberry, Alile Sharon Larkin and Bernard Nichols.
The films of Burnett, Dash and Woodbury get their power from
controlled reflectiveness, their social implications subtly incorporated.
But the UCLA school is more immediately recognizable by a committed
social-political energy which at times threatens to overpower the viewer,
but always keeps in the foreground a perspective of commitment to an
embattled black community.
2
"The new black cinema
was born out of the black
arts movement of the
1960s, out of the same
concerns with a
self-determining black
cultural identity."
Clyde Taylor, from "New
U.S. Black Cinema"
Then, in the late 1970s New York became the center from which
another group of young filmmakers emerged. Attention to this fresh
development was first alerted by Warrington Hudl(n's Street Corner Sto-
ries. In all their diversity, the appearance on the scene of Hudlin, Robert
Gardner, Roy Campanella II, Ayoka Chenzira, Charles Lane, Alfred
Santana, Kathy Collins, Hugh Hill, Monica Freemal1, Camille Billops, and
others, served notice that the supply of young talented African-American
artists determined to make responsible films would not dry up.
Black Journal, UCLA and the New York "school" indicate three focal
points where individual talents developed more than easily distinguishable
styles. Still, I would suggest that the West Coast work is marked by its
expansiveness, its risk-taking, and frequently by a Pan-African community
orientation. By contrast, films from the East Coast have so far moved more
deliberately within limits, suggesting somewhat the dimensions of the
Broadway theatrical stage.
But these three pulses of the movement are not the only ones. Carol
Munday Lawrence, for instance, formed a sustaining film production
company in San Francisco, the first black woman to do so. Michelle
Parkerson makes her films from a base in Washington, D.C., as does
Alonzo Crawford. Still others like Jimmy Mannas and Robert Van Leirop
have sharpened their skills in faraway places like Guiana and Mozambique.
Nor is even an historical sketch of this new film movement complete
without the efforts of its supporting cast of cultural workers like Pearl
Bowser, who gained national notice for the new cinema with an historic
festival in New York in 1969, followed by dozens of her exhibitions, in places
such as Denmark, France and India. One should recall also the Black Film
Institute led by Anthony Gittens in Washington, the African Film Society in
San Francisco, the Blacklight International Film Festival in Chicago, the
Atlanta Third World Film Festival, and several other efforts to develop local
community audiences. The movement now has its own journal in Black
Film Review, published in Washington, D.C ..
To individual filmmakers, in conversation, the future is an even rockier
road in search of funds than before, faced as they are with deep cutbacks
in government and foundation support. And despite their efforts, the
breakthrough to the audience they need and deserve has not appeared on
the horizon.
But to the historian, their efforts continue to look like an irresistible bid
for a representative portrayal of African-Americans before the world. They
have already produced a fuller, more rounded portrait of their people on the
screen than all the efforts mesmerized by Hollywood's glitter put together.
Each year new names enter the lists-Spike Lee, Carl Clay, Floyd
Webb, to name a few. Even more encouraging, many contenders are
managing to make their second, third, fourth films, each often a jump ahead
3
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/
of the last in .maturity and assurance. They continue to search for new
markets and funding sources, including European television. They take
their talents and their films everywhere.
The world is being educated, provoked, and entertained by screen
portrayals of black people that reflect their reality. For these young
filmmakers, and those to follow, just won't be denied.
The prospects for the new black cinema are mixed. Hopeful signs
continue to appear. Charles Burnett has just received a MacArthur
Fellowship. The Spike Lee train of remarkable successes rolls on. But we
should also notice that during the same years of his hits, the supply of black
independent films has been running low, particularly in terms of feature
films. Nevertheless, we know a new day in black representation is on the
way, part of the emergent challenge from repressed cultures and peoples
that is throwing Eurocentric knowledge into its present crisis.
Whatever the combination of talents, marketing strategies and tech-
nologies that eventually make black self-representation unremarkable,
one, particularly, should concern the participants in this event; the mid-
wives of the black cinema yet to be born. And that is the wider understand-
ing of the mechanics of power-knowledge and the essentiality of cultural
democracy as a right, not just a charitable idea.
copyright by Clyde Taylor, 1988
4
\!
From: Bright Moments
by St. Clair Bourne
My own beginning in filmmaking in 1968 as a staff producer for
Black Journal, the first national public affairs television series, was also
due as much to social conditions as my own energy. In those days, Black
people protested through action about our condi~ions. Among our com-
plaints was the lack of media acknowledgement regarding black participa-
tion in and contributions to American society. At th® same time, the Civil
Rights movement was beginning to slow down as the activists were more
and more thwarted by violent public resistance and government conspir-
acy. Planned and spontaneous rebellions erupted in the cities where
there were large black populations, causing the temporary disruption of
ongoing business as well as White discomfort and fear in those cities.
Therefore, programs, funds and positions in the television industry were
made available to provide black media access and participation to quiet
the raging storm. In the tax-supported public television sector, the Black
Journal series was created. I won't go into a detailed account here but
basically, because of our pro-black advocacy point of view film style, the
Black Journal series documented the black activity of the times and, in
the process, influenced the editorial tone and the images in other main-
stream television documentaries about black issues.
For most of the filmmakers of my generation, the documentary for-
mat became the primary means of expression because most of the inde-
pendent films were issue-oriented and the primary source of black
images came from the television news shows produced in New York City,
the center of television documentary filmmaking in the country. Also,
Black Journal and other black public affairs programs became the main
source of employment as well as the spiritual rallying point for many black
filmmakers during those times and documentary film production values
became the standard that we adopted.
I have continued to make documentary films, although I have
abandoned the journalistic format in favor of telling a narrative story using
real-life characters in a real-life setting. Also, I've tried, where possible, to
choose subjects and situations that are interpreted within an African world
view. For example, in The Black and the Green, I followed five black
American activists as they traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland to meet
with their Irish nationalist counterparts. Their experiences and percep-
tions about the use of violence for social change in Northern Ireland form
the core of the film's content. In another of my films, Langston Hughes:
The Dream Keeper, I showed the life and times of the famous poet-writer
and followed Hughes' wanderings of 60 years ago to France, Spain, Rus-
sia and Senegal as he witnessed the major world events of his day.
As the American government has drifted continuously to the right
since the early 1970s, the flow of news and information, money for pro-
duction and broadcast time for documentaries have been cut back. At the
same time, the impact of entertainment elements in the daily television
news has taken its toll on the attention span of the viewer. The documen-
tary as we know it-once a source of information and inspiration-is an
5
"In the American cinema,
political conditions di-
rectly influence screen
images and thus, the
images of African-Ameri-
cans have served specific
cultural and political pur-
poses throughout the his-
tory of the film industry."
St. Clair Bourne
/
endangered species, not only because there are fewer sources for finan-
cial backing but, more importantly, with fewer places for exposure, the
documentary audience is shrinking.
The current crop of black filmmakers are concentrating more on
the production of dramatic feature films and seek broad audiences
through mainstream outlets. Although they do insist upon artistic control,
they have no hesitation with dealing with and, in fact, courting main-
stream distribution companies. How, in two decades, did the emphasis
within the black independent film community change from documentaries
to features, from the pursuit of alternative distribution systems to the
push for access into the mainstream?
Of course, black feature film activity did not begin in the 1960s. It
had its start during the turn of the century and most of you are aware of
Oscar Micheaux, the Lincoln Film Company, Spencer Williams and oth-
ers who paved the way. But the current state of black film activity has its
immediate roots in the black activist 1960s and it is there that we may
find some answers.
In addition to the black activism of that time, there was another
factor in the film Industry that helped increase the black presence in the
movies. Skyrocketing production costs and dwindling attendance figures
were creating a crisis for several of the major Hollywood studios. It was
independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles and his ground-breaking film
Sweet, Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, followed by several other low-
budget black directed films that made Hollywood take notice of the exis-
tence of a previously undefined black audience. Hollywood's reaction
was to absorb certain creative elements from that independent black film
and produce imitative films for their own purposes, known as "blaxploita-
tion films." Ultimately, the black audience tired of the formula stories,
stopped going and this genre died.
Still, the question remains-why did so many Black people pack
the theatre where these films played? From a political and even technical
point of view, these films were terrible. First, the black leads in these
films were shown fighting the system in some form and winning, even
though "winning" often consisted of exploiting women and beating up
only the criminal elements of the white community. But to Black people
who had seen only "coon" roles in a steady diet of Hollywood films, these
new films were a step forward.
Currently, most of the black images emanating from Hollywood
are essentially those which have as their primary function entertainment
that endorses the current political order and advocates no change. And it
is, once again, the black independents that are producing, against in-
credible odds, the significant work but, this time, with a difference ... and
the difference is the audience-an audience that is still hungry for
6
images and stories that speak to them but one that has grown sophisti-
cated about the media.
/
Again, one of the spinoffs of the black film activity of the 1960s
was the creation of campus and community-based film societies like the
San Francisco African Film Society and Chicago's ~lacklight Film Festival
that would sponsor periodic film series and invite black filmmakers to ap-
pear with their work. Conclusions from the often heated discussions after
the screenings about film language, values and technique would be fil-
tered through the on-going intellectual black community grapevine. As the
publisher and editor for over a decade of Chamba Notes, an international
quarterly film newsletter, I printed much of the information and essays
from this period and observed as this exchange of ideas influenced the
black film-going audience.
At the same time, films by African filmmakers like Ousmane Sam-
bene, Med Hondo and Ola Balagun began to be shown here and, even
though they were not seen by a large mass black audience, they influ-
enced black critical taste by providing a point of comparison with black
Hollywood films.
So where are we now? How do Spike Lee, Niamah Barnett,
Robert Townsend, Julie Dash, Louis Massiah and others from this newest
generation fit in to the ongoing independent black film movement of which
William Greaves, Madeline Anderson, Melvin Van Peebles, Jimmy Man-
nas, the late Kathy Collins and myself are all apart?
Although the current generation of black filmmakers are, as Spike
Lee states in an interview in my documentary about his newest feature
film, "the children of the nationalist 60s," they differ in ideology. For ex-
ample, unlike their predecessors, they have no hesitation in dealing with
mainstream production and distribution sources, primarily because of
their desire for distribution to wide audiences. By looking at the impact of
the work of Spike Lee, the most publicized and most prolific of the new
wave, as an example, certain conclusions can be drawn.
First, the treatment of both old and new themes by Lee's films has
expanded the boundaries into controversial subject matter beyond the
black nationalistic cultural affirmation that has been a characteristic of in-
dependent black films. Second, the use of current state-of-the-art film
production technology has set a new standard in terms of production val-
ues, thereby raising the ante in attracting black audiences who will no
longer settle for a film with a good message but badly made. Third, the
use of mainstream outlets for films decreases the emphasis on develop-
ing alternative black community-based distribution outlets. Whether the
use of mainstream distribution has affected the political content of his
films has yet to be determined, but the trend is worth watching. Fourth,
continued black control and financial success of new black films, if ac-
quired, will assure an improved black presence in the American film land-
7
/
scape and will probably change not only the black cultural image in
American film but the cultural style and technique of American film in
general. Fifth, politically, as black filmmakers begin to establish a limited
economic foundation based on the support of a predominantly black au-
dience with a small crossover fringe, the growth and mergers of multi-na-
tional corporations presents an extreme political and economic danger to
the development of a Pan-African cinema that is aligned with the cultural
and political nurturing of dispersed African people.
Everyone should have the right and opportunity to see them-
selves reflected in the cultural expressions of the land in which they live.
Self-determination and artistic explorations are acts of liberation and, in
the end, a healthy process. Hollywood has proven that, up to now at
least, it is incapable or unwilling to do that. So it is up to us, the inde-
pendents, to fill that vacuum.
copyright St. Clair Bourne, 1988
Writer/activist
Amiri Baraka
is explored in
St. Clair
Bourne's
documentary,
In Motion:
Amiri Baraka
8
From: Playing the Changes:
St. Clair Bourne's In Motion: Amiri Baraka
by James Snead
"Few artists, black or
white, alive today, have
engagedthefftimesand
their art as aggressively
as Baraka. In the course
of his various 'changes,'
h~ has witnessed, partici-
pated in, and influenced
the major figures and
movements of American
poetry, drama, and poli-
tics in the 60s, 70s, and
80s."
James Snead
" ... it is perhaps a minor
miracle that so much of
Baraka's 40 years could
be squeezed into this
powerful 60-minute film."
James Snead
At forty years old, then, I was acknowledging another
tremendous change in my life. In my life of changes.
.
/
(And how can you play the tune, 1f you don't know the
changes?)
--
Amiri Baraka, from The Autobiography of
Leroi Jones
St. Clair Bourne's engrossing documentary, In Motion: Amiri
Baraka (1981 }, sets itself the difficult challenge of fixing a subject "in mo-
tion," freezing it just long enough in the camera lens so we can see and
understand it-yet Amiri Baraka is not just any subject, and his is not just
any motion. Baraka is Baraka, and thus the film must in fact have two
subjects: the amazingly mercurial writer called lmamu Amiri Baraka (who
"changes" names in 1967 from Leroi Jones); and the background subject
of the times and personalities which over the last 30 years have shaped
Baraka's life and work. Connecting these two massive subjects in a one-
hour film is the aim, and the challenge of In Motion: Amiri Baraka.
At the outset of his film, St. Clair Bourne makes clear that he is
trying to capture Baraka during a tiny two-week cross-section taken out
of this amazing 40-year history: 'The following documentary covers the
final two weeks before (Baraka's) sentencing on charges of 'resisting ar-
rest'." Yet he also intersperses the story about two weeks in 1981, with
news footage, photographs, and interviews covering three decades of
Baraka's various "changes." St. Clair Bourne uses interviews and archi-
val materials again and more extensively in his later documentary, Lang-
ston Hughes: The Dream Keeper (1986). The Baraka film, is both a wide-
ranging overview of Baraka's past, and a minute examination of a critical
moment in his recent career.
In Motion: Amiri Baraka has a virtuoso opening, surrounding us
with the central signs and values of Baraka's life in compressed form, an-
ticipating the main themes of the film through a seemingly casual glimpse
of Baraka working at home. First, there is the sound of someone practic-
ing jazz drums in the basement of a modest house. Next, we see that the
youthful drummer seems to resemble Baraka, and is in fact his son,
Obalaji, practicing Max Roach drum patterns. But the allusion here is
also to the past: the revolution in black arts in the 50s and 60s to which
Roach, as well as Baraka, were major contributors. Finally, if we look
carefully over Obalaji's shoulder, in the upper portion of the frame (astute
camera positioning here), one can make out a poster of none other than
Lenin. In this way, the viewer can connect in a single sequence Baraka's
younger days in the 50s and 60s with his ideological and familial situation
in the 80s.
The "family" theme continues as the soundtrack cleverly
mixes
Obalaji Baraka's drumming downstairs with the sound of his father Amiri
Baraka typing upstairs, establishing in the staccato clickings both the
9
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''And certainly Bourne
and his collaborators are
trying, through the film's
unresolved stylistic ten-
sions, to remind us that it
is the very struggle and
contradiction between
past and present, form
and content, tradition and
revolution that motivate
change."
James Snead
/
unity of generational purpose, and the connection, always present in
Baraka, between music and writing. Seeing the writer surrounded by his
wife and daughter in his study while he is working, at once reverses the
romantic European and American paradigm of the "isolated artist" who
must remain undisturbed in a lonely study, shutting out family and friends
as he works, angered at the slightest interruption (as in the first scene of
Goethe's Faust, for example). For Baraka, inspiration is immediate, com-
munal, and non-exclusive. While he is writing, his wife presses him to
buy a puppy-dog for their daughter.
Unknown to us, the filmmaker is showing us the family tiff for an-
other reason: it establishes early on how Baraka family disagreements
may arise, and allows us to imagine how a similar spat may have initi-
ated the bizarre chain of events that resulted finally in the 'resisting ar-
rest' charge against Baraka. As Baraka exclaims in the film: "you can't
get sentenced to 90 days in jail for arguing in your own car ... with your
wife about the price of your child's shoes-1 mean, it hasn't come to that
yet!" Yet, on the pretext of "protecting" Amini Baraka from her husband, a
New York City policeman actually did reach inside his car and grab Amiri,
resulting-once his identity was known-in the incredible charge and the
inflated sentence which we see Baraka fighting throughout the film.
St. Clair Bourne's film has an interesting visual design, but often its
sound track is more innovative, with several overlap and echo effects
that, literally, add resonance to the story the pictures are telling. The
film's structure is also unusual, being divided into six segments, all of
them titled after a quote from Baraka's works. We follow Baraka "in mo-
tion" throughout these segments: driving a car; reading poems; giving a
speech at a "Baraka Defense Rally"; announcing a future poetry reading
on his WBAI radio program; picketing the offices of South African Air-
ways; discussing a new play after a preview; finally, standing in front of a
court building after another stay of his sentence. At the film's end, we
read the news, conveyed in small print, that "on December 17, 1981,
Amiri Baraka was convicted of 'resisting arrest' and consequently served
a 90-day sentence." The soundtrack conveys Baraka's final words: "We
will put them on trial one day and we will see what the people's justice
is ... "
The film, then, tells two stories: 1) the retrospective story of a gen-
eration told in often nostalgic tones by famous and not-so-famous wit-
nesses such as Ginsberg, Spellman, Joel Oppenheimer, Baraka's
friends, and even his parents;
2) the story of Baraka now, an activist
getting older but not softer ...
copyright by James Snead, 1988
10
From: The Making of Ashes and Embers
by Haile Gerima
The making of film cannot be approached without a thorough consid-
eration of the history of stereotyping in literature, art, theatre, and motion
pictures. Whenever we have the opportunity tQ access this powerful,
exorbitantly expensive medium, we cannot afford to merely make a movie
without a concrete and critical understanding of the hfstory of stereotyping of
the African race in motion pictures. This historic consciousness should
remain in the backdrop of our creative process all the way from concept to
the creation of characters and on to the further development of the charac-
ters' relationships to each other on the vast canvas of the screen plot.
In my own case, during the script writing process I spend a great deal
of time on what is known as Environment and Character Development.
Within the process of creating characters, their development is achieved by
consistently analyzing, redefining, chiseling, molding and fashioning their
individual characteristics and the circumstantial environment in which they
are to interact with others. As a result, the environment is believable and the
characters are multi-dimensional, deeply reflective and act in order to ac-
complish their human objectives, whatever their class status or occupation.
The script, from the evolutionary process that started a& an idea or a seed
all the way to a completed motion picture, is the critical floor plan from which
the moving picture derives its direction. Therefore it is at this stage that the
vigilance against stereotypes and conventional but false cinematic repre-
sentations must begin.
I made Ashes and Embers in 1982. I wish to comment on the creative
process of the screenplay stage as it relates to the invention and develop-
ment of environment and the constant application of safeguards against the
phenomenon of stereotypes.
Environment: Locations or environments where a given film narrative
will be staged have their own personality. All environments have three
important aspects: 1) physical; 2) psychological; 3) sociological. These
three aspects of all environments play a large role in any given motion picture
narrative. We cannot create comprehendible characters without clearly
creating and understanding the environment in its fullest texture. Every
environment has a physical dynamic appropriate to a given plot. Even the
story of Genesis in the Bible is obedient to the law that puts environment first
in the process of creating believable characters and plot line. From the story
of Adam and Eve all the way to Solomonic legend, successful stories could
not have been told without first creating an environment.
The sociological aspects of an environment play a major role in the
anchoring of physical human relationships. Infrastructures and social insti-
tutions are erected for the interplay of social dynamics. Countries, villages,
cities, houses, churches, clubs, schools, publications, etc. emerge for
purposes of social/cultural interaction.
11
"We should make films in
our images in the fullest
of our essence. It is in this
way we assert our human-
ity."
Haile Gerima
/
The third aspect of an environment is the psychological aspect. The
psychological effect of an environment is a direct result of both the physical
and sociological aspects of the environment. An example is the learned
value of things. Good houses, bad houses. Good hair, bad hair. Good nose,
bad nose. Good skin, bad skin. Good and evil are both physical and
sociological aspects of a given society. As a result of these learned values,
certain psychological effects are generated and are measurable in physical
and in sociological terms, as well as in terms of their subsequent impact on
the individual psychology. The environments or location sites for Ashes and
Embers were carefully chosen with this in mind.
In addition to the primary narrative, the location sites enable me to
exploit a deeper text, either in terms of symbolisms, metaphors or analogies.
I attempted from the outset to challenge the audience with multi-layered
meanings of these location sites through careful manipulation of structure
and transitions.
In Ashes and Embers, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., VietNam and
a countryside were the sites chosen in order to fulfill the objective.
1. Los Angeles. In Ashes and Embers, Los Angeles is a community
made up of a series of racially segregated hamlets surrounded by smoke-
covered hills, dark tunnels decorated with manufactured cultural goods of all
kinds advertised on the crowded billboards; false and unrealistic colors; and
large buildings covered by brown smog, as though a city is burning under
invisible fires.
On the sociological level, the message is "go west my son, go west my
daughter-enter the industry and come out as manufactured cultural gods,
professional buyers and sellers of cultural images-enter the tunnel of
horror where social mobility is based on sexual coupons, drug orgies, or at
best the destruction of the souls of men and women." Hollywood: where
looks are more important than virtues. Where women are bought and sold
like lamb chops to advertise and sell anything from soap to condoms. Where
there is a clearly distinct class stratification on the basis of color. White upper
class people are presented as number one human beings, as leaders, as
stars, and models for the rest of the world to emulate. Blacks, Indians and
Chicanos compete for the number two human spot, taking turns being
servants, butlers, the never-ending Tontos; the insignificant, the human
subordinates.
On the psychological level, metropolis Los Angeles unleashes a
horrendous repercussion for the entire world. It's a place where movie stars,
by the very nature of their status, are suspended in a cloud of cocaine; where
blue-eyed and blonde-haired demigods are falsely made to believe they are
gods and the non-blond, non-blued-eyed ones are made to feel less so. To
appease those who anguish over not meeting these physical standards,
modern voodoo Industrialists can manufacture these human models
,12
I
i
_lc
"We cannot allow nor
remain a passive specta-
tor to human life being
presented by white
human models only."
Haile Gerima
through the modern miracles of hair bleach, contact lenses, plastic surgery-
all to fit the human specifications imposed by this environment. For non-
whites it is quadrupally more oppressive.
/
In the case of African-Americans, doomed for eternity as comedians,
exotica, and servants, the choices available in Hollyw,ood are clearly deline-
ated. The oppressive aspect of the European-dominated cultural imagery
has its psychological side effects for those cohabituating with this industry,
such as an inferiority complex, loss of original confidence, spastic tempera-
ment, jitteriness, nervousness, lack of sleep, subservience to answering
services, and obsessive unnatural reflex conditioning toward telephone
rings.
In order to underscore these aspects of Los Angeles, Ashes and
Embers was shot through the use of a fog lens to reveal a hazy dreamland.
The first shot begins from the hillside sign of "Hollywood" and travels into
Hollywood Boulevard. Through camera placements and lighting effects I
wanted to display the dark tunnel that Hollywood Boulevard is.
A synopsis of the beginning scene illustrates the collusion of environ-
ment and the life of the characters. In the storyline, Randolph, a friend of Nay
Charles, the principal character, is scheduled to audition the next day for an
acting part. Because of his anxiety, Randolph forces Nay Charles to take him
the night before to locate the place of the audition. Nay Charles, very
apprehensive, agrees while complaining about the wrong time and wrong
neighborhood for two black men in the middle of the night. Reality strikes
when police intercept them. On their knees at gun point, hands on head, they
are spread and dehumanized while shiny automobiles quickly dash by in the
background and passersby romantically hold hands; two worlds pretending
to be one.
One of the most brutal and violent accomplishments of Eurocentric
literature and mass media is the historic representation of black men a,nd
women outside of the context of the human experience. While contextually
connected white people reenact the good and the evil with all the universal
human emotions, black people remain unconnected to any human tribe. We
have seen fragmented images where black men and women are stepped on
and no one will care or miss them when they expire on the screen for no
intellectual or emotional connection with them has been displayed.
Since they are not the primary agents of the narrative in screentime,
they are ushered in and out quickly without being fully developed as
characters. It's very rare that we get a glimpse of a victimized person's
parents and the painful turbulence the family is left with. Consequently, we
see daily throughout contemporary cities and neighborhoods society's mis-
handling of black men and women as the general population is desensitized.
In the midst of this, my critical responsibility within the narrative of Ashes
13
"Cinema is a very expen~
sive and powerful me-
dium. The choice left for
us is to be imitators or
innovators. If we want to
tell the trillion untold
stories of our people, our
film approach has to be
as creative and innovative
as the stories them-
selves."
Haile Gerima
/
and Embers was to introduce a film structure which violates this traditional
representation of African people. As both Nay Charles and Randolph are on
their knees, in order to anchor Nay Charles to his human origin, I have
utilized a flashback technique to take him to the countrysrde to immediately
connect him to his grandmother. At this juncture there are more functions
to this cinematic technique that will be elaborated later. However, the most
important effect is to link them to a grandmother who is firmly grounded in
the history of struggle. She is the pendulum sitting on the swing on the porch
that actually paces the life of Nay Charles. She is the heartbeat of his
restlessness. She is the umbilical chord. The flashback puts him in context.
2. VietNam. VietNam, another location site, is brought into Ashes
and Embers although in a very limited fashion. Historically, whenever
America goes to war a period of negotiation occurs in all areas of racial
oppression. It is a time of loyalty and betrayal. A time of hope and of despair.
Most specifically, it is a period when the world of African-Americans is
enlarged as it relates to their condition and their aspiration. Ashes and
Embers underscores this phenomenon in order to advance the thesis of
dislocation. I wanted to show a character imbued with the most painful and
complicated experience since it is my belief that a major and fundamental
contradiction in all societies is the ownership of pain. Through society's
struggle to collectivize pain it becomes enabled to rectify individuals with
collective crisis. Nay Charles, however, is unable to share his pain; he holds
on to it as though it is his alone.
He has two choices. One, to be so passive that h,e has to self-destruct,
or two, allow his grandmother with her churches, her congregation; allow
Jim, the television repair man or Liza Jane with her political tribe, to share
and appropriate and make his pain a collective experience.
The other aspect of Viet Nam in Ashes and Embers is based on a
grading system, marking an evolutionary process of Nay Charles' charac-
ter. Throughout the narrative he comes to grips with certain aspects of the
war. The first grade is Nay Charles as an instrument of conquering power
expressing his double loyalty. This image is presented as he conducts
himself as a G. I., a G. I. conducting a symphony orchestra as he tells the
Vietnamese people to "sit down", to "get up" , to put their hands on their
heads, contributing his bit as an army of occupation, making others non-
existent, projecting his own non-existence to them.
In the second grade of the VietNam experience he slowly starts to see
a glimpse of Vietnamese as women, men, old and young with all the human
emotional facets. This consciousness of their humanity turns the victims
into his haunters. As he roams and wanders in his flashbacks and pre-
flashbacks he allows their images to be sharper, more in-focus in his head
within these different stages.
The third grade of this VietNam locatj,on, i.e. experience, is when the
14
I
'i
sight of Nay Charles' grandmother squatting at a graveside triggers a mental
image in his mind. He connects her to a Vietnamese woman who is in the
same physical squatting posture as well as the sall}e social condition as his
grandmother. This association is torturous for Nay Charles and a signal that
he is humanizing himself.
The fourth grade of this evolutionary process is t'he final consummation
of himself as a Vietnamese~ He roams the streets alienated by any and
everything, flashing back to the physical beating of a Vietnamese man. Nay
Charles usurps the excruciating pain upon himself. Feeling the blow of the
actual G. I. boot, he collapses in the middle of the capital city of the United
States. He is picked up from the street as though he were actually a stabbing
victim, declaring as much to his rescuers as they place him on a bench
overlooked by a great monument of war. Looming in the distant background
is the infamous U.S. Archive. However, atthis point, the connection made by
Nay Charles with that of the Vietnamese people is the most significant
evolutionary process into which Nay Charles has entered.
In my long life as a filmmaker, however imperfect and small my
contribution is, I have always held my head high, never being ashamed to
present any one of my films in public. Each film, from Hourglass to After
Winter represents the stages of my own growth. In my travels across the
U.S. and some other parts of the world I have been encouraged to pursue my
search for truth. Again and again after screenings of my films I have seen
people emotionally and intellectually stimulated. I was subsequently sent
back to the empty film editing room, recharged into my life as a filmmaker
which is otherwise depressing. I have received from people numerous
letters, poems, and phone calls inspired by my film work. My intentions have
never been doubted. My films, however imperfect in their presentation, in
their posture, have never apologized or asked for forgiveness. In a society
that is extremelytribalized and ghettoized, my films are always propelled and
shot across the auditorium on to the screen with the fullest confidence under
which they were charged. They assert themselves to be taken as normal
films. Nothing more, nothing less.
copyright by Haile Gerima, 1988
John Anderson plays
a Viet Nam veteran in
Haile Gerima's film
Ashes and Embers
(1982).
15
Notes on School Daze
by Spike Lee
from Uplift the Race: The Construction of School Daze by Spike Lee with Lisa Jones
used with permission from the author
/
This script takes place at a fictitious, predominantly Black college in
the South. The student body is divided into two factions: the Haves and
the Have-Nots. This division is based upon class and color. The Haves,
the affluent students at Mission, are all with light skin, "good hair," blue or
green eyes, and so forth, while across the tracks are tl1e Have-Nots.
They are dark, have kinky nappy hair, and many of them are the first
members of their families to ever get a college education; in other words,
the black underclass. Each faction has a name for the other. It's the
WANNABEES VS. THE JIGS!!! WannaBe White and Jigaboos. Remem-
ber, it's about class and color.
Almost halfway through the shoot, with footage already in the can,
the colleges of the Atlanta University Center decided to bar the School
Daze Picture Company from filming on their campuses. The reason for
the boot? They feared that School Daze would portray a negative (shit,
that word again) image of Black colleges, and more importantly of Black
people as a whole. You have to understand that historically Black col-
leges have been very conservative. They consider themselves the
guardians of the integrity of the race. We tried to reason with them, in
fact, negotiations with the schools had been going on since the previous
November. But the alarm went off even before that, back in October
1986.
Before She's Gotta Have It opened in Atlanta that October, I came
up with the idea of making the premiere screening a benefit for my alma
mater, Morehouse College. I wanted to shoot School Daze at the Atlanta
University Center the following spring and thought the benefit would get
things off to a good start. Forty Acres [Lee's production company] would
provide the print of the film, pay for the theatre, the advertising, and the
cost of printing the tickets. Morehouse would kick back and count the
money. We planned to charge $15 a ticket, and the college would collect
$6,000. We were sure that Morehouse would welcome the offer; we went
ahead and printed the tickets. Morehouse turned us down.
The old, tired, conservative administration and faculty had heard that
She's Gotta Have It was a pornographic film (a rumor that would haunt
us throughout the shooting of School Daze). They didn't want
Morehouse's good name to be associated with such a film. Even if the
filmmaker was their alumnus. That hurt me alot.
We began shooting on the campuses in March without a contract,
apart from an agreement signed early on with AU. After three weeks we
still didn't have one. Heading towards our fourth week, we received a let-
ter from the AUG's lawyer demanding that we stop shooting until the
script was made available. We again refused and were barred from the
campuses. Not only that, but the footage we shot previously could not, or
so they told us, be used in the movie. At the time of this writing, More-
house had still not agreed to let us use the footage shot on its campus.
Morris Brown, however, gave us a definite no.
16
·~
"We were determined to
make a film which would
allow Black folks to see
themselves up on the
screen and really feel
proud; proud about who
they are and how they
look."
Ernest Dickerson, Direc-
tor of Photography for
School Daze
There were so many rumors circulating around the AUC about the
movie. Women at Spelman thought that Kelly Wollfolk-who played
Vicky, football player Grady's love interest-had the role of a prostitute.
The students were influenced by the propaganda being pushed out by
the administration. When I was at Morehouse the atmosphere was differ-
.
u
ent. The student body was more vocal and certainly more political. We
didn't take what the administration told us at face value. I think we would
have been really upset if a young Black filmmaker came to our campus
to shoot a film and got kicked off by the school. But there wasn't a whim-
per from a:ny of the students at Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, or Morris
Brown. In fact, we never had a chance to shoot anything on Spelman's
campus. The acting president was quite adamant about us not being
there.
I'm all for Black colleges. I'm a third-generation Morehouse man,
and I hope my sons choose Morehouse. But there are certain things
wrong at Black colleges and I address some of them in School Daze. To
me, this doesn't mean that I'm putting forth a negative portrayal of these
institutions. The AUC presidents were after squeaky clean images of
Black colleges. I refuse to be caught in the "negative image" trap that's
set for Black artists. Yes, Black people have been dogged in the media
from day one. We're extrasensitive and we have every right to be. But
we overreact when we think that every image of us has to be 100 per-
cent angelic-Christ-like even.
The Look of the Film
I think Ernest Dickerson (Director of Photography) and I accom-
plished the visual look we wanted for this film. We wanted the camera to
always be moving, whether on a dolly or a crane. The camera moves in
this film are really good. The camera's like a character itself, dancing
around people.
There ought to be a study done on how many questions a film direc-
tor is asked during a shoot. With a film of this size and scale, a director
gets faced with thousands of questions a day. It's said that if the brain
were receptive to all the stimuli that is out there, a person would have a
nervous breakdown. When I'm directing I try to operate with this in mind.
I tell people only what they need to know to do the jobs they were hired
to do. Otherwise I'd be spending the entire shoot answering questions.
I got into a lot of static with my script supervisor this time around. It's
her job to ask for a shot list every day and I didn't have one every day.
We wanted to be open. For some scenes you want to see what the
blocking is going to be like, you want to see the actors go through it on
location, and then you want to look things over with your director of pho-
tography. I would have a shot list for big scenes with lots of extras,
17
':
"The overall feeling I
decided to go for in
School Daze is very
Kodachrome, very bright
colors, popping. Bright
colors are a very Afro-
centric thing."
Ernest Dickerson
/
"A motif we used
throughout the film was
two people in profile, 'up
in each other's face.' That
was a conscious deci-
sion."
Ernest Dickerson
though. But the little stuff, things that are not goingJo involve many shots,
I rehearse them, then I look at them. I don't want to come on the set all
the time with a predetermined idea of what we're gonna shoot. There's no
spontaneity to that.
In the final scene of the film, we call it "Wake Up," I wanted to show
that the people at Mission College had come to some kind of realization,
some kind of meaning, some kind of truth. (I had the Gamma Rays take
out their weaves and their blue contact lenses for this scene.) And when
"Dap" calls everyone out of bed, they come because they've realized
something, not just because they're being summoned. That's the way I
wrote it. And I hope it comes off that way. It is a metaphor for the sleeping
that we as a race have done.
Wynn Thomas was the production designer on She's Gatta Have ft.
He did that work with practically no money. On School Daze he had a de-
cent budget-not a ton of money-but we gave Wynn the ball and he ran
with it. The sets he built for the film are great-"Straight and Nappy," the
Gamma house, "Dap's" room, and the coronation. He had this sequence
of interconnected backdrops worked out for each number of the corona-
tion. We ended up cutting one of the dance numbers, "Sun is Rising,"
from the film.
The Music
My mother took me to Broadway plays and I went to see my father in
jazz clubs in the Village when I was five or six years old. I was brought up
around music, and whether I do musicals or not, music will always play
an integral role in my films.
I didn't begin with the idea of making School Daze a musical. I
wanted to make a film which took place on a Black college campus during
homecoming weekend, and from that material, the music arose. There is
always so much music happening during a homecoming. The subject
matter of School Daze really dictated that it be a musical.
·
Neither Island nor Columbia objected to the idea of a musical, though
Russell Schwartz, the president of Island, wanted to cut some of the num-
bers to trim costs. When I was still with the company, one of the major is-
sues to resolve was the money for the music. Even before I wrote the first
draft of School Daze, I knew I wanted a separate budget for the music. Is-
land Records gave us only a $7,500 advance to distribute the sound track
of She's Gatta Have It, and we had to fight to get that. I didn't want to be
tied to Island Records or Columbia for the School Daze sound track, so I
made a deal with Manhattan Records, a division of Capitol EMI. I think
the idea of a musical really struck a positive note with Columbia. I guess
they know singing and dancing Negroes . .sell. But School Daze was not
18
: \
~
I
"Reading the script was
like stepping into a
culture that you realize
has been around you but
you've never ever known
it. Also it was not totally
specific to the culture of
Black people. It com-
mented in a wider sense."
Matia Karrell, production
manager for School Daze
going to be another Wiz. It's an original work for film, 'whereas The Wiz
began as a play with an all-Black cast adapted from the film ·The Wizard
of Oz. The film translation didn't work for me. Critigal mistakes were made
in casting and it was over-produced. They went for box-office names, like
Diana Ross, instead of actors who could do a believable job. Ms. Ross
was too old.
School Daze is not a traditional musical; actors don't just break out of
nowhere into song and dance. In many musicals you can always tell
when a song is coming because the dialogue gets corny. I wanted to inte-
grate the music into the movie. One traditional musical piece in the film is
"Straight and Nappy," which is meant as a prototype MGM musical num-
ber. People sing in the other numbers because they are performing in a
show or are accompanied by a band-where the setting is realistic.
My father wrote the score, acted as musical director, and contributed
two featured songs. My aunt Consuela Lee Morehead, an accomplished
pianist and composer in her own right, assisted him. Unlike my previous
films, we had input from other songwriters.
Since the success of She's Gatta Have It, people constantly ask, "Are
you happy, are you sure?" My answer is still yes. I'm doing what makes
me happy. And I say my prayers every night that I'm able to do the thing
that makes me happiest and make a comfortable living too. And people
ask, "Why film?" Well, I think because it encompasses all the arts, pho-
tography, music, acting, dance, you can put all that stuff in a film.
I probably could have followed in my father's footsteps, but I rebelled
against it. He never pushed me into It, not any of his children. Whatever
we wanted to do with our lives was fine with him. He and my mom just
stood back and gave us encouragement. Moms dragged me to Broadway
plays, and had to take me home in the middle of The King and I, because
I cried. All that singing, music, and dancing scared me to death. But that's
where I started to ~ike musicals. On becoming a filmmaker, I knew that I'd
want to try to do a musical. One of my first Super-B films was a four-min-
ute dance piece, the dancer was Melody Ruffin, and the song was Patti
Austin's "At the End of the Rainbow." Melody had done it for the More-
house coronation I directed. So we came back a month later to shoot it.
By the way, Jasmine Guy, who plays "Dina," a Gamma Ray, danced in
that coronation. She was a freshman in high school at the time.
In She's Gatta Have It, I tried to incorporate a musical number, the
duet in color. Of all the reviews I read, this one scene received the most
mixed response. I liked it then and still do. Island Pictures made several
hints that it should be cut. One reviewer said, "Vince Minnelli is turning in
his grave." That hurt. We tried it again in School Daze with the "Sun Is
Rising" number and during the editing it got cut. It's a good dance num-
ber, but the film was too long. Barry and I spent a lot of time In editing
trying to make the piece work. But alas, it still had to go.
19
"It shouldn't be unusual
that a group of young
Black people can get
together and make a
brilliant film about their
own experiences and their
own existence in this
country, or any country
on the planet."
Larry Fishburne, "Dap
Dunlap" in School Daze
/
When I think about it, School Daze really isn't a musical piece. But
it's not a comedy or a drama either. School Daze is a complex hybrid of
all the above. It's a hard film to describe in a sentence. But I strive not to
make films that can be boxed in and categorized-unlike these "high
concept" Hollywood movies. What is School Daze then? Maybe it's just a
Spike Lee Joint, better than She's Gotta Have ft.
Coach Odom, played' by Ossie Davis
leads the Mission College football
team in a pre-game pep talk.
The Jigaboos, from the production
number, "Straight and Nappy."
The Gam mites, eight pledges of the
Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity.
20
'
' i
Critics' Notes
"It was only in the 1960s,
when Third World people
themselves started par-
ticipating in cinematic ex-
ploration, that the film
medium began to be used
as a serious vehicle to
give voice to that mass of
humanity--the peoples of
Third World--who had
previously been cut off
from experiencing this
new art form in a positive
way."
Teshome H. Gabriel, from
Third Cinema in the Third
World: The Aesthetic of Lib-
eration
"In every decade, some-
one has posed the ques-
tion, 'Why not an inde-
pendent black cinema?"'
Toni Cade Bambara
Toni Cade Bambara
/
There is an idea afoot in the world, thanks to our more conscious
filmmakers, theoreticians, critics, reviewers, and exhibitors: The Cinema
of Liberation. That is to say, a growing number of bur cineastes through-
out the African Diaspora have opted for maroonage. 1 Rather than going
Hollywood, they've escaped to the hills. They've joined the guerrilla army
committed to the decolonization of the global mind. The task of the
filmmakers-to liberate the global screen. The campaign to free the Afri-
can screen was begun in earnest with the launching of FESPACO, the
Pan-African Film Festival at Ouagadougou. Like a magnet, it has brought
together a number of independent-minded folks from the U.S., the U.K.,
the Continent, the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Cuba, and soon I
hope, Oceania.
There is no one film that exemplifies the cinema of liberation. Group-
ings, though, come to mind. Three films I usually play back-to-back for
the purpose of laying a foundation for further explorations of the transfor-
mation imperative are: Bush Mama, a black-and-white feature by Haile
Gerima (Ethiopia/U.S.), that portrays the coming to consciousness of a
woman too long a welfare victim; Burning An Illusion, a color feature by
Menelik Shabazz (Caribbean/U.K.), that dramatizes the dual awakening
of a would-be Buppie sister and a would-be Rasta Jah brother; and Hair-
piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People, an animated short by Ayoka
Chenzira (Brooklyn/U.S.), which confronts us with the issue of alien vs.
authentic standards. More importantly to an understanding of the idea is
what happens during festivals; what happens between an audience and a
group of films, an audience and a group of panelists, and the audience
with each other after days of rubbing elbows together. A change of mind,
a shift of allegiance from eccentric or Eurocentric to Afrocentric, the de-
velopment of a wary eye when viewing products of the conventional cin-
ema, and a growing desire to know more about Blacks and Cinema.
Frequently one begins a discussion/exhibit/paper/retrospective on
Blacks & Cinema with either our 1920 attempt to launch Birth of a Race,
or with our 1915 and thereafter protests against Birth of a Nation. Usually
we begin with the career of Oscar Micheaux or with the founding of Lin-
coln Pictures. It makes more sense to begin with the 1890s when we
were both on the screen and in the auditorium too, and thinking. Opera-
tors for Lumiere, Melies, and Edison were presenting, in various coun-
tries, programs of flickers shot all over the world. In 1897, for example,
Feliz Mesguiche, an Algerian operator for the Lumiere company, exhib-
ited films in New York City at Proctor's Pleasure Palace, a five minute
1. Maroonage refers to maroons, fugitive Negro slaves of the West Indies and
Guiana in the 17th and 18th centuries who rebelled and lived apart in their own
defended societies.
21
~--------------------------------------------------------------............................ ..
"Present-day students of
(black) film are necessar-
ily the leading edge of an
eventually more sophisti-
cated criticism."
Thomas Cripps, from
Black Film as Genre
/
walk from Black turf. Minstrels Dancing on the Streets of London was
part of the program ....
But let's not begin in the 1890s. Let's begin in the beginning of
our experiments with cinema. That would be the Nile, Year 400 ....
copyright Toni Cade Bambara, 1988
Hortense Spillers
There is at the moment no coherent or sustained body of film/im-
age criticism that would assist Black Americans in their understanding,
enjoyment, and consumption of popular cinema. Growing up in Memphis,
we used to call it "the show"-Saturday afternoon fare for less than four
bits-hot salted popcorn, Baby Ruth candy bars, segregated movie
houses with sumptuous red trimmings and shrouded mysterious organs
wrapped in them, which darkness no one apparently penetrated. But that
innocence, never entirely forgotten in synthesis with the discourses of
self-reflection, remains, in my view, the primary eye through which the
community both witnesses and imagines its visual potential -- how "I"
look? To whom? Any systematic critical position must begin with these
basic questions.
It would seem, then, not charitable in the least to rob a body and
soul of its first groping questions in the dark of old southern movie
houses, but here we are now, decades later, at a crossroads not so
much between movies and the culture (since that always was the point,
really), but rather, an advanced art of talk about movies and the relation-
ship between such language and a larger agenda of social and political
purpose. Trusting the child in me sometimes and obligated to. respect the
adult I think I'm becoming, I would offer for consideration that same old
query, radically transformed by the urgencies of a quite different world
from that of the U.S.A. in the fifties-not simply how "I" look, but how to
turn inward? Or, greedily, how to come into possession of "the look,"
which philosophers tell us is already constituted in, by, and for the gaze
of a powerful other. These, then, are notes for amateurs-the johnny-
come-lately lay crowd to the serious business of filmic criticism.
Not wanting to concede more to the sociology of black film than it
already commands, I want to begin with an anecdote which, in turn, gen-
erates its own problematic. As an undergraduate in the mid-sixties, I was
given my first hint that a film means more than meets the eye, when the
International Relations Club at Memphis State University sponsored a fo-
rum on D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. For black people, usually, who
22
"Perhaps ultimately
American movies will
wake and be invigorated
by black cinema the way
poetry was by black
poets and the way sports
were by black athletes
and the way music was
by black composers, mu-
sicians, and performers."
Donald Bogie, from Toms,
Coons, Mulattoes, Mam-
mies and Bucks
always seem to make up half the nation (rather than Langston Hughes'
"dark tenth" of it), this classic film is on the one har)d, racially virulent and,
quite probably, politically dangerous. It is believed by some to have rein-
forced the racist sentiments and assumptions that spread like wildfire at
the turn of the century and, in time, it came to characterize the contempo-
rary period of race relations in the United States. 0
1n the other hand, stu-
dents of film tout Birth of a Nation as a significant development in the ca-
reer of modern cinema. But I dislike it because the film is not only silent,
but executed in a choreography of movement only slightly advanced over
that of the nervous disjointedness of the animated cartoon. In short, I
have no eyes for old movies, silent movies, or for film that does not oc-
cupy my whole vision as if in a plenum of movement through a material
scene.
Beyond the comparatively "underdeveloped" technology of Griffith's
film, I understand that the contrast between "black" and "white" not only
enables the technology of today's films in sound and color, but that such
contrast represents virtually frightful comparisons. It seems that the black
person's critique of film, then, embraces the politics of the "gaze" and the
"look." But this critique must also work out thoroughly the figurative and
semantic implications of "black" itself: If "black" is to "white," making the
production of the image possible in the first place, what the negative is to
the sentence, then "black" and "white" mutually coexist in the production
of meaning, not its negation. Because audiences of film actually appear
to confuse the tortuous political symbolisms of "black" with its richly vari-
ous aesthetic functions, we live in the midst of what could be called an
"image crisis." We have seen the evidence of such a crisis in the protests
generated by Alice Walker's novel-become-film, The Color Purple, for ex-
ample, during its premier showings three years ago. So far as I am con-
cerned, then, the real object and subject of filmic criticism sits in the
spectator's seat, and it is the black spectator, above all, who must learn
to see the image without fear and anxiety, or, in short, to unlearn the "per-
ceptual cramp" into which the eye has been forced by the violence of
specular suggestion. As spectators, we have yet to learn our own eyes,
or to exploit the DuBoisian "double consciousness" in an experimental
way.
In "forgetting" that somebody is watching you, you/we dare to look
inward.' As far as I can tell, this intramural project is not only long over-
due, but it is the only interesting one in this period of artistic realism. Afri-
can-Americans have been called upon to learn mariy "foreign" languages
in their long historical apprenticeship In the New World. We have yet an-
other to consider and that is, the grammar of an appropriate image, be-
yond crisis. I really do not think that, this late in the century, any of us, at
least in the United States, have seen "it."
copyright Hortense Spillers, 1988
23
Biographical Sketches
Clyde Taylor is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University where he teaches Film
and Society and Archaeology of American Cinema. He has contributed numerous articles
and reviews on black film to magazines, journals, and books. He also has organized
several film festivals and conferences and has served as guest curator of a film series on
St. Clair Bourne at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Spike Lee, filmmaker from Brooklyn, took the film world by storm with his release, She's
Gotta Have ft. Filmed in black and white, in 12 days with a budget under $200,000, it won
the Cannes International Film Festival prize in the new filmmaker category in 1985. It was
also the first independent, all-black cast American film in over a decade to be distributed
worldwide. Lee received a M.F.A. from New York University Graduate School of Film. His
thesis film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads was the first student film ever
selected for the prestigious New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art
in 1983. It also won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Student Academy
Award.
Haile Gerima is Associate Professor of Film at Howard University, having received a M.F.A.
in Film from University of California/Los Angeles. His film credits include two
documentaries, After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), and Wilmington 10- U.S.A. 10,000
(1978), and four dramatic films, Ashes and Embers (1982), Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976),
Bush Mama (1976), and Child of Resistance (1972). Ashes and Embers received
numerous awards including Outstanding Production at the London Film Festival, 1983,
Grand Prix Award at the Lisbon International Film Festival, 1982, and the International
Critics Award at the Festival of Three Continents, 1983. Gerima also received the Best
Feature Film- Oscar Micheaux Award in 1976 from the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame for
Harvest: 3,000 Years.
St. Clair Bourne~ has challenged the normative roles and images of blacks in American
cinema through his innovative documentary and fiction films. He began his career in 1968
as a staff produce} for the first national Black public affairs series Black Journal. That year
the program won an EMMY award and Bourne himself received the John Russworm
Citation for "excellence in broadcasting." As an independent filmmaker, Bourne's 31
productions Have included Let the Church Say Amen! (1973), The Black and the Green
(1982), in Motion: Amiri Baraka (1982), and Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper.
Bourne has taught film at Cornell University and UCLA and has had solo screenings of his
work at The Museum of Modern Art (1973), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1974),
and the High Museum, Atlanta (1986).
24
Toni Cade Bambara is one of America's leading black woman writers, having achieved
success as a short story writer, novelist, and television scriptwriter./Her novel, The Salt
Eaters, won the 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as
well as the Langston Hughes Society Award and Medallion. She wrote the script for, and
narrated, the television documentary, The Bombing of Osage which won the Best
Documentary Award in 1986 from the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters and the
1986 Award from the National Black Programming Consortium. Bambara is a graduate of
Queens College in theatre, with a Master's degree in American Literature from the City
College of New York. Her other works include The Seabirds are Still Alive, Gorilla, My Love,
Tales and Short Stories for Black Folk, and The Black Women.
James Snead is Associate Professor of English and German Literature at the University
of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. from St. John's College, Cambridge University, and
was Associate Professor of English at Yale University for five years. He has presented
numerous lectures on black cinema on topics such as "History of Black Independent
Cinema in the U.S.," "The Black Image in American Film and Television," and "Technology
and Content in Media Images of Blacks." His book reviews and film criticisms have
appeared in Black Film Review, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times
Book Review, and Black American Literature Forum. Snead is currently working on a book
entitled, The Coded Black: Film Stereotypes in Transition.
Hortense Spillers is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell University. She
holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and has taught
literature and writing at Haverford College, University of Nebraska, Wellesley College and
Brandeis. Her numerous essays, literary criticisms and short stories have appeared widely
in journals including The Black Scholar, The Harvard Advocate, Black American Literature
Forljm, the American Book Review, and The Women's Review of Books. For one of her
short stories she received the National Book Award for Excellence in Fiction and Belles
Lettre in 1976. She is the co-editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary
Tradition (1985).
25
Glossary of Film Terms
A
Abstract Film: A film that shows only the essential elements (shapes, patterns, etc.) of the original subjects;
a nonrepresentational film.
Accelerated Motion: Action filmed while the camera rate is progressively reduced, used to represent action
as taking place at a greater than normal speed.
Action: The rehearsed movements, speech and behavior of performers within a shot.
Action!: The order of the Director indicating that actors are to begin performance, once cameras are up to
speed, all is ready, and the number board and/or clappers have been photographed for a take.
Action Field: The area that is actually being filmed by the camera; frequently referred to as frame or shot.
Added Scenes: Material, shots, or sequences written into a script during its filming or after its completion.
Ambient Light: Lighting of a set or scene which does not fall directly on the subject of a shot.
Angle: The relationship between the camera and the subject; the camera's view of a shot: "high", "low", etc.
Antihero: The protagonist, male or female, in a film, who has pronounced personality or character defects
or eccentricities not usually associated with heroes.
Approach: The director's instruction to bring the camera closer to the object of the shot.
8
Backdrop: An artificial background usually painted on a cyclorama, curtain, or flats, used to achieve the effect
of a natural setting such as forest, beach, or other landscape in a shot or sequence.
Background (picture): The most distant part of a shot, usually well behind the subject being photographed
in the foreground.
Back Lighting: Illumination deliberately aimed more or less towards the camera, giving silhouette or highlight
effect; lighting the subjects of a shot from the rear.
/
Back Projection: A system by which action may be shot with moving background taken separately; projection
of film on a translucent screen from a rear projector to provide what appears to be a moving background for
actors being filmed on a set.
Background (sound): Music or sound played to underline action being filmed.
Block: To determine the position of the camera, crew, and cast, and cast movements before shooting a
particular scene.
26
Boom: Cantilevered mounts of various sizes and lengths on which film cameras are mounted.
Boom Shot: A shot made from a camera mounted on a boom for high angles or wide angles; a versatile shot
that can be used to pan, tilt, or travel in all directions.
Bridging Scene: Shot inserted for smooth transition between two shots to clarify an otherwise difficult tran-
sition.
'
Build Up: To promote tension in a film by arranging shots that will build to a crisis/
c
Camera Speed: The rate at which film runs through a camera, measured by frames per second or in feet or
meters per minute.
Cheat Shot: A shot in which the action is not as it appears to be.
Close Up: A film shot in which an object or actor is photographed so that it or he/she fills most of the frame.
Combined Print: The final stage in film making. A print consisting of images with sound track to one side.
Composite Photography: A special-effects technique in which two images seem to appear together in the
same shot despite the fact that they are photographed separately.
Conflict: The struggle between opponents that is a necessary component of any dramatic plot.
Continuity: Appropriate succession of content in scenes that follow one another; even transition from shot
to shot.
Contrast: The overall light/dark ratio of a shot.
Crop: To reduce or define the area in a shot, usually by tightening the frame.
Cross Cut: To edit back and forth with a pair of scenes in different places in which the action is occurring si-
multaneously.
Cut: Sharp transition from one scene to another.
Cut Away: Shot which temporarily draws attention from the main action.
Cut Back: To return, it:~ editing, to the main scene after a cut away.
Cutting In the Camera: Shooting scenes of shots so that the desired content and continuity are obtained with
little need for editing.
D
Definition: The clarity of sound or an image on film. Sharpness of focus or accuracy of registration.
Defocus: To deliberately take the action out of focus by focusing the lens to a close point in order to reduce
the depth of that action area.
Degradation: A loss of image fidelity through duplication.
27
Denouement: The action in a film which follows the climax and ties up all loose ends that may remain after
the main conflict is resolved.
Detail Shot: A close shot used to reveal details of an object or part of an object, or of part of an actor's body.
Dialogue: Conversation between two or more actors.
Director: The individual immediately in charge of translating a shooting script on to film.
Discovery Shot: A shot that reveals something to the audience during the course of action or camera
movement.
Dissolve: The linking of two shots as the first fades out and the second fades in, usually signifying a lapse
of time and a change of pace.
Distributor: The middle man of the film world who buys rights to films from the producers and leases prints
to exhibitors.
Documentary: A film depicting nonfictional events or occurrences and meant to be informative or make a
specific comment on a subject or issue.
Double Frame: To expose or to print two successive frames of each image, usually in order to retard action.
Dub: 1. To blend speech, music and effects into one sound track. 2. To substitute foreign language dialogue
or commentary for the original.
E
Edit: To correlate, arrange, synchronize, trim, or cut film, and to annex leaders to it and/or sound track strips
in order to achieve the properties and proportions necessary for a cohesive and credible film production.
Effects: 1. Electronically produced visuals. 2. Any elements of sight or sound used for specific effects.
Elevation Shot: A shot in which the camera moves in a vertical position only.
Establishing Shot: A long shot that establishes the primary locale of the film; used for atmospheric purposes
and generally shown in the opening scene of a film.
F
Fade In/Out: Gradual picture transition from or to a blank screen; the corresponding effect in sound.
/
First A~swer Print: The print that is first viewed in its entirety by the producer, who will judge its acceptability.
Flash: Very short scene.
Flash Back: Sequence out of temporal order in a finished film.
Follow Focus: Change of focus during a shot as it tracks, or as the actors move.
Foreground: The action area that is nearest the camera in a shot or scene.
28
Framing: The manipulation of camera positions in order to achieve the best composition for a shot or scene
to be filmed.
Freeze Frame: To continuously print a single frame of film so that its still image can be held on screen to
produce the effect of stopped action.
Full Shot: To include all of a subject so that the image entirely fills the frame.
/
G
Genre: A motion picture catagory such as Western, mystery, gangster or science-fiction.
H
Head-On Shot: An action shot in which the actors, vehicles, horses, etc., are moving directly toward the
camera.
Headroom: The area between the top of an actor's head (or the top of an object) and the upper edge of the
frame.
Independent Filmmaking: The filming of productions that are conceived by a person or group not under
contract to a major studio; usually done in rented or leased facilities. The film may be produced without union
personnel or may be subcontracted to union personnel.
Insert: Close, explanatory scene such as of a letter, clock face or calendar, that can be made out of sequence
and inserted into the principal action during the editing process.
lntercut: To edit two or more scenes alternately to show what is happening simultaneously in different
locations.
J
Jump Cut: A sharp advance in an action shot or between two shots when a portion of film is removed, usually
to advance the action quickly.
K
Key Light: The main illumination of the center of interest in a shot.
L
Location: Any site for filming away from the studio.
Long Shot: A camera shot in which the subject is seen at a distance.
Low Key: 1. Pictures in which shadowy areas or lower gray scale tones are emphasized. 2. Dim illumination
of the subject.
29
---------~
M
Mask/Matte: 1. To hide partoftheview, e.g. to shoot through a keyhole. 2. To shield the camera from a lamp,
or from the sun shining directly at the lens.
Master Scene: Usually an establishing shot: the basic scene from which a sequence is edited by intercutting
or adding closer shots.
Match Dissolve: Gradually and precisely to replace a shot by another of similar outline and content.
Memomotion: A photographic technique used to represent an extremely slow process at normal projection
speed (time lapse cinematography).
Mis-en-Scene: The act of combining all of a scene's elements (setting, costumes, lighting, action, etc.) in
order to achieve the ultimate desired effect.
Mixer: The member of the sound crew who is responsible for controlling and bringing together sound, from
various recordings.
Montage: The visual juxtaposition of a series of short shots, often superimposed, made to convey an
impression.
N
Narrator: One who speaks a commentary for a film, usually off screen.
Night Filter: Filter used to alter the color of a daytime shot in order to present the illusion that it was shot at
night.
0
Objective Camera: A camera angle in which the shot is seen by members of the audience as if they were
actually observing the action from their theatre seats, such as a straight-on shot of a scene as it might appear
on a stage.
Obligatory Scene: A scene that is necessary in order to resolve the plotted problems and conflicts that have
preceded it; particularly important in climatic scenes and those of the denouement.
~
Off-Mike: Directed away from the microphone, to simulate sound from a distance.
Out-Takes: Ashotdeleted from a film during the editing process.
Overlay: To dub one sound on top of another.
p
Pan: To move the camera around in the horizontal plane.
Parallel Action: A series of shots of two or more events shown alternately, to convey to the audience that
30
, I
,L
they are taking place simultaneously.
Participation Shot: One in which the camera seems to take the viewpoint of some character in the film.
Persistence of Vision: The phenomenon of image retention caused by the time-lag effect between visual
stimulation and the loss of response to that stimulation. All film illusion is based on this persistence that occurs
when static images, each slightly changed from the preceding one, are displayed faster than the brain or the
optic nerve can comprehend or react to them.
Polaroid Filter: The trade name for a large filter that polarizes light in order to eliminate glare or unwanted
reflections from objects during shooting.
Process Shot: A scene which combines live action with some form of existing bacll;ground.
Producer: The individual around whom the making of a film revolves - responsible for casting, selection of
writer, director, editor, etc., and supervises all facets of the production.
Q
Quick Cutting: Instantaneous transition shots made without dissolves, so that shots follow each other in rapid
succession.
R
Ratio: The shooting ratio is the relationship of exposed film stock to the corresponding length of the finished
picture. In films 5:1 is very economical, 15:1 is extravagant.
Raw Stock: Unexposed negative film.
Reaction Shot: Close up of a performer's face, used as a cut away from the main action to register an
emotional response to something that has just taken place.
Reflector: An easel-shaped stand with a highly reflective board used to throw natural light where required.
Relief: A shot or sequence inserted into a film to reduce audience tension following scenes of horror, fear,
or trouble.
Re-take: A second photographing or recording to take the place of material found to be no good, though
thought to be okay at the time of shooting.
Reverse Angle: A shot taken from the opposite or approximately opposite angle from the one in the
preceeding scene.
R/L (Right/Left): The general direction of movement of action is most important from the point of view of
continuity. If an actor walks in one shot towards the right and the next scene picks up the apparently continued
movement, he must be seen still moving from left to right.
Rough Cut: A stage in the editing of a film between assembly and the final form of the cutting copy.
Runaway Production: 1. A production made on an American location away from Hollywood o·r in a foreign
country for the purpose of reducing production expenses.
2. A production designed to bypass the use
of union performers and crew members.
31
s
Selective Focus: Shooting in sharp focus only a section of the action area.
Sequence: Film equivalent of a chapter, or numbered section in a book; ordinarily limited by unity of time,
place and action.
Set-up: The position of camera, mike, lights, artists, etc. at any given moment: generally applied to the
positions at the start of a shot.
Shooting Script: Written content of an entire film in precise detail and separated into serially numbered
scenes. Often written in two columns, pictures, and sound, with simultaneous items opposite each other.
Short: A film under 3,000 feet in length, i.e. thirty minutes, playing time.
Skip Frame: A method of negative cutting by which pace of action may be speeded up by eliminating alternate
frames.
Slow Motion: A method of shooting with camera running at a rapid speed so that, in projection at standard
speed, the action will appear much slower than normal.
Soft Focus: An intentional reduction of an image's sharpness by use of an optical device such as a diffusion
disk or netting or gauze placed over the lens.
Spare Takes: Takes which, while good, were left unselected for cutting copy use. They remain available in
case of second thoughts.
Special Effects: Generally, any device or technique used to create an appearance of reality in a scene where
it would be impossible, impractical, or unsafe to use an actual action or effect.
Spot Lighting: Light sources which project a beam, the angle of which is variable, enabling the lighting to
be focused.
Straight Cut: Scenes succeeding each other without intervention of any optical effect.
Subjective Camera: Referring to scenes shown from the point of view of the camera so that audience reaction
is immediate and intensified.
Superimposed: Two or more shots photographed or printed on to one piece of film.
T
/
Take: One complete photographing of a single piece of action.
Tempo: 1. Actual pace of performer's action in a shot. 2. Apparent pace, in the film sense, of a sequence
achieved by appropriate juxtaposition of shots of particular length.
Tilt Shot: A shot made with a camera as it is pivoted in a vertical line from a fixed position.
Time Lapse: Story gap, with break of immediate continuity between successive sequences.
Tracking Shot: A shot in which the performer's movements are followeEl by moving the camera along its axis
or on tracks laid for a particular scene.
32
24 Frames: The normal speed for photographing, recording, and projecting film per second.
Two Shot: A medium close shot covering two characters in a frame.
v
Visuals: 1. Shots to illustrate essential commentary. 2. Any action or object that is seen on film.
/
w
Whip: An abrupt camera movement.
Wipe: An optical effect used as a transition between two shots in which the first shot appears to be pushed
off the screen by the gradual appearance of the second shot.
Wrap: The successful completion of a shot.
z
Zoom: To alter the size of the action area from wide-angle to close shot without moving the camera, by means
of a zoom lens.
33
Black Cinema Bibliography
Adler, Renata. "The Negro That Movies Overlook." New York Times, March 3, 1968.
Archer, Leonard C. Black Images in the American Theatre. New York: Pageant-Poseidon, 1973.
Baldwin, James. "Sidney Poitier." Look 32, July 23, 1968: 50- 54.
Belafonte, Harry. "Belafonte: 'Look, They Tell Me, Don't Rock the Boat."' New York Times, April 21, 1968.
Black Filmmaker Catalogue (The). The Black Filmmaker Foundation, 1980.
"The Black Movie Boom." Newsweek 78, September 6, 1971: 66.
"Black Oriented Films Seen Losing Ground." Jet. January 17, 1974: 88.
"Blacks vs. Shaft." Newsweek 80, August 28, 1972: 88.
Bogie, Donald. Toms. Coons. Mulattoes. Mammies. and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American
Films. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
Brown, Roscoe C., Jr. "Film as a Tool for Liberation?" Black Creation 4, Winter 1973: 36- 37.
Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama and the Negro in American Fiction. New York: Athenaeum, 1969.
Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900- 1942. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Cripps, Thomas. Black Shadows on the Silver Screen. Post-Newsweek Television, Ray Hubbard, Executive
Producer, 1975. (A one-hour television compilation-film that surveys the history of race movies.)
Cripps, Thomas. "Movies in the Ghetto, Before Poitier," Negro Digest, Feb. 1969: 21 - 27, 45- 48.
Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. W. H. Allen, London, 1969 and William Morrow, New York,
1971.
I
·
Cyr, Helen W. A Filmography of the Third World: An Annotated List of 16mm Films. Metuchen: Scarecrow
Press, 1976.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1924.
"First African Movie By and About Africans Made by Ossie Davis." Sepia 20, September 1971 : 59 - 63.
Franklin, Oliver. Black Films and Film Makers. Philadelphia: Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum,
1980.
Franklin, Oliver. On Black Film: A Film and Lecture Series. Presented by the Annenberg Center for the
Communcation Arts and Sciences, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1973. (A useful compendium
of interview, filmography, and articles.)
34
i .
! ' '
i I
! ~
I ~
';,
'
Gayle, Jr., Addison (ed.). The Black Aesthetic. New York: Anchor Books, 1972. (Essays on the problems and
development of black art in the United States.)
Higgins, Chester. "Black Films: Boom or Bust." Jet, June 8, 1972.
Hoberman, Jim. "A Forgotten Black Cinema Surfaces." Village Voice (New York), November 17, 1975, 1 ff. See
also New York Daily News, March 9, 1975.
Holly, Ellen. "Where Are the Films About Real Black Men and Women." New York Times. June 2, 1974, II.
/
"Italy's Film Industry May Top H'wood In Lifting Bias as Negro Roles Soar." Variety. June 12, 1968.
Johnson, Albert. "The Negro In American Films: Some Recent Works." Film Ouarterlt19, Summer, 1965: 14
- 30.
Kagan, Norman. "Black American Cinema: A Primer." Cinema 6, Fall 1970: 2 - 7.
Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
Leab, Daniel J. '"AII-Colored'-But Not Much Different: Films Made for Negro Ghetto Audiences, 1913 -1928."
Phylon 36, September 1975: 321 - 39.
Leab, Daniel J. "A Pale Black Imitation: All-Colored Films: 1930- 60." Journal of Popular Film 4, 1975: 56-
76.
Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin Company, 1975.
Limbacher, James L., and Barbara Bryant, Minorities In Film I. Minorities in Film II. Minorities in Film Ill. In
"Shadows on the Wall" TV series. Detroit: Wayne State University College of Lifelong Learning, 1975.
Mapp, Edward. Blacks in American Films: Today and Yesterday. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972.
Maynard, Richard A. Myth and Reality: Africa on Film. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Book Co., 1974.
Meeker, David. Jazz in the Movies: A Guide to Jazz Musicians 1917- 1977. New Rochelle: Arlington House
Publishers, 1977.
Michener, Charles. "Black Movies." Newsweek LXXV (October 23, 1972): 7 4- 82. In Black Man on Film, edited
by Richard A. Maynard, pp. 96- 104. (one of several critical pieces on the rise of the blaxploitation film.)
Monaco, James. American Film Now: The People, The Power, The Money, The Movies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979,
Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Murray, James P. "The Independents: Hard Road for the Old and New." Black Creation 3, Spring 1972: 8-
11 .
Murray, James. To Find an Image: Black Films from Uncle Tom to Superfly. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Company, Inc.
Noble, Peter. The Negro in Films. London: Skelton Robinson, 1948; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1970.
Null, Gary. Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1974.
35
Oakey, Virginia. Dictionary of Film and Television Terms. New York: Barnes and Noble Press, 1983.
Pantovic, Stan. "The Making of a Black Movie." fumig 22, December 1973: 55- 56.
Patterson, Lindsay. Black Films and Film-makers: A Comprehensive Anthology from Stereotype to Super-
llillih New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.
Peavy, Charles D. "Black Consciousness and the Contemporary Cinema." Popular Culture and the Expanding
Consciousness. edited by Ray B. Browne. New York: Wiley, 1973. (Essays on the impact of modern black
cinema on blacks.)
Peterson, Maurice. "A Flood of Black Films." Essence 3, September 1972: 28.
Peterson, Maurice. "Xala." Essence 6, January 1976: 28.
Perkins, V. F. Film as Film. Understanding and Judging Movies. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
Pines, Jim. Blacks in Film: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the American Film. London: Studio Vista,
1975.
Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films (1904 - 1950). Metuchen:
Scarecrow Press, 1977.
Tate, Cecil F. The Search for a Method in American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1973. (A useful sampling of possible methods of interpreting genre films.)
Taylor, Clyde. "Shooting the Black Woman." The Black Collegian, May- June, 1979: 94- 96.
Van Peebles, Melvin. Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song. New York: Lancer Books, 1971.
Wesley, Richard. "Which Way the Black Film." Encore Magazine, January 1973.
West, Hollie I. "Makers of Black Films Stand at Crossroads." Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1973.
Wilford, Red. "Looking to the '80's: Blacks in the Movies and Television." St. Louis Argus. April 24, 1980.
Wright, Richard. "Chicago Slums are Recreated in Buenos Aires for Film Scenes." Ebony 5, January, 1951:
84-85.
Yearwood, Gladstone L., ed. Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black Filmmaking. Athens, OH:
Center for Afro-American Studies, 1982.
~
/
36
·-,
Schedule of Activities
November 17th, 7:30 p.m.
"The New Black Cinema"
keynote address by
Dr. Clyde Taylor
November 18th
Film Screenings, 12 noon
In Motion: Amiri Baraka
directed by St. Clair Bourne
6:00p.m.
Ashes & Embers
directed by Haile Gerima
/
8:30p.m.
School Daze
by Spike Lee
*
November 19th
Filmmaker and Critic Discussions
moderated by Toni Morrison and
Clyde Taylor
10:00- 11:30 a.m.
Haile Gerima and Toni Cade Bambara
discuss Ashes and Embers
1:00- 2:30p.m.
St. Clair Bourne and James Snead
discuss In Motion: Amiri Baraka
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Spike Lee and Hortense Spillers
discuss School Daze
4:30- 5:30p.m.
Summary and conclusions
