Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Malcolm X , Ed Guerrero argues, the commercial film industry reflects white domination of American society. Written with the energy and conviction generated by the new black film wave, Framing Blackness traces an ongoing epic--African Americans protesting screen images of blacks as criminals, servants, comics, athletes, and sidekicks.

These images persist despite blacks' irrepressible demands for emancipated images and a role in the industry. Although starkly racist portrayals of blacks in early films have gradually been replaced by more appealing characterizations, the legacy of the plantation genre lives on in Blaxpoitation films, the fantastic racialized imagery in science fiction and horror films, and the resubordination of blacks in Reagan-era films. Probing the contradictions of such images, Guerrero recalls the controversies surrounding role choices by stars like Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy, Whoopie Goldberg, and Richard Pryor.

Throughout his study, Guerrero is attentive to the ways African Americans resist Hollywood's one-dimensional images and superficial selling of black culture as the latest fad. Organizing political demonstrations and boycotts, writing, and creating their own film images are among the forms of active resistance documented.

The final chapter awakens readers to the artistic and commercial breakthrough of black independent filmmakers who are using movies to channel their rage at social injustice. Guerrero points out their diverse approaches to depicting African American life and hails innovative tactics for financing their work. Framing Blackness is the most up-to-date critical study of how African Americans are acquiring power once the province of Hollywood alone: the power of framing blackness.

In the series Culture and the Moving Image , edited by Robert Sklar.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Guerrero (Univ. of Delaware and recently a Rockefeller Fellow) offers this book as "a conversation occurring on many levels" that "began for me from early days" and "continued to grow more sophisticated" in its analysis of "the ideological, psychoanalytic, and political constructions of race in cinema." This fragment from the introduction is important because the book is constructed as a history, but is clearly at its best in its social analysis of the politics embedded in a popular art from. The work is an exemplar of "cultural studies," the emerging discipline in academic circles through which scholars study the place of popular culture in society. The author brings to bear on his subject a disciplined eye for the irony, the hidden and often unconscious meanings, and the bits of subversive wit that peer through the ideological cracks of commercial movies, particularly movies of the last quarter of a century. In addition, he synthesizes a rich vein of critical, journalistic, and trade-paper literature written by like-minded observers for whom movies--particularly those with African American themes--have important meanings beyond their apparently naive roles as mere entertainments. There are stills grouped at the ends of chapters, a thorough bibliography of the critical canon of the last 25 years, and a serviceable index. General and academic libraries.