Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

by Michael Boyce Gillespie

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

Genres: Film

248 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2016

Reviews

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rethinking Film Blackness

Excellent book that makes an important contribution to a national conversation on caricatured and authentic portrayals of Black communities. Gillespie urges the reader to abandon a Quixotic quest for a one to one correspondence between onscreen and off screen lives. The four anchor films are hidden gems and advance marvelously this thesis about abandoning indexical illusions.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Film Blackness, Michael Boyce Gillespie suggests that "the idea of Black film is always a question and never an answer" (16). While this certainly makes for an intriguing theoretical framework for engaging with Black film, it is question that never fully feels properly set up, perhaps that is the point. Over four chapters, Gillespie examines four different Black films from the 1970s through the 2000s to engage with immaterial, formal, and affective engagements of Blackness through cinema's form. The films in question are, Coonskin (1975), Chameleon Street (1989), Deep Cover (1992), and Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Gillespie argues that each of these films use cinema's aesthetics to enact a specific element from Black expressive culture. Relying on a distinctively visual culture analysis, Gillespie opts for socio-cultural analysis to exists alongside the visual text of the film. For most of the book this analysis works quite well, but I must reiterate that the conditions in which a film is defined as a Black film, or even the potential unresolved questions that Black film raise were never fully established. In this way, the book feels slightly disjointed as the reader jumps from film analysis to film analysis without ever fully knowing why or how these films relate to one another or how they relate to the broader context of a Black film aesthetic.

[Solene · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Micheal Boyce Gillespie offers his view of Black cinema. From race-based casting to stereotypical roles, the author explains it all. But it’s not all about a guidebook. While Gillespie gives his take on the evolution of Black representation on screen, he also debunks it.

Because cinema is not the only way that Blackness can be shown. Means of expression can be found in many other ways that do not include films. Gillespie warns against a fascination for Black film. Curated for an audience that is - more often than not - not Black.

The list of movies he discusses stand in opposition to sensationalizing. A way to resist to the lure of what an audience would want to see. Instead, the list gives readers the opportunity to reclaim their cinematic experience. To see what is really being said. How to counter the message being served to them. And to see what the director really wanted them to take away.

I found this book interesting for my personal research. However, I found the author’s style a bit redundant. Still a four-star read.

[Mills College Library]

791.43 G4786 2016