Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

Description:

For decades, representation of the Black experience in films has been marginalized, stifled, inaccurate, and inadequate. In Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, now available in paperback, cultural historian Wil Haygood places the Black experience in the foreground and examines the struggles and triumphs of Black actors and filmmakers as a window into Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. This all-encompassing study provides an unprecedented look at the history of Black cinema in a white-dominated industry--from Hollywood's first blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, to Gone with the Wind (1939), Imitation of Life (1959), the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, and contemporary films such as Do The Right Thing (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Black Panther (2018).Featuring a powerful new preface that addresses Black filmmakers' ongoing fight for inclusion and the continuing need for cinema to tell more compelling stories about being Black in America, this important, timely volume provides an exceptional history and groundbreaking perspective of Black cinema.

Review Quotes:

This is an invaluable national memoir, seen through the ardent research -- and lived experience -- of the award-winning Black journalist and movie lover Wil Haygood. The white world he has in mind is America, to be exact. And Haygood anchors the opening of his survey in an extended contrast between the life and work of the commandingly influential director D.W. Griffith (whose disquieting 1915 masterpiece, "The Birth of a Nation," with its vividly racist underpinnings, was screened in Woodrow Wilson's White House for an appreciative audience) and that of the contemporaneous Black director Oscar Micheaux... the author's unflagging energy also serves as an effective reproach to any who still don't feel the frustration of how difficult it has been for so long for Black Americans to see themselves on screen and feel seen in the great American movie industry. At times Colorization has the feel of an almanac, or maybe it's an encyclopedia, or a time capsule timed right up to the minute. The archivist doesn't want to miss a detail or a moment. This is a memoir that demands update and expansion in the years to come.