Colorization
One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World
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- 4,49 €
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A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland
This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown.
Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.
He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others.
An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.
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The struggle of Black directors and actors to make movies on equal terms is explored in this sweeping historical study. Journalist and biographer Haygood (The Butler) surveys the Black presence in American cinema back to the silent era, starting with D. W. Griffiths's racist Reconstruction epic, The Birth of a Nation, and pioneering Black director Oscar Micheaux's heroic Black characters. He goes on to probe the demeaning Mammy stereotypes that Gone with the Wind star Hattie McDaniels wrestled with; the emergence of Black crossover stars, among them Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith; '70s blaxploitation flicks like Shaft and Foxy Brown, with their confrontational depictions of Black power; director Spike Lee's race-conscious oeuvre; Black-themed blockbusters like 2018's Black Panther; and modern-day controversies over the dearth of Black Oscar nominees. Haygood centers his narrative on punchy biographical sketches of Black filmmakers and piquant making-of tableaux—"Everyone was game, despite the wildness and weirdness," he writes of the set of Melvin Van Peebles's blaxploitation epic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, where one could " the marijuana wafting about during breaks in the filming"—while ably filling in historical context from the Harlem Renaissance to the George Floyd protests. The result is an engrossing account of a vital but often slighted cinematic tradition, full of fascinating lore.
