Career Paths of African American Directors
Title | Career Paths of African American Directors PDF eBook |
Author | Saundra McClain |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 210 |
Release | 2024-06-03 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1040028055 |
Career Paths of African American Directors is a collection of in-depth conversations with African American directors. These conversations provide an insightful overview of the interviewees’ work and artistic vision and explore their personal influences, aesthetic philosophies, directorial styles, and some of the creative successes they achieved while navigating the obstacles, challenges, and biases encountered while establishing their careers in American theatre. The directors are presented with similar core questions as well as pertinent questions related to their own aesthetics, philosophy, and career. Often, these selected directors’ productions are grounded in a non-European aesthetic and philosophy, and their directorial styles are refracted through the prisms of ethnicity, gender, race, and culture, thus bringing a fresh approach to their work and the art of directing. Career Paths of African American Directors will be of interest to actors, early career and established directors, and students of Acting, Directing, and Theatre Studies.
Career Paths of African American Directors
Title | Career Paths of African American Directors PDF eBook |
Author | SAUNDRA. TURNER DAVIES MCCLAIN (CLINTON.) |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2024-06-03 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9781032420295 |
Career Paths of African American Directors is a collection of in-depth conversations with African American directors. These conversations provide an insightful overview of the interviewees' work and artistic vision and explore their personal influences, aesthetic philosophies, directorial styles, and some of the creative successes they achieved while navigating the obstacles, challenges, and biases encountered while establishing their careers in American theatre. The directors are presented with similar core questions as well as pertinent questions related to their own aesthetics, philosophy, and career. Often, these selected directors' productions are grounded in a non-European aesthetic and philosophy, and their directorial styles are refracted through the prisms of ethnicity, gender, race, and culture, thus bringing a fresh approach to their work and the art of directing. Career Paths of African American Directors will be of interest to actors, early career and established directors, and students of Acting, Directing, and Theatre Studies.
African Americans in Film
Title | African Americans in Film PDF eBook |
Author | Camille R. Michaels |
Publisher | Greenhaven Publishing LLC |
Pages | 106 |
Release | 2017-07-15 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1534560815 |
The whitewashing of roles in films and the lack of representation at awards shows such as the Oscars are only two of the career obstacles African American actors and filmmakers have historically faced. Although blackface is now taboo, racism is still prevalent in Hollywood. Readers explore the causes of the systemic oppression that has made it difficult for African Americans to break into the movie business. Through full-color photographs and primary sources, readers will learn how to become more thoughtful viewers of movies and television.
The Hollywood Jim Crow
Title | The Hollywood Jim Crow PDF eBook |
Author | Maryann Erigha |
Publisher | NYU Press |
Pages | 234 |
Release | 2019-02-05 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1479886645 |
The story of racial hierarchy in the American film industry The #OscarsSoWhite campaign, and the content of the leaked Sony emails which revealed, among many other things, that a powerful Hollywood insider didn’t believe that Denzel Washington could “open” a western genre film, provide glaring evidence that the opportunities for people of color in Hollywood are limited. In The Hollywood Jim Crow, Maryann Erigha tells the story of inequality, looking at the practices and biases that limit the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities. She examines over 1,300 contemporary films, specifically focusing on directors, to show the key elements at work in maintaining “the Hollywood Jim Crow.” Unlike the Jim Crow era where ideas about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for segregation, Hollywood’s version tries to use economic and cultural explanations to justify the underrepresentation and stigmatization of Black filmmakers. Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood’s racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it. Erigha questions the notion that increased representation of African Americans behind the camera is the sole answer to the racial inequality gap. Instead, she suggests focusing on the obstacles to integration for African American film directors. Hollywood movies have an expansive reach and exert tremendous power in the national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. The Hollywood Jim Crow fully dissects the racial inequality embedded in this industry, looking at alternative ways for African Americans to find success in Hollywood and suggesting how they can band together to forge their own career paths.
Trying to Get Over
Title | Trying to Get Over PDF eBook |
Author | Keith Corson |
Publisher | University of Texas Press |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2016-03-22 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1477309101 |
From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as “blaxploitation,” the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors—Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince—who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.
New Jack Cinema
Title | New Jack Cinema PDF eBook |
Author | Steven D. Kendall |
Publisher | J.L. Denser |
Pages | 216 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | African American motion picture producers and directors |
ISBN |
Black Directors in Hollywood
Title | Black Directors in Hollywood PDF eBook |
Author | Melvin Donalson |
Publisher | University of Texas Press |
Pages | 394 |
Release | 2003-12-01 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 9780292701793 |
Hollywood film directors are some of the world's most powerful storytellers, shaping the fantasies and aspirations of people around the globe. Since the 1960s, African Americans have increasingly joined their ranks, bringing fresh insights to movie characterizations, plots, and themes and depicting areas of African American culture that were previously absent from mainstream films. Today, black directors are making films in all popular genres, while inventing new ones to speak directly from and to the black experience. This book offers a first comprehensive look at the work of black directors in Hollywood, from pioneers such as Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles, and Ossie Davis to current talents including Spike Lee, John Singleton, Kasi Lemmons, and Carl Franklin. Discussing 67 individuals and over 135 films, Melvin Donalson thoroughly explores how black directors' storytelling skills and film techniques have widened both the thematic focus and visual style of American cinema. Assessing the meanings and messages in their films, he convincingly demonstrates that black directors are balancing Hollywood's demand for box office success with artistic achievement and responsibility to ethnic, cultural, and gender issues.