Colorization : one hundred years of Black films in a white world
Wil Haygood (Author)
"The author of The Butler and Showdown examines 100 years of Black movies--using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture and the civil rights movement in America. 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 The Imitation of Life, Gone With the Wind, Porgy & Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the 70s, 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 Williams, 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"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2021
First edition View all formats and editions
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2021
Instructional and educational works
viii, 452 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates illustrations (some color) 25 cm
9780525656876, 0525656871
1288183644
Movie night at Woodrow Wilson's White House
The rare and extraordinary sighting of a Black filmmaker
The imitation game
A most peculiar kind of fame
An interlude
1933, Babyface & Chico
Flashback, The 1939 Academy Awards
Dangerous love, starring Inger Stevens, Sammy Davis, Jr., James Edwards, Ike Jones, and Dorothy Dandridge
The pricey Black movie that vanished, and how it came to be
Two cool cats with Caribbean roots disrupt Hollywood
Flashback, 1964 Academy Awards
The hustlers, detectives, and pimps who stunned Hollywood
Foxy Brown arrives, vanishes, and gets resurrected
Flashback, 1972 Academy Awards
Berry Gordy dares to make movies
Kunta Kinte seizes the moment
Aiming a camera in Brooklyn
The blackout that haunted a decade
An interlude, the ghost of Sidney
The reckoning
The front page
Moving in the Moonlight
The scourged back
"This is a Borzoi Book published By Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso