Black Film essay topics
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Film's Figurehead For Racism
959 wordsAmerican History X is clearly a film dealing with racism. The interesting thing about this film is the way in which the subject is treated. First of all, it is obvious that, though racism is always a difficult subject to deal with, American History X presents it without any reservations or dumping down. Second, the film's figurehead for racism, Derek Vineyard (Edward Norton), is not an unintelligent redneck racist as films often portray them, but is in fact well-spoken, charismatic and intellige...
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Original Film
1,198 wordsThe Hollywood movie "Guess Who" (2005) is a remake of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967). Both film's premises are about the same situation of an interracial marriage. The original revolved around a daughter bringing her black fianc " ee to meet her white middle class family. This was a touchy and even controversial subject in 1967 but the film became an award winner. The 2005 update switches the roles around and with a stroke of genius we now have a white fianc " ee meeting a black family. P...
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Views From The Black Middle Class
1,315 wordsIn Jacqueline Bobo's article, "The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers", it is discussed how black women create meaning out of the mainstream text of the film "The Color Purple". In Leslie B Innis and Joe R. Feagin's article, "The Cosby Show: The View from the Black Middle Class", they are explaining black middle-classed responses to the portrayal of Black family life on "The Cosby Show". In their articles, Bobo, Innis and Feagin are investigating the representation of race, particular...
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Black Social Drama Boyz N The Hood
779 wordsHood: slang for neighborhood or black area / life. Before 1991 this concept of hood life was never before portrayed or looked into until John Singleton produced the black social drama Boyz N the Hood. This is the first film by a black director that actually goes deep inside the ghetto or inner city. Singleton carefully directs this film so that it appears to mirror the real world 'having value as a kind of anthropological study of an unfamiliar way of life'; (Thompson 2). Set in lower-middle-cla...
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Degeneration Of The White Race
658 wordsOn March 3, 1915 the movie The Birth of a Nation was released at the Liberty Theatre in New York City. This film was financed, filmed, and released by the Epoch Producing Corporation of D.W. Griffith and Harry T. Aitken. It was one of the first films to ever use deep-focus shots, night photography, and to be explicitly controversial with the derogatory view of blacks. Throughout the movie, the film justified the need of the in order to keep social harmony among society after the Civil War. In th...
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Black Middle Class Views The Cosby Show
1,924 wordsIn Jacqueline Bobo's article, The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers, she discusses the way in which black women create meaning out of the mainstream text of the film The Color Purple. In Leslie B. Innis and Joe R. Feagin's article, The Cosby Show: The View From the Black Middle Class, they are examining black middle-class responses to the portrayal of black family life on The Cosby Show. In their respective articles, Bobo, and Innis and Feagin are investigating the representation of ...
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Steadily Expanding Black Presence In American Film
465 wordsThe thread of African American history is spun from two sources: the struggle to define a place in the wider American life and the effort to maintain an authentic black presence in the larger American culture. This duality has meaning in the realm of filmmaking because the tools of cinema, film and cameras, cost more than the paper and pencil tools of writers. It is the cost of doing business that affects, indeed, threatens the black presence on the screen. The costly collaborative nature of fil...
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Stereotypes Of Black Women
284 wordsTania Modleski's "Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film", discusses how popular film perpetuates stereotypes of black women. Some controlling images of black women include: the mammy, the jezebel, and the sapphire. While Modelski doesn't analyze the sapphire stereotype, she does use Who ppi Goldberg's past film roles as examples of the nurturing and maternal mammy and the over- sexual ized jezebel. While I could clearly see Modelski's comparison of Goldberg's roles and b...
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Black Actress Dorothy Dandridge
1,156 words... a Horne in Cabin in the Sky to Lola F alana in The Liberation of L.B. Jones" (Penney 7). In Hallelujah, "Chick represented the black woman as an exotic sex object, half woman, half child. She was the black woman out of control of her emotions, split in two by her loyalty and her own vulnerabilities. Implied throughout the battle with self was the tragic mulatto theme... In this stereotypical concept the white half of her represented the spiritual; the black half-animalist ic" (7). Hallelujah...
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Norms For Black Films In Hollywood
1,213 wordsFilm is one of the most influential means of communication and a powerful medium of propaganda. Race and representation is central to the study of the black film actor, since the major studios continue to reflect and reinforce the stereotype of our times. The depiction of blacks in Hollywood movies reinforce many of the misconceptions of the white majority rather than objective reality, limiting black actors to stereotypical roles. The movie 'Soul Food' proved to be the inspiration for African-A...
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Birth Of A Nation By D.W. Griffith
748 wordsOne of the effects of syn aesthetic cinema is to break the hold that the medium has over the viewer. By removing the experience from past conditioning or convention, a movies, as Birth of Nation and Searchers are both able to develop their own syntactical meaning where the semantics of any given image may vary or change in the context of different sequences. This alteration of meanings is brought about by extending the capacity of the paradigmatic axis. This dimension plays a significant role in...
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Black Face In Response To The Movie
744 wordsBlack Face In Response to the movie I have a lot of matters to comment on. I was fortunate enough to be semi-educated on the topic of "Black Face" and racist advertising prior to the video. Therefore, the movie served as a thorough recap of the information that I discovered previously. One thing I cannot begin to understand about this time period is the number of African Americans who participated in these movies that degraded our people. I also have a problem with the continuation of the stereo...
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Spike A Black African American Entrepreneur
2,249 wordsSpike Lee The man we know as Spike was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia. The first of five children, he got the nickname Spike from his mother for being a tough baby. Spikes tendency to be difficult is one that goes right back to the crib. The infant Spike, much like the man he grew into, was small but loud. The family he was born into was great for a number of reasons. His parents, college educated newlyweds, both came from families stressing creativity and black t...
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Blacks Of The South
712 wordsD.W. Griffith's epic tale told in Birth of a Nation was a shocking one. The movie set box office records, taking in over eighteen million dollars. When it was released, it was one of the longest films ever made, over three hours in length. Some film scholars say that it is the most important film ever released. But despite all of these records and achievements, the story and the way that blacks of the South were depicted haunted blacks for decades to come. Showing the black man as a sexual preda...
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Spike Lee's Next Film
2,120 wordsIn the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else's vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smit...
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Gay Subject Matter In Dunye's Film
2,473 wordsCheryl Dunye was born in Liberia in 1966 but grew up in Philadelphia. She attended Temple University were she received a BA and then went on to complete her MFA at Rutgers University's Mason Gross school of the Arts. It was there that she first began using the video art form to delve into class, race and sex in the lives of black women. In addition to filmmaking, Dunye is an avid writer, and has published articles for Felix, Time Out and Movement Research. Cheryl Dunye is famous for her pseudo-d...
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Their Real Mother
308 wordsEssay topic: What do you think about the presentation of the black characters in the film to kill a mocking bird The presentation of the black characters in the film, To kill a Mocking Bird, hinges on the history of slavery in the southern states of USA. The film is set in the township of Maycomb in the state of Alabama in the 1930's. Slavery was abolished after the northern states won the civil war [1961-1965] but in Maycomb black people are mostly still with out basic civil rights and are stil...
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Doors For Many Black Actresses
755 wordsI faced a bit of confusion when I sat down to type this paper. I was pondering exactly where to begin, with so many thoughts, opinions and unanswered questions, I just decided to write. I don't know if you really need to include this statement. The issue that I decided to shine light upon is the seemingly reoccurring lack of room for originality of black actresses in film. Not the fact that there are very few roles accessible for the black actress or the fact that only certain black actresses th...
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Silent Film Birth Of A Nation
314 wordsIn the past semester we have covered many topics. From John D. Rockefeller and Industrialization, to World War I. The thing that sticks in my mind is the first movie we watched in class, Birth of a Nation. The silent film Birth of a Nation was produced in 1915. The director was a man named D.W. Griffin. The film is based on Thomas Dixon's The Clansman. In this short film D.W. Griffin depicts a time period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, through his own eyes. Through this film, Griff...
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Black Films
1,454 wordsAnalysis Of Blaxploitation Films Analysis Of Blaxploitation Films Essay, Research Paper In today's culturally diverse, politically correct society, it is hard to believe that at one time racism was not only accepted as the norm, but enjoyed for its entertainment value. Individuals of African descent in North America today take the large, diverse pool of opportunities offered by the film industry for granted. Much like Canadian theatre however, there was a time when a black man in any role, be it...
