Black City Cinema. - book review

Black City Cinema by Paula J. Massod. Temple University PressI268 pp.I$19.95 (sb).

Much has been said about the representation of black subjects in Hollywood cinema. Starting with the crude caricatures of African Americans in early silent shorts that adhered to the black-face minstrel tradition and continuing on with the violent black superheroes of 1970's blaxploitation cinema, many Hollywood productions were marred by racist undertones for most of the twentieth century. In her most recent work entitled Black City Cinema, Paula J. Massood enumerates on and discusses the stereotypes of African Americans projected by commercial Hollywood cinema during the entire history of film as well as the various attempts done by independent black filmmakers to subvert these representations and redefine black cinema aesthetics. What sets Black City Cinema apart from past writings on African American film, however, is Massood's emphasis on migration and the growth of the urban black population as two primary aspects of African American cultural progress that defined the black presence in American cinema.

As the title of the publication suggests, the focus here is mainly on black city space. Throughout the entire history of African American film, the urban landscape served as something more than a cinematic mise-en-scene, a mere backdrop to narrative action. On the contrary, as Massood argues, it functioned rather as a highly politicized space and a central organizing trope that enabled a film narrative to unfold. Every film is political and Black City Cinema acknowledges that fact by clearly illustrating how in all cases cinematic mise-en-scene is constructed so as to either comply with a dominant Ideological discourse or challenge it. This assertion Is particularly pertinent to the discussion of the black presence in American cinema, since by Identifying the space in which African American narratives unfold we can unmistakably pinpoint the attitudes and anxieties toward black culture present in American society at any given historical moment.

In Black City Cinema, Massood examines the notion of the politicized film space with an almost scientific precision by drawing heavily on the work of Russian formalist critic Mikhall Bakhtin and, in particular, making use of his concept of "chronotope." This term, originally borrowed from mathematics, refers to the specific interrelationships of temporal and spatial categories in different forms of narrative. The effectiveness of treating every cinematic landscape as a spatiotemporal trope is illustrated particularly well in the book's opening chapter on black-cast musicals produced between 1929 and 1943. As Massood points out, these productions were defined by the antebellum idyll--a self-contained space and time isolated from the rest of the world. By placing black narratives within a rural Southern environment and removing black characters from an easily identifiable historical context, Hollywood producers of the time utterly failed to recognize the widespread migration of African American populations to northern regions of the country and the consequent growth of industrial centers such as Chicago and New York. Moreover, they depicted black culture as "static, unchanging, and unchangeable," and thus denied African Americans their rightful role in the nation's industrial and cultural progress.

In the chapters that follow, Massood makes clear how the subsequent appearance of black city space In the 1970's blaxploitation films and the early 1990's 'hood' films functioned as a strategy of subversion adopted by African American filmmakers intent on finding some form of oppositional cinema practice. The appearance of the black ghetto (or "hood") chronotope meant the final recognition of black culture within American cinema that endowed the representation of African Americans with contemporaneity and immediacy. In her analysis of the construction of urban space in these films, Massood once again borrows from Bakhtin's work to introduce the concept of "dialogism" into her discussion. Initially used to describe the relationship of the dominant discourse of the literary text (the author's direct speech) to the individual discourses of its fictional characters, the term is applied here to describe the "relationship between the world outside the text and that created by the text"

The idea of dialogism becomes particularly Important in Massood's discussion of "hood" films that emphasize the authenticity or "realness of the black urban environment often depicted with a documentary-like directness. Here, she cautions against confusing cinematic space with the real world, explaining that miseen-scene is invariably constructed whether or not a filmmaker chooses to use real settings and natural light. In the introduction to her book, the author formulates her aim to acknowledge "the influence that exterior reality may have on a text...without mistaking cinematic representation for actual extradiegetic [extradiegetic: is this the correct word?] circumstance." Thus, by way of examining African American film, Black City Cinema ultimately addresses the same issue that has troubled film scholars since the very origins of cinema; namely, the relationship of the mechanical photographic reproduction to perceived reality.

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