The Riverbends Genealogical and Historical Society has a collection of “race movies”: “The ‘race movie’ or ‘race film’ was a film genre which existed in the United States between about 1915 and 1950. It consisted of films produced for an all-black audience, featuring black casts. In all, approximately […]
Actor and singer Sheila Guyse has died. Guyse appeared on Broadway, most notably in “Finian’s Rainbow” and in “race films” with all-African-American casts catering to African-American audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. The New York Times has an obituary. Nina Mae McKinney has a tribute to Guyse. Here […]
Learn to speak jive like all the hep cats do.
At A Knife And A Quill, Kate Laity shares her thoughts on American Horror Story: Coven: “I don’t turn to drama series for insightful commentary on witchcraft. I do expect fun and I do expect a little pulse-taking on the state of the nation. Because witchcraft narratives are almost […]
Who said it, James Joyce or Kool Keith?
Ann Hornaday discusses “The Aesthetic Politics of Filming Black Skin”: “For the first hundred years of cinema, when images were captured on celluloid and processed photochemically, disregard for black skin and its subtle shadings was inscribed in the technology itself, from how film-stock emulsions and light meters were […]