Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film

Introduction: Migrations, Movies, and African American Cities on the Screen

Introduction: Migrations, Movies, and African American Cities on the Screen Space, in contemporary discourse, as in lived experience, has taken on an almost palpable existence. Its contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic; its hollows and voids are occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle, and are likewise assumed to stand for, and identify, the sites of such a struggle. Anthony Vidler (1992)1 uring the last half of the twentieth century, African American film was increasingly identified as city film in the public imagination. Its narratives were commonly assigned to specific urban settings, with New York's Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods associated with African American East Coast life and Los Angeles' South Central and Watts neighborhoods with the West Coast. The two most common genres associated with African American city spaces are blaxploitation films from the 1970s and, most recently, hood films from the 1990s. In both examples, genre is defined by urban visual and aural iconography, which is often engaged in a dialogue with its immediate socioeconomic, political, and industrial contexts. Copyrighted Material 2 Introduction The release in 1991 ofMario Van Peebles' New Jack City, John Singleton 's Boyz N the Hood, and Matty Rich's Straight Out of Brooklyn, along with the increased popularity and visibility of rap and hip-hop music, sparked renewed critical, intellectual, and aesthetic focus on African American urban-based popular culture. The popularity and profitability ofhood films and rap music galvanized the production and release of an extraordinary number of films between 1991 and 1993 in particular, all ofwhich capitalized on inner-city settings and a focus on male youth culture, and which referenced the films' fashion, the music, the personalities, and the look ofcontemporaryAfrican American urban life for both black and crossover audiences. The films' self-conscious presentation of black city spaces redefined both national and international cinematic and musical forms, and their influence continues even a decade later across a variety of genres. One ofthe most striking elements ofhood films like Boyz N the Hood was that their narratives were thoroughly anchored in the immediate moment. The fashion, music, and extradiegetic references to outside political and social personalities and events, like the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) presidencies and the LAPD's infamous beating ofRodney King in 1992, commentated on contemporary African American life. And yet the films rarely explored the history of black city spaces beyond the time frame of the 1990s. On occasion, such as the inclusion of footage of the Watts Rebellion in Allen and Albert Hugheses' Menace II Society (1993), the films referenced the relatively recent past. While such references acknowledged the sources of contemporary urban conditions, their historical analysis rarely extended beyond the life spans of their characters, their directors, or their primary audiences, which consisted of a cross-section ofyoung people. Often, historical events were linked to the biography ofa given character, like the Watts Rebellion for Menace II Society's Caine in chapter 5. For many young African American and white filmmakers in the 1990s, therefore, black city spaces existed within limited historical parameters in which the city had always existed in its present form, or, perhaps, as it appeared in blaxploitation films from the 1970s. In this book I expand the historical and the aesthetic borders ofblack city films beyond hood films and blaxploitation and argue that cities are highly politicized locations with a long history in African American and American culture. The roots of the most recent cinematic constructions of black city spaces stretch back through the history of black cinCopyrighted Material Migrations, Movies, and African American Cities on the Screen 3 ematic signification to early race-film production during the silent era, and are closely connected to African American experiences of movement and migration throughout the twentieth century, just as film is a twentieth century technology and "the urban art par excellance."2 This study outlines the relationship of African American film to migration and the growth of black urban populations, focusing on key periods and genres in film history: black-cast musicals produced between 1929 and 1943; race films from the early sound era; blaxploitation and related films from the 1970s; hood films from the 1990s; and African American filmmaking from the late 1990s, including Maya Angelou's Down in the Delta (1998) and John...