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5. Out of the Ghetto, into the Hood: Changes in the Construction of Black City Cinema
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Out of the GheHo, into the Hood: Changes in the Construction of Black City Cinema uring the early 1990s, a new group ofAfrican American city films appeared. Variously described as "ghettocentric," "NewJack," "New Black Realism," or hood films, films such as New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991), Straight Out ofBrooklyn (Matty Rich, 1991), Boyz N the Hood Oohn Singleton , 1991), Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992), and Menace II Society (Allen and Albert Hughes, 1993) were direcdy influenced by black-focused films from the 1970s and the changing industrial, political, and economic environment that emerged in the 1980s around filmmakers like Spike Lee.1 Hood films are characterized by identifiable urban settings and contemporary time frames. The films' location shooting and references to urban signs acknowledge actual city spaces such as New York and Los Angeles and, to a lesser extent, places like Oakland and New Jersey. Their construction of city space and city time is also meta-textual, and they focus, through quotation, allusion, and homage, on the plethora of images associated with African American urban youth culture in film, television, and music video. Hood films share a number of characteristics with blaxploitation , and their subject matter, settings, and techniques have often been compared to the earlier genre. Like blaxploitation , hood films are shot with specific cinematic tech145 Copyrighted Material 146 Chapter 5 niques that connote both temporal immediacy and documentary verisimilitude . Many ofthese techniques, such as sync-sound, location shooting , hand-held camera (or Steadicam), and grainy film stock are influenced by cinema verite and lend many of the films, especially Straight, Juice, and Menace, a documentary-like realism. Both film genres also incorporate the music, clothing, speech idioms, and personalities from their respective cultural contexts, thus echoing through visual and aural signposts the audiences' lived experiences. As with blaxploitation films from twenty years before, the verite style of hood films was partially (and initially) contingent upon budgetary limitations. For example Rich's Straight was made for approximately $100,000, and these financial constraints dictated the overall look of the film.2 Both blaxploitation and hood films were relatively low-risk, low-cost genres and each appeared during periods of financial crises within the industry. Blaxploitation, with its minimal budgets and maximum profit potential, provided studios with a much needed, influx of reliable cash. The industry experienced a similar slump in the early 1990s, and Hollywood again-spurred on by the financial successes of Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, and the Hudlin brothers (House Party)turned its attention to African American film production and the black and crossover box office. 3 Underlying both "waves" of African American film production, therefore, was the premise that "making cheap movies aimed at a core black audience can mean lucrative business" and subsequently fix the industry's financial woes.4 The films' immediacyand the core of their "realness"-is the ironic result of these industrial limitations. Twenty years passed between the emergence of Sweetback and Shaft and the relative "boom" year of 1991, in which more than nineteen films directed by African American directors were released.5 One of the factors affecting the new filmmaking environment was the rise in the number of film programs and, subsequently, in the number of film-literate directors being hired by studios right out of film school. The result of this can be seen in the films made by Lee and Singleton, both ofwhom self-consciously utilize a variety of cinematic techniques in order again to signify a realism in their work. The directors who did not attend film school also possess a remarkable la,lowledge of film style, technique, history, and genres, which is linked to the growing number of cablemovie channels, to the appearance of the VCR, and to the increased availability of cheap copies of older films on tape (and, increasingly, Copyrighted Material [44.205.5.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:00 GMT) Out of the Ghetto, into the Hood 147 DVD). For example, Allen and Albert Hughes cite the influence of the gangster genre (even including clips of gangster films in Menace) and the filmmaking of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma in their own work.6 Like Scorsese's urban ethnic narratives, the Hugheses' focus is on tight-knit communities and their involvement in often highly organized forms of "alternative economies." The fundamental differences between black-focused films from the 1970s and those from the 1990s are the result of industrial, political, and economic changes in the intervening decade. While the...