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Ditmann | The Thorniest of Issues Laurent Ditmann Spelman College The Thorniest of Issues Jesse Algeron Rhines. Black Film/White Money Rutgers University Press, 1996. (195 pages. $17.95, paperback) Film studies, arguably one of today's most vibrant scholarly disciplines, rely essentially on ideological, cultural , or structural modes of interpretation focusing on the narrative characteristics of their subjects. This in turn tends to pitch academic researchers—concerned with the cinema's aesthetic dimension—against the real world, where the paramount issue is a film's financial success. For those critics who might too easily forget that the so-called "entertainment industry" is precisely that, a profit-driven business , Dr. Jesse Algeron Rhines' short but fairly decisive Black Film/White Money serves as a useful reminder that filmmaking is not merely a matter of intellect or creativity, but also one of big bucks, power-playing, ethnic and gender politics, and other-than-artistic considerations. A professor of political economy in the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University, assistant editor of Cinéaste in charge of the magazine's "Race in Contemporary American Cinema" feature, and screenplay writer, Rhines is well versed in many disciplines, from political science to Foucaldian criticism to ethnic studies. He applies this broad spectrum of analytical methods to the exploration of the thorniest of issues: the representation of Africans and African-Americans in American cinema. By this, he means not only the treatment of African -Americans as characters, but also their role in direction , production, and distribution networks (the latter being, according to Rhines, the key to a film's success). This large venue of investigation—while contributing to. make the book an appealing and absorbing exposé based on a deep understanding of the film industry as a whole— also constitutes its most obvious shortcoming, a methodological choppiness which takes the reader, sometimes abruptly, from character analysis to econometry to the nitty-gritty of film production. Rhines' discussion aims to "enhance African American employment and entrepreneurship and to expand the ability to counter traditional White propaganda which aids in the debilitation of Black people's political, social and economic strength" (Rutgers U. P. press release , 1). To do so, he devotes four of his eleven chapters to a chronological framing of Black filmmaking in America. He divides the past century into four distinct periods: the Silent Era (Chapter 2), the Great Depression and World War II (Chapter 3), the Blaxploitation era of 1945 to 1974 (Chapter 4), and the period of "Blockbusters and Independents," i.e. 1975 to the present (Chapter 5). This period includes the 1986 release of Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, considered by Rhines a milestone in Black filmmaking. Tracing the appearance of an autonomous Black film consciousness back to the struggle of the African-American community against the producers and director of Birth ofa Nation, Rhines goes on to demonstrate how social discrimination triggered the creation of individual voices such as Oscar Micheaux's or early producers George and Noble Johnson's. According to Rhines, the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement brought racial issues to the forefront of the political debate . Consequently, Hollywood started to include more Blacks in prominent acting roles, later finding in lowcost Blaxploitation films a much needed source of additional revenue at a time when antitrust laws and competition from television started to affect the movie industry in a significant manner. He concludes by showing how the film industry, in spite of important advances , still has to break free from early patterns of creative stereotyping and, behind the camera as in the boardroom, of financial discrimination. Rhines' analysis of specific films or characters, more often than not succinct and interesting, nicely complements seminal studies such as Nelson George's Blackface: Reflections on African Americans and the Movies (1994) or Black American Cinema (1993) edited by Manthia Diawara. His discussion becomes more illuminating, however, as soon as economics and labor practices come into play. Rhines sees the emergence of high-investment blockbusters (he seems particularly fixated on Coppola's 1974 The Godfather) as Hollywood's response to the need for fast profit through strategic and massive...

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