Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema From the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitatation by Christopher Sieving (review)

Christopher Sieving's Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema From the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation is a welcome and necessary work in the field of black-oriented films of the Sixties. Sieving closely researches such rarely discussed films as Ossie Davis's Gone are the Days (1963), Shirley Clarke's The Cool World (1964), the unproduced "The Confessions of Nat Turner," Jules Dassin's Uptight (1968), and the integrationist comedy, The Landlord (1970). The book intelligently covers each film through the meticulous and skilled use of major university film archives, the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The author has investigated film production documents, correspondence between studio executives, scriptwriters, filmmakers, newspaper reviews, trade journals, articles from both the black and white press, and most importantly to the historical period, the FBI files on the creative talent. Based on his archival research, Sieving offers critically sound and well-supported explanations of how and why particular films failed at art houses and B-film outlets—that is, grindhouses. His historical approach to black film and cultural studies should be applauded.

Each chapter offers a wealth of knowledge concerning other, similar black-oriented films that were contemporaneously produced. The chapters also explain the growing social and political division within black communities that gradually rendered the black audience less monolithic. For example, Sieving contrasts two Cinema V¹² 1964 distributed films, the black inner-city film The Cool World and One Potato, Two Potato. The latter was a financially successful interracial marriage melodrama that Cinema V produced. In the case of aforementioned Uptight, the author writes that it was the first Hollywood-produced black film that "fictionalized the then-current black power debates" (123). The film failed at the box office for several reasons, but the most striking is that black audiences were no longer buying saccharine stories about black life on film. To see this trend emerging, one need only review the popularity of early Sidney Poitier vehicles and then note the later shift of his film persona toward black militancy.

The book concludes by underscoring that Sixties Hollywood was unable to negotiate black images and storylines that reflected the hopes and dreams of its black audience(s). The period Sieving covers foreshadows such film-school trained Black filmmakers as Haile Gerima and Alile Sharon Larkin, whose films spoke distinctly to Blacks, as did their blaxploitation complements.

Christopher Sieving's Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema is an invaluable study of a very specific period in American film. Seiving's rigorous research makes the book a good and worthwhile read. The author displays the skill, knowledge, and wisdom to expose the polyphony within black social and cultural politics.