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The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban \"land of hope\" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era,Migrating to the Moviesbegins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early \"race films\" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.

[...]it could form the basis for the development of the academic study of African cinema through the production of new books, new theses, new histories, new theories, enshrining an African film culture in younger generations. [...]it might lead to the creation of new jobs in African cinema in film archiving, film restoration, and film curating. A RESPONSE TO TITANIC CHALLENGES Clearly, African film archives are in a crisis of immense magnitude which requires both immediate and long-term responses, and it is to this task that one institution has chosen to devote its energies. Since its creation in 1970 in Tunis, FEPACI (Federation Pan-Africaine des Cinéastes / Pan African Federation of Filmmakers) - a continental body charged with defending and promoting the interests of African filmmakers and film professionals, and recognized by the African Union, the Arab League, the European Union, and UNESCO - has worked toward creating infrastructure for the production, distribution, exhibition, and circulation of films on the African continent. According to Egyptologist Yoporeka Somet, in Ancient Egypt, temples housing archives and libraries were known as \"houses of life\" or Per Ankh, i.e., places where culture itself was kept alive.

New African Cinemaexamines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers from the early post-colonial years into the new millennium. Offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema since the 1960s, Valérie K. Orlando highlights the variations in content and themes that reflect the socio-cultural and political environments of filmmakers and the cultures they depict in their films.Orlando illuminates the diverse themes evident in the works of filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène'sCeddo(Senegal, 1977), Sarah Maldoror'sSambizanga(Angola, 1972), Assia Djebar'sLa Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua(The Circle of women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria, 1978), Zézé Gamboa'sThe Hero(Angola, 2004) and Abderrahmane Sissako'sTimbuktu(Mauritania, 2014), among others. Orlando also considers the influence of major African film schools and their traditions, as well as European and American influences on the marketing and distribution of African film. For those familiar with the polemics of African film, or new to them, Orlando offers a cogent analytical approach that is engaging.

From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as “blaxploitation,\" the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors—Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince—who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.

The first generation of Ethiopian filmmakers produced significant fictional and documentary films inside Ethiopia from the 1960s to 1990s, but access to these films has been limited. Drawing on interviews with filmmakers, Kassahun and Thomas analyze this early production in its cultural context and compare it with Haile Gerima’s internationally celebrated Harvest: 3000 Years (1975), produced in the United States, to complicate the meta-narrative of Ethiopia’s film history. In the context of debates by intellectuals about art and politics, early Ethiopian filmmakers participated in an internationally conscious Ethiopian modernism across the political revolutions of 1974 and 1991.

This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa's under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood - with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature - the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.