Contemporary Black Film Analysis

The definition of a black film would seem to be an easy standard to mutually agree on. Films about the people and culture of the African diaspora would satisfy most definitions, but issues arrive when black people are poorly represented and stereotyped or when the definition excludes other cultures from discussing black culture when they could also give a fair and thoughtful representation in Black Cinema. Thomas Lott argues that it can be hard to identify what makes quality black films because there must be an analysis of the separate concepts blackness and cinema. In his article “ “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,” Lot provides a compelling reason why his no theory approach provides a satisfying and open-ended approach to defining Black Cinema.

Lott references Thomas Cripps’ Black film as Genre, Cripps to discuss a proposed definition of Black films to be defined as movies produced, written, directed, performed by, and performed for black people. The cinema community often defines this as the essentialist criteria. Its antithesis, the non-essentialist criteria, suggest that only one of these critiques be present. Both theories are …show more content…
That is not to say that all Blaxploitation films could be typified as such. Some were categorically different based on style, audience, and political content. Lott notes that Blaxploitation films had an aesthetic problem with being blackface representations of white films and stereotypically black. These are mostly attributed to Hollywood taking the role of producing the nonrepresentative black film as the industry naturally does with most movies. Naturally, there has been a major shift to independently produced blaxploitation film which suggests that the essentialist and non-essentialist theory could be combined and tweaked to come to a