Essay On African American Films

African Americans have endured a complicated history in the filmmaking industry, both in front of and behind the camera. In the silent era, African Americans suffered vicious stereotypes and blatantly racist films such as The Birth of a Nation. Even the roles for African Americans that seemed positive, like loyal servants, only reinforced the belief that blacks should serve whites. But even in this era of virulent racism, black films still existed. Oscar Micheaux directed black films for black audiences throughout the 1920s and 30s. Later on, throughout the 1930s and 40s African Americans migrated out of the south and into urban areas, creating a specific audience for studios to target. The growing Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s saw greater push back against the racial status quo, and films began greater cast integration and put forth more effort to understand the meanings of race in America. Overall, African Americans saw extremely limited film success before 1970, and even the few African Americans stars to emerge, like Sidney Poitier, got criticized by African Americans for a lack of participation with the black …show more content…
Quickly a formula arose for creating successful black films, and a torrent of such films hit theaters everywhere. The formula was to have a hypermasculine, dangerous, and individualistic black hero as protagonist, and to imbue the film with the hottest trends in music, fashion, slang, and attitude. Employing this formula gave success to films such as Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, and Superfly. The era of popular blaxploitation films lasted from about 1970-1975, but the impact of that era extended much longer. Black audiences established that they mattered, and that in turn gave rise to many African American celebrities like Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne, and Billy Dee