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Black Films, Black Filmmakers Black films from the 1930s and 194

Black films from the 1930s and 1940s were produced by black filmmakers for a black circuit and were rarely seen by white audiences. So-called blaxploitation films from the late 1960s and early 1970s were produced by white filmmakers for a largely urban audience, and these films were shaped for white audiences as well as black. The black films from an earlier era showed a wide range of subject matter, with the mass of films emulating white genres such as detective stories, westerns, comedies, domestic dramas, crime dramas, and so on. The blaxploitation films of the 1970s were much more limited, being primarily crime and action films featuring drug use, violence, sexual situations, and so on, creating an image of blacks that was limited and, in the eyes of many critics, degrading. It would be wrong to argue that the black films of the 1930s were high artistic achievements, for overall they were not, but they did offer a more varied view of black life than could be found in the studio-financed action fantasies of the sixties and seventies.

The all-black film movement started in the silent era with the Lincoln Motion Picture company in Los Angeles in 1916, a black-owned and operated film corporation (Sampson 27). The most successful of all black-owned independent film production companies was the Micheaux Film and Book Corporation, later known as the Micheaux Film Corporation. This company was founded in 1918 and would continue producing films through the 1920s and 1930s (Sampson 42). Other companies followed, some in business for only a short time. The black films produced by these companies between 1910 and 1950 were a form of underground film, produced not for the mass audience but for the specialized black audience. Most of these films would be considered "C"-grade as Hollywood productions:

This general lack of quality can be traced directly to the lack of adequate finances and experience of these early producers, ...

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Black Films, Black Filmmakers Black films from the 1930s and 194. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708381.html