With the talkie, the Negro is at his best. Yet Black American artist Geraldyn Dismond in the British film journal Close Up wrote that year, “It is significant that with the coming of talkies, the first all-Negro feature pictures were attempted by the big companies … The movie of yesterday, to be sure, let him dance, but his greatest charm was lost by silence. One wouldn’t look to that time as a paragon of progress for the Black filmic image. Is the industry waking up or is it realizing it can stripmine Black aesthetics - language, style, swagger - using Black artists in front of and behind the camera to hide the fact that these works are just as uninspiring as what’s come before?Ĭonsider for a moment Hollywood in 1929. “Where’s the story about the Black guy who’s MacGyver? Where is our Black Indiana Jones?” Lewis Lee thinks these projects are on the horizon - that the industry is waking up and realizing “what we really have to offer.” But I doubt such reform is possible. ![]() “Where’s the story about the tech bro who’s doing something?” Lewis Lee asked. Revisiting a Sundance panel with Black filmmakers whose work appeared at the festival in January, I was struck by what Aftershock filmmaker Tonya Lewis Lee had to say about the state of Hollywood and its fixation on gangsters and struggle.
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