A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black-Cast Posters

New York: Noonday Pr, 1992. -----The scan you see is the book you get. Large soft cover/trade, tight square and clean, flat uncreased spine, ink name on ffep, 168 pages, filled with over 200 color posters, publishers stamp on bottom edge. "As early as the 1920s, a thriving black film industry existed in the United States. Independent film studios - many of them black-owned - produced hundreds of "race movies," films with all-black casts, aimed at black audiences. At the height of this boom, there were as many as six hundred theaters on the race-movie circuit. The race movies covered the full spectrum of popular film genres, from musicals (The Bronze Venus) to comedies (She's Too Mean for Me) to Westerns (Two-Gun Man from Harlem) to short films, showcasing the talents of everyone from Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway to Louis Jordan. A Separate Cinema is the first book to present a histoy of black-cast films through their posters. Covering the years 1915 to 1965, the book includes more than 200 color posters, many of them very rare. In his introduction, Donald Bogle, author of Brown Sugar and Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, places the films in a social and cultural context. A true celebration of black cultural history, A Separate Cinema offers a unique glimpse of another era and of the extraordinary energy and spirit that characterized early black film." Contents include: Preface by Spike Lee / Intro by Donald Bogle / Without a Voice / Pioneers of Independence: Oscar Micheaux & Spencer Williams / Hollywood Hijinks / A Film Anachronism: Paul Robeson / Harlem Goes West / A Gift of the Gods / Comic, Coon, or Buffoon? / Bronze Femmes Fatales / Jazzin', Jammin', and Jivin' / From the Neck Up: Minstrels / Pint-Sized Jesters / African Atrocity / Uptown Saturday Night: Race Films / With a Voice: The Postwar Period / Author's Note / index. Any image directly beside this listing ist tha actual book and not a stock photo. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Soft Cover. Near Fine. 4to - over 9¾" - 12".