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Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World
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About This Book
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read." — Shondaland This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther —using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown . Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation— which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther . And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others. An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.
Reviews
"A well-researched history of frustrations, defiance, and bold dreams—good for movie buffs and civil rights historians alike."
"Haygood's defining history is as moving as it is enlightening."
"The stories that Wil Haygood tells—of pioneers, mavericks, rebels—are as gripping as anything that one might hope to see on the big screen ..."
"Colorization goes to a place no earlier book on Black cinema in America could have possibly gone: reporting that the most impactful film of 2020 was shot not in Hollywood but in Minneapolis, not on a movie camera but on an iPhone, as it captured the brutal murder of a defenseless Black man, George Floyd, with his neck under the knee of white policeman Derek Chauvin."
"He takes a story he needs, tells it well, and ties it to the next one."
"Haygood centers his narrative on punchy biographical sketches of Black filmmakers and piquant making-of tableaux while ably filling in historical context from the Harlem Renaissance to the George Floyd protests."
"This dearth of behind-the-scenes reporting is particularly striking in the case of another member of this club, director Lee Daniels, since one of his best-known films was based on Haygood's own Washington Post profile and book about the real-life story of longtime White House butler Eugene Allen."
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