African American cinema is loosely classified as films made by, for, or about Black Americans. Historically, African American films have been made with African-American casts and marketed to African-American audiences. The production team and director were sometimes also African American. More recently, Black films featuring multicultural casts aimed at multicultural audiences have also included American Blackness as an essential aspect of the storyline.
Segregation, discrimination, issues of representation, derogatory stereotypes and tired tropes have dogged Black American cinema from the start of a century-plus history that roughly coincided with the century-plus history of American cinema. From the very earliest days of moving pictures, major studios used Black actors to appeal to Black audiences while also often relegating them to bit parts, casting women as maids or nannies, and men as natives or servants or either gender as a "Magical Negro," an update on the "noble savage."
Black filmmakers, producers, critics and others have resisted narrow archetypes and offensive representation in many ways. As early as 1909, Lester A. Walton the arts critic for New York Age was making sophisticated arguments against the objectification of Black bodies onscreen, pointing out that "anti-Negro propaganda strikes at the very roots of the fundamental principles of democracy." Noting the educational impact film could have, he also argued that it could be used to "emancipate the white American from his peculiar ideas," which were "hurtful to both races."
The "race films" of 1915 to the mid-1950s followed a spirit of "racial uplift" and educational "counter-programing" with an eye to combating the racism of the Jim Crow south. That sensibility shifted markedly in the 1960s and '70s. Although Blaxploitation films continued to include stereotypical characters, they were also praised for portraying Black people as the heroes and subjects of their own stories.
By the 1980s, auteurs like Spike Lee and John Singleton created nuanced depictions of Black lives, which led the way for later filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Ava DuVernay to use a range of genres (horror, history, documentary, fantasy) to explore Black lives from multiple perspectives. Ryan Coogler's 2018 blockbuster superhero film Black Panther has also been widely praised for creating a fully realized Afrocentric urban utopia of Black people that includes a foundation myth and a legendary hero and takes "utter delight in its African-ness."
History Black cinema began in the silent era. Black producers made films, called race films, for segregated audiences. The short film Something Good – Negro Kiss was made in 1898. Early commercial films often depicted minstrel shows until vaudeville acts overtook them in popularity. An African American appeared in narrative film at least as early as 1909, which is also the year that Siegmund Lubin produced a comedy series, using a Black cast, with the derogatory title Sambo. Before then, film roles for Black actors were played by white actors in blackface. Sam Lucas became the first Black actor to be cast in a leading role in a mainstream film, appearing in the 1914 film Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Peter P. Jones Film Company was established in Chicago and filmed vaudeville acts as well as the 1915 National Half Century Exposition and Lincoln Jubilee.
William D. Foster's The Foster Photoplay Company in Chicago was one of the earliest studios to feature African Americans. Casts for its films included performers from stage shows at Robert T. Motts' Pekin Theatre. Theatre companies the Lafayette Players and the Ethiopian Art Theatre also had several players who crossed over into filmmaking. REOL Productions was a New York City studio that produced films in the early 1920s with actors from the Lafayette Players. During its relatively short existence, REOL produced a couple of documentaries, comedies, and a feature film.
Lincoln Motion Picture Company was established in Omaha, Nebraska before relocating to Los Angeles, and was among the very first Black producers of African-American films. Their mission statement was to "encourage black pride" with its "mostly family-oriented pictures." The short-lived white-owned Ebony Film Corporation was founded in 1915, but the white ownership's poor judgement about its stereotype-laden films aimed at both white and Black audiences led to a public outcry from Black audiences in the wake of divisive anger about The Birth of a Nation. The company shut its doors in 1919, as a result. Norman Studios, founded in 1920 in Jacksonville, Florida, produced drama films with African American casts, even though Norman, himself, was white. Between 1920 and 1928, however, he made a string of successful films, starring Black actors.
Biograph made a series of comedy shorts with comedian Bert Williams. Texas had several film companies that made films with black casts beginning in the 1920s.
Documentary shorts (1909–1913) Some of the earliest African American films were later classified by scholars as "Uplift Cinema", referencing writer-educator Booker T. Washington's influential uplift movement, which took shape at Tuskegee Institute, an early Post Civil War teacher-training college in Alabama for newly freed slaves. Under his leadership, the college produced several documentary shorts, as a way to promote the institute and build support among the school's benefactors. Their first promotional documentary was 1909's A Trip to Tuskegee (1909) followed in 1913 by A Day at Tuskegee. That same year, Samuel Chapman Armstrong's Post Civil War Hampton Institute, which focused on "manual labor and self-help," took a page from Washington's book and created its own narrative documentary John Henry at Hampton: A Kind of Student Who Makes Good, specifically to appeal to Northern donors.
Race film (1915–1950s)
Beginning in 1915, and continuing until the 1950s, African-American production companies partnered with independent film companies to create "race films," movies with African-American casts targeted at poor, and primarily Southern, African-American audiences by African-American producers working on much tighter budgets than their Hollywood rivals.
Race films typically emphasized self-improvement and middle-class values, while also "foster[ing] an entire generation of independent African American filmmakers and helped establish a 'Black cinema' in America, an artform and system where Black directors were empowered to be independent — raising money, shooting and editing, and scoring films themselves." Nearly 500 were made in the United States between 1915 and 1952, and most were shown in the southeastern United States where there were more theaters serving African Americans.
Early stars of the genre included future Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel and the actor, singer and political activist Paul Robeson, who would later be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Novelist Oscar Micheaux adapted one of his novels for his first film The Homesteader, in 1919, which is credited as one of the earliest race films. Micheaux's second film Within Our Gates, released in 1920, was like all race films, a response to racism, and in this case the racism in D. W. Griffith's divisive 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Micheaux would go on to write, produce and direct "forty-four feature-length films between 1919 and 1948," leading the Producers Guild of America to call him "The most prolific black — if not most prolific independent — filmmaker in American cinema."
Talkies and musicals (1920s–1940s) Early filmmakers sometimes served in multiple roles as actor, director and producer. Spencer Williams, who later starred in Amos 'n' Andy, wrote and directed films. His Amegro Films produced the 1941 film The Blood of Jesus. Novelist-turned-filmmaker Oscar Micheaux worked first in silent film, and later became a prominent director and producer in talkies. William D. Alexander, known for his government-sponsored newsreels aimed at African American audiences early in his career, also became an influential African-American filmmaker.
Major distributors included Toddy Pictures Corporation, which acquired and re-released earlier films under new titles and advertising campaigns and, briefly, Million Dollar Productions, which featured a partnership with African American star Ralph Cooper.
Musical films captured various African-American acts and performers on film. Known as soundies, they were a precursor to music videos, which were often cut from them and then released between the years 1940 and 1946. They featured an enormous range of musical styles and "cheesecake" performances, as well as musicians both white and Black, including singer, dancer and actress Dorothy Dandridge, who would later become the first Black Oscar nominee for Best Actress. Comic actor Stepin Fetchit, who was the first Black actor to earn a million dollars, and is controversial for his demeaning portrayal of Black subservience, also appeared in them. Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who went on to make 20 feature films between the 1930s and 1960s, made soundies too.
Other Black actors famous for their song-and-dance chops include tap dancer, singer and actor Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who also performed in Shirley Temple films. Singer, dancer and actor Lena Horne, often recognized for her rendition of Stormy Weather in the 1943 musical of the same name, was also the first Black actress signed to a studio contract. Among the most prominent early actresses was Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel, who won Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.
Civil Rights era
Sidney Poitier films (1950s–1970s) In the 1950s and 60s, Sidney Poitier became a movie star and the first Black male actor to win the Oscar in a competitive race for Lilies of the Field (1963), one of many acclaimed films in long filmography that includes an Oscar nod for The Defiant Ones (1958), which emphasized racial harmony as a means to an end, In the Heat of the Night (1967), a crime drama that focused on the uneasy partnership that develops between a bigoted white Southern police chief (played by Rod Steiger), in which Poitier famously slaps a racist plantation owner, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967) a box office hit, co-starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as the liberal parents of Poitier's white fiancée, uneasy about their engagement. In the early 1970s, Poitier turned to directing, only to later return to the screen to portray Thurgood Marshall in Separate but Equal (1991) and Nelson Mandela in Mandela and de Klerk (1997). In 2009, Poitier was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Blaxploitation (1971–1979)
Blaxploitation films are a subset of exploitation films, a term derived from the film marketing term emphasizing the promotion of a brand-name star, a trending topic or titilliating subject matter — in short, a nearly surefire draw at the box office. Both exploitation and blaxploitation films are low-budget B-movies, designed to turn a profit.
The 1970s Black variant sought to tell Black stories with Black actors to Black audiences, but they were usually not produced by African Americans. As Junius Griffin, the president of the Hollywood branch of the NAACP, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1972: "At present, Black movies are a 'rip off' enriching major white film producers and a very few black people."