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The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons
Edited by Dianah Wynter
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Book Presentation:
In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema―an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition―will get the full film-studies treatment.This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons’ films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons’ worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens―the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased―and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons’ iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.
About the Author:
Dianah Wynter is a Full Professor at California State University Northridge, USA, where she teaches Women Filmmakers, Directing, and Film as Literature. An Emmy-nominated director, she holds MFAs from the Yale School of Drama and the American Film Institute. Her publications include Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen.
Press Reviews:
"With her debut as a filmmaker, Lemmons' Eve's Bayou was both miracle and miraculous. The same can be said of this richly deserved, thorough and scholarly examination of her first five films." (Angela Bassett, Actor/Filmmaker)
"This is a solid volume focusing on the work of Kasi Lemmons. This volume should have a very long shelf-life as it has not been embarked upon before by any researcher. Professor Wynter has taken up this mantle because she has recognized there is a dearth in scholarship pertaining to the work of Kasi Lemmons that is most deserving given the filmmaker’s body of esteemed work." (R. Dianne Bartlow, PhD Author, Altruism and African-American Women in Contemporary Popular Music)
See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan
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