Hollywood's African American Films

The Transition to Sound

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by Ryan Jay Friedman

Type: Studies
Subject: History of Cinema
Keywords: 1930s, African Americans, sound, United States
Publishing date: 2011
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8135-5049-7

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Book Presentation:
In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.

About the Author:
Ryan Jay Friedman is an assistant professor in the department of English and the program in film studies at The Ohio State University.

Press Reviews:
"Friedman illuminates the brief profusion of African American musical features and shorts at the dawn of sound cinema, showing how these films emerged out of their era and set the stage for Hollywood treatments of Black images and sounds for years to come."
— Arthur Knight

"Hollywood's African American Films is a compelling exploration of the complex and often contradictory position(s) embodied by African American performers in early sound film. It is a model of rigorous research and textual analysis that analyzes Hollywood’s troubled nexus between race and representation and offers scholars new conclusions to old questions."

— Paula J. Massood

"Friedman illuminates the brief profusion of African American musical features and shorts at the dawn of sound cinema, showing how these films emerged out of their era and set the stage for Hollywood treatments of Black images and sounds for years to come."
— Arthur Knight

"Hollywood's African American Films is a compelling exploration of the complex and often contradictory position(s) embodied by African American performers in early sound film. It is a model of rigorous research and textual analysis that analyzes Hollywood’s troubled nexus between race and representation and offers scholars new conclusions to old questions."
— Paula J. Massood

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press

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