ESSENTIAL FILM BOOKS for Black History Month

by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

In an effort to promote Black film books, I want to implore our readers to check out these integral books, if you haven’t already:

OUTLAW CULTURE (1994) by bell hooks

A powerful and urgent book with some of the best critical writing about cinema and Blacks in movies that I have ever read.  A strict, direct Black Feminist radical interpretation of pop culture and movies, hooks excoriates Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie, the phoniness of academic culture, and gives the best review and insight about Kevin Costner’s The Bodyguard, putting Whitney Houston in a completely different context. Her notions of being an outlaw are serious and not ironic. Also contains Ice Cube’s most intelligent interview, and how red is the color not only of revolution but of outsider thinkers like hooks was. Under-appreciated and still under-valued, she was one of our greatest cultural critics and writers. 

RHINESTONE SHARECROPPING (1980)

by Bill Gunn

Writer, actor, director Bill Gunn’s extraordinary Kafka-eqsue account of a Black screenwriter’s exploits in Hollywood, inspired by his own experiences with the vampires and racist gangsters of tinsel town. The book is such a brilliant record and visionary poem of the angst and conflict raging inside the Black artist in a white world. 

We learn from the book, through thinly veiled and creative renditions of most likely actual events that occurred in his life, how the screenwriter - named Sam Dodd- is not only the butt of racist jokes but a kind of patsy and whipping boy for all the gross capitalists deciding who and what is Hollywood royalty and who and what is fair game for the gutter.  A must read for screenwriters.  The denouement occurring in the office of the Hollywood producers with Sam recounting a horrifying vision -  is chilling and heartbreaking. Read it and then watch his Ganja & Hess, Personal Problems and the movies The Landlord and  The Angel Levine which he adapted and wrote.

SWEET SWEETBACK’s BAASASSSSS SONG: Screenplay, Diaries, Soundtrack (1996, UK)

by Melvin Van Peebles

Although earlier editions of Payback Press’ publication of Van Peebles’ writing had included the famous and brilliant essay/review of Sweetback by Huey P. Newton, this is still a good book to own or just read as it gives immediate insight into Van Peebles’ mindset, his goals, and why a revolutionary movie like Sweetback was necessary.  It also sheds light on the early music of Earth, Wind & Fire (who did the soundtrack, composed by Van Peebles himself!), and a duplication of the letter Van Peebles wrote to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association in America,  in 1970, refusing to both submit the movie to the association for a rating (Valenti wanted the movie branded with an X rating)  and righteous declaration of legal war: Van Peebles threatens to sue.  

REGENERATION: Black Cinema, 1898 to 1971 (2022)

If you like heavy coffee table books, beautiful photographs, and moving essays and facts about motion pictures - you will appreciate this extraordinary book.  I heavily criticized the pejorative New York Times review of the exhibition the book supposedly represents - the Regeneration exhibit last fall at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.  The Times would have us believe everything Black people are in cinema is either a reaction to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation or some kind of reach for a goal we can’t quite attain…The review was patronizing and dismissive.  I wonder if the NY Times had read this book.  Well, I have and I am telling you it does more than measure up to aspects of Black cinema and what it means for Blacks to be on screen.  

The book is exhaustive with early history and a lot of small facts and information that one seldom hears or has ever read anywhere else in a formal compendium designed to urge one to broach the tidal wave of Black experience in cinema in the United States from late 19th century onward. The book is divided into sections, the essay "Spectrum of Black Cinema” by Doris Berger and Rhea Combs is excellent and the notes on Louise Beavers, for example, and Bert Williams are wonderfully rich and inspired. Shola Lynch’s essay on William Greaves was a much welcomed breath of fresh air.