Black Film As a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African American Aesthetic Tradition
InBlack Film as a Signifying Practice,Galdstone Yearwood explores cinema as part of the black cultural tradition. he argues that black film criticism is best understood as a 20th century development in the history of African-American aesthetic thought, which provides a substantive and accumulative aesthetic and critical tradition for black film studies. The book examines the way black filmmakers use expressive forms and systems of signification that reflect the cultural and historica priorities of the black experience. It delineates howthe African-American expressive tradition utilizes its own vernacular space and time for story telling in the cinema and how black film narration draws on the formal structures of black experience to organize story material.Yearwood focuses on signifying practices in the cinema and the symbol-producing mechanisms tht inform black fimmaking.The book proves valuable insghts into the narrational processes at work in African-American expressive forms and in black culture. Using the frameworkds of an Afrocentric model,Black Film as a Signifying Practicemoves away from a preoccupation with balck film as deefined by the dominant society to emphasize how the expressive startegies and cultural mechanisms that have been critical to black survival influence in black fimmaking.Part on epresents an overview of black film and an introduction to black film culture. It surveys the emergence of the black independent film movement from the perspective of the black culturea tradition, and it presents a criticque of the major theories, concepts and issues that have shaped the history of the black independent film movement. Part two undertakes an intensive examination of problems in black film narration through an analysis of selected films.Black Film as a Signifying Practiceis a useful resource for students of film studies, African-American studies, cultural studies, and the arts.