Title: Filming back and black
Description: Filming Back and Black: Strategies of African American Political Modernism reconsiders the history of "political modernism" by addressing the filmic strategies of African Americans engaged with formal experimentalism and political struggle, thereby contributing to scholarly investigations into the ways in which film functions as a political medium. I argue that the theoretical and cinematic concerns of political modernism extend across the century in African American cinema, starting as a strategic use of modernist formalism and becoming a fully fledged political modernism in dialogue with contemporaneous avant-garde movements. This study is divided into two parts, the first addressing what I call the "strategic modernisms" of the silent cinema era and the second focusing on post-war political modernism proper. Through close analyses of films covering a broad period in film history, I demonstrate how these filmmaking practices constitute a critical filmic project that aims to counter the ideological hegemony of classical narrative form. In my thesis, I reconsider the history of political modernism by addressing the filmic strategies of African Americans engaged with formal experimentalism and political struggle and thereby contribute to the scholarly investigation of race and representation in film.