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Paula J. Massood. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. 268 pp. $19.95.
African American Review, Volume 37, Numbers 2-3
(C) 2003 Lovalerie King
Paula J. Massood is concerned in Black City Cinema with urban spaces, particularly areas of Los Angeles and New York City, and how they have been represented or acknowledged in black cinema. Acknowledging that cities are "highly politicized locations with a long history in African American and American culture," Massood uses Bakhtinian concepts to investigate the "relationship of African American film to migration and the growth of black urban populations." The approach allows her to discover how the "play between visual and aural signifiers contributes meaning to a film, anchors the narrative in an historical moment, and acknowledges the existence of complementary or contradictory spaces and times in a single text." The time frame for Massood's study runs from 1912, when the Foster Photoplay Company released The Railroad Porter, to two 2000 releases: Spike Lee's Bamboozled and John Singleton's Shaft. For most of her project, Massood utilizes a combined genre and period approach; however, chapters 4 and 6 are devoted specifically to Spike Lee's work, and that factor, along with the Epilogue, makes for a slightly disjointed, but nevertheless engaging, read. All in all, the volume is filled with useful contextualized analyses presented in a manner that is fluid and compelling. Massood's use of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope enables her exploration of "spatiotemporal systems that generate cinematic genres." Massood finds Bakhtin's dialogism useful because its basic definition, "the relation of any utterance to other utterances," easily accommodates cinematic discourses, works well with the concept of the chronotope, and generally allows for a consideration of both diegetic and extradiegetic aspects of film production.
The first two chapters of Black City Cinema provide the historical background for the rest of the book and allow Massood to expand "the historical and aesthetic borders of black city films" beyond the blaxploitation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the hood films of the 1990s. Chapter 1, "The Antebellum Idyll and Hollywood's Black-Cast Musicals," considers the Great Migration in relation to all-black musicals produced between 1929 and 1943, including Hallelujah...