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Ellen C. Scott. Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. 268 pp. $29.95.
In her book Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era, media scholar Ellen C. Scott provides a well-researched critical history of black repression in the American film industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The study is a welcome addition to important recent publications in African American television and film studies such as Sarah Torres's Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton UP, 2003) and Allyson Nadia Field's Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke UP, 2015). All of the projects provide a careful and thoroughgoing account of the visual media industry and its representations of black life. Scott's book significantly advances our understanding of the conditions of film production by investigating the impact of censorship in the constitution of narratives and the framing of black bodies on screen. Cinema Civil Rights undertakes media studies as a material cultural studies project, referring readers to the cinematic objects while contextualizing and critiquing the material and social conditions for those objects' construction. Scott's work stands out among these other books for its study of mainstream Hollywood film-a genre that would seem not to provide as rich a terrain for the discussion of black representational politics. However, Scott's canny readings reveal that an anxiety about black representation in the context of civil rights discourse in popular film has been, for more than one hundred years, a central and abiding organizing principle for studios and directors in the most powerful and longstanding film industry in the world.
Scott's analysis of "the structure of limitation" in the film industry during its Golden Age is...