Overview

In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.

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9780822358817

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Reviews

Undaunted by the profound lack of surviving films, Allyson Nadia Field deftly excavates the rich discursive history of how African Americans mobilized and fine-tuned the rhetoric of uplift in the context of visual culture. Uplift Cinema is an essential mapping of the ideological, economic, and aesthetic tensions structuring the emergence of Black American film production and exhibition, and a vital account of Black participation in the history of industrial filmmaking. --Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity

Even before The Birth of a Nation, African American filmmakers envisioned cinema as a means of presenting a new image of black culture in the USA. With peerless archaeological research, Allyson Nadia Field excavates the roots of African American film within a rhetoric of social uplift. Offering more than a prologue to later black filmmaking, Field reveals the origins of an alternative film culture based in ideological address and political rhetoric, as cinema forged an effective political voice. -- Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity A significant and remarkable book, Uplift Cinema revises African American cinematic history. Allyson Field's illuminating scholarship and close reading of primary archival sources will compel historians to reimagine how the history of black cinema is told. -- Maurice Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideology in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 Undaunted by the profound lack of surviving films, Allyson Nadia Field deftly excavates the rich discursive history of how African Americans mobilized and fine-tuned the rhetoric of uplift in the context of visual culture. Uplift Cinema is an essential mapping of the ideological, economic, and aesthetic tensions structuring the emergence of Black American film production and exhibition, and a vital account of Black participation in the history of industrial filmmaking. -- Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity Allyson Nadia Field in Uplift Cinema has immediately established herself as a leading scholar in the study of early black film... Uplift Cinema is written in a highly accessible style for historians of all stripes. Most importantly, the volume will be seminal not only for scholars of black film but also for those working in African American history and the early Progressive Era. -- Gerald R. Butters Jr. Journal of American History

Undaunted by the profound lack of surviving films, Allyson Nadia Field deftly excavates the rich discursive history of how African Americans mobilized and fine-tuned the rhetoric of uplift in the context of visual culture. Uplift Cinema is an essential mapping of the ideological, economic, and aesthetic tensions structuring the emergence of Black American film production and exhibition, and a vital account of Black participation in the history of industrial filmmaking. --Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity

Author Information

Allyson Nadia Field is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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