Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film

Massood, Paula J. 2003. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Focusing on various urban landscapes as a “character’ in black film, Paula K. Massood’s Black City Cinema is an interpretive, critical discussion of the urban landscape as a vital element in defining the “black” experience in films.  From east coast ghettos to west coast “hoods” (145), much of contemporary black films target a largely male, black, urban audience. She identifies such tropes in African-American experience such as migration, transformation, nationalism, middle-class mobility struggles, and escapism which often play out against an urban backdrop. Massood focuses on the ghettos of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles as well as the migration of films shifting from urban settings of cities to distinctly urban/black settings of  Southern and Midwestern areas.

Because most of blaxploitation is set against the backdrop of urban life, I felt that Paula Massood’s book would be vital to my understanding of how urban life, its issues and problems, helped to shape blaxploitation cinema. I was disappointed to see that much of the book focused on the works of Spike Lee and his urban settings and only one chapter (Chapter 3: Cotton in the City, The Black Ghetto, Blaxploitation, and Beyond) focused on the importance of urban areas in blaxploitation films. Furthermore, there is no discussion or implication of how the urban environment impacted portrayals of female characters in blaxploitation.  Much of the chapter focuses on the dichotomy of urban life and films with male leads (Superfly, The Mack, Sweetback). With the exception of one film (Bush Mama), much of the discussion focuses on how masculinity is discussed within the realms of the urban background.