MetaFilter posts tagged with black and film

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There is just stuff people do.

miss lynnster — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:08:19 -0800

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath on May 6, 1940. The "Wrath" link is the Henry Fonda film in its entirety.

This is a historian’s dream, more than four hours of never-before-seen film...

y2karl — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:53:55 -0800

Currie Ballard, a historian in Oklahoma, has just made what he calls “the find of a lifetime”—33 cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities.

A Find of a Lifetime
Twelve different short excerpts of the film are linked

The Spook Who Sat By The Door - 30 years later.

y2karl — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 14:39:56 -0800

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, a movie pitched and marketed as blaxploitation, was a low budget political science fiction thriller about black revolution in urban black America based upon the novel written by Sam Greenlee. It was withdrawn two weeks after its release in 1973, ostensibly at the behest of the FBI. Some remember it fondly, while others revile it in recollection. Thirty-one years later, it has been released on DVD. Sam Greenlee's an interesting man--another book of his, Baghdad Blues, is evidently an autobiographical novel based upon his first hand experience of the 1958 Baath coup in Iraq. Side notes: Researching this post led me to the intriguing Chicken Bones. And here is Elvis Mitchell's take on The Marginalization of Black Action Films.

gloege — Mon, 25 Mar 2002 07:02:46 -0800

Berry, Denzel Make Oscars History Denzel Washington is only the second African American male to win an Best Actor Oscar since Sidney Poitier's win for Lilies of the Field in 1963. Halle Berry is the first African American female to win Best Actress ever. Berry's speech was quite good (albeit long) but it leaves me wondering how all those "women who stand behind her[sic], Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox and it's for every nameless faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened" feel about being named inferior. And why didn't the camera flash onto Jada Pinkett-Smith when Berry said that? Now, that would have been a true Oscar moment.

mathowie — Tue, 21 Sep 1999 19:58:49 -0800

I can't wait for the new version of Shaft to come out. It should be pretty cool. Richard Roundtree played a pretty good badass in the original, but other than that it was pretty comical. Rent it and listen to the lame dialouge the writers came up with.