Students will examine the place of black people and culture 
strung between roles as witness to an unspeakable, or 
unfilmable, experience (blackness) in American life and as 
conspirator in a medium (film) often designed to deliver 
fantasies to the viewer. Students will find the situation 
of "blackness" in a kind of serial rebellion against the 
paradoxical abstraction and intimacy of film as a genre and 
against the fantasy-delivery role of cinema in American/modern 
life. All these relationships, of course, vary from film to 
film, from era to era, and often differ in films set outside the 
U.S. 

Students will gain a more sophisticated sense of how the racial
politics in each era influenced the making and reception of these
films. Tracing these politics across the decades, students will
gain a more nuanced sense of how racial politics and the history 
of film operate together and how history has tracked increased
autonomy, agency, and complexity in the depiction of black people
and culture in film, a sense of progress they will measure 
against their sense of the contemporary world.

Throughout the course, students will keep a rigorous writing 
journal matching quotations and citations from the course 
materials with reflections that connect those passages directly 
to concepts and themes from lecture and discussion. From these 
journals, students will develop an extended essay running across 
the arc of the course. Over the term, students will formalize 
sections of these essays, turn them in, and receive feedback 
from the instructor. As the term progresses, students will 
accumulate a folder of notes and drafts, which allows them to 
keep track of their progress and allows the instructor to chart 
their revisions en route to a final draft due on the last day of
class. This method provides a semester’s worth of practical, 
technical guidance in writing while (based as it is on student 
journals) keeping the roots of the writing process personal and
organic. It is meant to support students as they engage the 
process of writing at several stages.

Required and Recommended Books 
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Krin Gabbard, Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American 
Cinema 
Michael Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea
of Black Film 
Ed Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction 
Tim Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An
Introduction 
Robert Sklar, Move-Made America: A Cultural History of American 
Movies 
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black 
Hollywood
Paul Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema

Grades are comprised of four equally weighted parts: 
1) attendance/participation (each student will do multiple
presentations; participation also includes viewing of two films 
per week on reserve in the Main Library); 
2) viewing journals (submitted at the end of class); 
3) (due week nine);
4) (due the final day of class) research/writing projects 
exploring the role of black people and culture in films between
WWII and the present. 
All students will be expected to be at every scheduled meeting 
of the course. 

Course schedule:

week 1: meeting before classes begin

week 2: general introductions, syllabus, and course handouts 1

week 3: NO CLASS—MLK DAY	
Intro theory: 
1) Barthes, “Listening,”
2) Corrigan and White “Film Sound: Listening to the Cinema,” 
3) Sikov, “Sound.”	
	
	
week 4: race, blackness, and American film: 
1) Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work 1940s; 
Michael Gillespie: “Introduction: We Insist: The Idea of Black 
Film”

1940s

week 5: class: (1947) New Orleans reserve: (1943) Stormy weather 
reserve: (1942) Syncopation

1950s
week 6: class: (1951) A Street Car Named Desire 
reserve: (1958) St. Louis Blues  
reserve: (1954) Carmen Jones

late 50s – early 1960s
class: (1961) Paris Blues
reserve: (1959) Ascenseur pur l’échafaud (Elevator to the 
Gallows) 
reserve: (1959) Shadows

week 8: class (writing week)

1960s 
week 9: class: (1963) Nothing But A Man 
reserve: (1966) Blow Up
reserve: (1966) A Man Called Adam
				
Paper 1 due in class		

week 10: S p r i n g    B r e a k

1970s  
week 11: class: (1975) Killer of Sheep 
reserve: (1975) Cornbread Earl and Me 
reserve: (1970) Les Stances and Sophie	

1980s
week 12: class: (1986) She’s Gotta Have It
reserve: (1982) Losing Ground
reserve: (1986) Down By Law

1980s
week 13 : class: (1989): Do the Right Thing
reserve: (1984) Beat Street
reserve: (1983) Wild Style

1990s
week 14 : class: (1990) Paris is Burning
reserve: (1991) Daughters of the Dust
reserve: (1994) Sugar Hill

1990s
week 15: class: (1997) Love Jones
reserve: (1995) Clockers 
reserve: (1992) Just Another Girl on the IRT

2000s
week 16: class: (2009) Medicine for Melancholy
reserve: (2002): Charlotte Sometimes 
reserve: (1999) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samuri

2010s
week 17: class: (2012) Restless City 
reserve: (2012) Moonlight
reserve: (2014) Secrets of the Magic City

Paper 2 due in class
	
– course schedule subject to change as necessary – changes will
be announced in class