Black Film As a Signifying Practice

"In Black Film as a Signifying Practice, Gladstone Yearwood explores cinema as part of the black cultural tradition. He argues that black film criticism is best understood as a 20th century development in the history of African-American aesthetic thought, which provides a substantive and accumulative aesthetic and critical tradition for black film studies.

The book examines the way black filmmakers use expressive forms and systems of signification that reflect the cultural and historical priorities of the black experience. It delineates how the African-American expressive tradition utilizes its own vernacular space and time of story telling in the cinema and how black film narration draws on the formal structures of black experience to organize story material."--BOOK JACKET.