Soul Searching

"Film historians and pop-culture enthusiasts alike have largely painted Blaxploitation as a spontaneous movement that arose in the wake of black-power politics to feed the cash-strapped studios' appetite for cheap program pictures, and as the genesis that would inspire later African-American auteurs...and pave the way for more recent inroads African-Americans have made in the industry. Soul Searching shatters that mythology by showing the black films of the 1960s, while few and fragmented, represented the first serious attempts to produce credible, progressive films about African-American life."—Steve Ryfle, Cineaste

"Film historians and pop-culture enthusiasts alike have largely painted Blaxploitation as a spontaneous movement that arose in the wake of black-power politics to feed the cash-strapped studios' appetite for cheap program pictures, and as the genesis that would inspire later African-American auteursand pave the way for more recent inroads African-Americans have made in the industry. Soul Searching shatters that mythology by showing the black films of the 1960s, while few and fragmented, represented the first serious attempts to produce credible, progressive films about African-American life."—Steve Ryfle, Cineaste

"This remarkable book—well written, accessible, impeccably researched—is perhaps the most important study of African American film history to emerge in the past decade. The fluidity of the narrative—Sieving is a master of language—ensures this book's place as the best of film history and theory available. A magnificent contribution to the (existing) literature. Essential."—G.R. Butters Jr., Choice

"Soul Searching is an original and thoroughly necessary project, giving the reader a nuanced understanding of a barely critiqued 'gap' in black American cinema's industrial and critical history."—Ed Guerrero, cinema studies, New York University

"Through extensive archival research and a sensitive eye for detail, Christopher Sieving makes a strong case for the important place of films like Gone Are the Days, Uptight, and The Landlord in the shifting landscape of the American film industry during a time of great social, political, and aesthetic change. Moreover, his analysis of The Cool World helps shed new light on a film that has been woefully overlooked in discussions of African American representation.""—Paula J. Massood, professor of film studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY