Registration deadline: 11 Nov 2025 (Tuesday)

Registration link: https://forms.gle/T8skR3JCdJQaRmZL6

Abstract

For most people, even for real cinephiles, the African-American cinema began with the first works in the 1980s of Spike Lee, John Singleton or Julie Dash. Some with longer memories might recall the films with stars such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte or Eartha Kitt in the 1950s. But in fact there has been an active African-American cinema since the silent era, a cinema produced by and for the African-American community and almost unknown to other Americans. These films included comedies, westerns, horror films, religious films and especially musicals; even when shot with minimal budgets, the best of these films exhibited impressive innocation, social criticism and the development of an African-American aesthetic.

For this illustrated lecture, Columbia University Professor Emeritus Richard Peña will trace a history of this little-known corner of American cinema, including clips from key films as well as a screening Spencer Williams’ 1941 THE BLOOD OF JESUS (56 minutes), a work included in the US Library of Congress’s registry of the most significant works of American film art.

About the Speaker

Richard Peña is an Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, where he specialized in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival.