History of Black Film

To combat the negative stereotypes that the film industry reinforced; African Americans created an independent film movement, "Race Films". African American creatives wanted to bring truer identities, cultural customs, and aspirations to the screen. The creation of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916-21) was a response to this need to have accurate representation.
 
The company was founded by a Black actor Noble P. Johnson and his brother George Johnson. They were among the first independent black race film companies. They produced many different genres, from action, drama, to westerns and more. They distributed their films nationally and created an all-Black exchanges, offices the booked films to theaters, in cities like Chicago New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C, Atlanta, St. Louis, and New Orleans.

Though they were successful for a while they began to encounter problems that led to its end. They began to have exhibition problems; many theatres were not willing to race films and that led to financing problems. Early on in the first few years of the race films movement, the focus was on presenting a positive image, which didn’t sell as well. Also in the late 1920s white company owners bought the race film companies, They were profit driven and the quality of the content eventual was lost.

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Bibliography

Bobo, Jacueline. ""The Subject is Money": Reconsidering the Black Film Audience as Theoretical Paradigm." Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 421-32. Guerrero, Ed. "The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation." 2012, [435]-469. Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genres . New York: Routledge, 2008.  Ryan, Michael, and Kellner, Douglas. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film . First Midland Book ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990. Shulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics . New York: Free Press, 2001. 
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