Festivals: Black film, then and now - 'Within These Gate: American Race Films, 1918-1948,' 'Brought to Light: Black Cinema, 1921-1959,' and The Alcapulco Black Film Festival

This summer the Museum of late Art in New York City proffers a rare retrospective survey of 19 of the centurys of all-black-cast "race movies" that filled segregated cinemas during the years of Jim vapor "Within Our Gates: American Race Films, 1918-1949" takes its name from the title of Oscar Micheaux's 1920 film, which was the director's replication to D.W. Griffiths' ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation, a film whose flamboyant narrative was as racially prejudicial as its cinematography was revolutionary.

Typically portraying a black world that paralleled its white counterpart, "race" films mirrored the genre that dominated Hollywood From religious melodramas (such as Micheaux's 1925 material substance and Soul and Spencer Williams' 1941 The life-blood of Jesus) to westerns (such as Herb Jeffries' 1938 sum of two units Gun Man From Harlem), gangster and detective thrillers (Double Deal, 1939 and Dark Manhattan, 1937) comedies (Boy! What a Girl!, 1945 and Beware, 1946) family dramas (Moon above Harlem, 1939, and Broken Strings, 1940) and musicals (Hi-De-Ho, 1947) these films reveal a land as sharply divided by race as it was broadly united through shared cultural norms, obsessions, fantasies and myths. (One of these shared obsessions was movies: Almost 700 segregated movie houses dotted America in the 1940s)

The retrospective's 19 films were single outed by Laurence Kardish, curator of film and video at the Museum of present Art, and James E. Wheeler, institutor and director of Concept East II, Detroit, a nonprofit organization devot to the preservation and presentation of African-American arts. of the films he helped pick The Blood of Jesus loom largest in Wheeler's mind, for it was the first movie he at any time saw, as a 5-year-old in 1946 growing up in the small black community of Lumber, Ark. "My parents ran a juke joint," Wheeler fondly recalls, "and all-black films were shown in its cafe. I still remember first seeing life-current of Jesus -- it was for a like reason intensely realistic, so real, the nation and the river baptisms direct the eyeed so like Lumber. I not ever saw anything but all-black films until I mov North -- then I at no time saw another one."

Complementing "Within Our Gates" is Brought to Light: Black Cinema, 1921-1959" This exhibition of 42 [i]affiche[/i]s and 44 lobby cards, heralds and pres works (all from Wheeler's private collection) explores and celebrates early black filmmaking's neighborhood in print. Then, as now, promotional materials featured the industry's greatest in quantity recognizable stars -- Paul Robeson and Anita Bush during black cinema's birth, and Herb Jeffries, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge (the last sum of two units of whom made the transition to mainstream Hollywood productions) in later years. one as well as the other the black movies and the broadsides that promoted them underscore a deep truth, says Kardish: "You can hardly imagine a cinema that is more American than `race films.'"

"Within Our Gates" races through July 8; "Brought to Light" races through July 6.

Wren Halle Berry, Robert Townsend, Debbie Allen, Babyface and others from the worlds of black filmmaking and entertainment gather in Acapulco, Mexico, June 24 to 29 it won't just be for the pleasures of partying at the Mexican resort. certain there will be parties galore, along with a comedy display a celebrity fashion show, industry networking, orb of day sand, shopping, and probably the occasional display of acute divanes -- on the contrary all these will merely be subservient to as background to the first-ever Acapulco Black Film Festival. "The festival," says director Warrington Hudlin (The Great White Hype Boomerang), "will at hand the best of international, classic and independent black cinema, providing an occasion to honor superiority in this important genre of American cinema."

Hudlin is the president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation, a nonprofit organization in of recent origin York City established in 1978 to assist emerging African-American filmmakers, and he is the curator of the film program (which includes a special presentation of Bleeding Hearts, Gregory Hines, directorial first appearance as well as Fled, Girl 6 and one time Upon a Time When We Were Colored). He is also curating the festival's three panel discussions (whose bring under rules are the future of black women in American cinema, the character of the motion picture soundtrack, and the relative landscapes of actors, comedians and rappers). Director-actress Debbie Allen (Out of Sync) director Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, Four Women) singer-songwriter Babyface, director Euzhan Palcy (A dried White Season, Simeon) and actress Salli Richardson (Sioux City, Posse) are among the panelists.

Director Robert Townsend, whose greatest in quantity recent release is B.A.P.S., will entertainer the Acapulco Black Film Festival, and actress Halle Berry will be honored for her outstanding artistic achievements. The parties will be somewhat cold too.

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