NeoBlackCinema

By La Rivers

We are living in the most exciting era of vision execution!  We are old enough to appreciate the strength and struggle of our past, but young enough to see how this has lead us toward a wondrous evolution into our future… especially creatively.  With the modern application of technology made available to all of us, we can all be visionaries without hesitation and we can express our creativity very effectively, especially with proper organization and structure.

Those of us who are filmmakers (actors, writers, producers, directors) take a special interest in the screenplay.  There’s nothing like well structured and organized text to make a story feel like a modern day experience to the reader.  Many of us, including myself, have amazing ideas and great stories to tell and we want to get them told in the most effective way possible.  The key to a great film begins with a great foundation. This foundation is your screenplay.  A story idea is only and idea, without proper execution.  In order to make your screenplay come alive, and get it sold (for those who are interested in going beyond telling a good bedtime story) you need structure.

One of my writing partners and mentors introduced me to a wonderful DVD learning series called Syd Field’s Screenwriting Workshop. Personally, I’m more of a novelist, always telling my stories from my Leo perspective. What I had to learn was that a screenplay is not a novel because the action takes place…

In “Baad Bitches” & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, Stephanie Dunn attacks  race, gender, heroism, politically correctness and consciousness all in one. She explores the idea of what it really means to be a strong black woman and how the roles in cinema reflect those images.

Dunn expresses her thoughts on images during the Blaxpoitation Era by reaching back into the 70s, exploring films like Cleopatra Jones, Foxy Brown and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and bringing us up to date where the images of black woman in music and film collide.

She questions what really makes these women heroes: Is it their sexuality, their power, their self-assuredness? And why do those heroines have the ability to transfer those images onto young black women seeking their sense self purpose. The breakthrough of an entire race rests so heavily on images that pose internal conflicts and conjure subtle cheers just for recognition, with a hint of guilt that co-exists, tracing back to the double consciousness of being black in America.

Chapters touch on the Black Movie Going Experience, Sex as a Means of Film Production, Aesthetic Strategy, and Maculating/Emasculating “The Man.” Dunn doesn’t look at films in the scope of what films and images are going to make money, she examines films from the perspective a woman who wants to tell her story the way it should be told, through the eyes of a Black woman. She questions the creation of Black…