Talk:African American cinema

African American cinema, also known as Black film, is loosely classified as films made by, for, or about Black Americans. Historically, African American films have been made with African-American casts and marketed to African-American audiences. The production team and director were sometimes also African American. More recently, Black films featuring multicultural casts aimed at multicultural audiences have also included American Blackness as an essential aspect of the storyline.

My writing isn't sacred, but the lede is pretty carefully thought out. Whoever edited the first paragraph (above) to cut out all the qualifiers related to time (i.e. historically) and frequency (i.e. sometimes) was inadvertently editing out all the meaning. Although different individuals define African American cinema in different ways (e.g. some think everyone needs to be Black in front of the camera and behind; some don't), the only factual way to address it in a general-purpose article is to show there are different definitions that have shifted over time. To write about that, you need to qualify what you're saying.

I'll cede to whomever wanted to remove it, but it's worth pointing out that Micheaux created a film **in response** to Birth of a Nation, and some of film critic Lester Walton's most powerful writing both anticipated that film and then railed against it, beautifully, once it became a reality.

Hi all: I think putting a classification section in is a fine idea, but it took me a long, long time to come up with text as accurate as this and by removing it from the lede, that whole section becomes nonsensical. So if you can think of another way of saying it, have at it. If not, using the same text so close together is probably just a waste of space.

Note that African-American as a hyphenized term prior to a noun dominates the African-American template series. This page should therefore probably hyphenate the term too.