CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/4/2024

Black History Month Staff Pick 'Separate Cinema' is Back in Stock!

Featured spreads are from Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art—back in stock in time for the book's tenth anniversary. This 320-page treasure trove collects more than 300 emblematic Black cinema posters of the last century, drawn from the largest private archive of African-American film memorabilia in the world, numbering more than 30,000 movie posters and photographs from more than 30 countries. “Film posters constitute an art form about an art form, and as well, in the case of the Black cinema tradition, a quasi-Black History lesson,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in his Foreword. “I think I first realized this when I was about to interview Spike Lee at his 40 Acres and a Mule production company in Fort Green. As I waited for our interview to begin, I became enamored—entranced, really—by the marvelous historical posters that Spike had on the walls of his office. I was green with envy and decided to start collecting Black film posters as avidly as I could afford. … The images gathered here in Separate Cinema provide a brilliant overview of the last century of film poster art that every student of film and every student of African American history and culture should experience. And perhaps you, too, will be moved, like I was in Spike’s office, to begin collecting them on your own. For they are a national treasure.”