CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/23/2021

'Separate Cinema' is Back in Stock!

Featured spreads are from Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art, Reel Art Press’s classic collection of 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. I thought of that feeling of exhilaration that I experienced that day in Spike’s office a few weeks ago when Nasir Jones (‘Nas’) visited the Hip Hop Archive, founded by Professor Marcyliena Morgan, in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. When we showed him the dozens of black film posters hanging on the walls of the Center, part of the Henry and Celia McGee Black Film Poster Collection, Nas declared that ‘I want a collection just like this one!’ 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.”