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Baad Cinema : The Gangster Connection in African American Film

This chapter is an extended version of my keynote that opened the 15th International Bremen Film Conference in January 2010—a major film research event featuring the prestigious Bremen Film Prize awarded for achievements in European cinema—sponsored by Bremen’s State Senate, the Art House cinema Kino46, and the University of Bremen (the Conference was inaugurated in 1995 in association with UNESCO’s Memory of the World: National Cinematic Heritage project). I was solicited to deliver the keynote because of my research reputation in the area of the conference theme: “Public Enemies: Film Between Identity Formation and Control”.

This research contributes to a volume based on the conference theme that examines, uniquely, not only the aesthetics and history of the gangster film, but also aspects of identity formation and control through various gangster and/ or public enemy mediations. It provides an important way to link the black “gangsta”-focussed films of the 1990s to two other notable African American crime film cycles: 1970s blaxploitation cinema and the 1930s and 1940s underworld race film. It presents an original thesis that while all three cycles rely on criminal (visual) stereotypes for their economic viability, they should also be defined through their exploitation of popular music as an “intermedial” form. Putting music into the picture through an interdisciplinary approach changes our interpretation of the interrelationship between the Hollywood gangster and these black film cycles (a relationship traditionally defined as unimaginatively derivative). These African American versions of the gangster are significant because they are determined by musical prerogatives.

The practice of simultaneous publication of both German and English versions of authors’ work in both hard print copy and in the form of an e-book is innovative and designed to ensure the widest international dissemination.