Author Spotlight

Allyson Nadia Field

Allyson Nadia Field is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and coeditor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019) and L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015).

2 Results

Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films

The Story of a Three Day Pass: Ordinary Love

Melvin Van Peebles’s feature debut riffs on the French New Wave to tell a love story that portrays interracial intimacy and unflinchingly confronts the distortions of racism.

By Allyson Nadia Field

Essays— Sep 28, 2021
Black Cinema at Its Birth

The earliest decades of African American filmmaking, celebrated in a monumental collection of “race films” now playing on the Criterion Channel, were fueled by an urgent need for self-representation.

By Allyson Nadia Field

Features— Mar 3, 2020