‘Separate Cinema’: Unsettling and gorgeous posters from the age of segregated movies
Birthright, 1939. A black Harvard graduate confronts racism. The images on this page come from a remarkable book that came out late last year, Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art, by John Duke Kisch; it’s an incredibly wide-ranging look at the posters of “black cinema” writ large, a category that includes not just the “race films” shown here but also Birth of a Nation, earnest Hollywood dramas, The Jazz Singer, Blaxploitation flicks, South African movies addressing apartheid, breakdancing movies from the 1980s, and much more.
If you have posters that are valuable – please watch our short video on how to properly archive them for long-term storage. This is a simple thing to do for potentially an amazing return.
