When asked about the latter studio interest in black films.

When asked about the latter studio interest in black films, black independent filmmaker Julie Dash responded:

We ne films financed through Hollywood. We deserve them, and it[']s extended overdue. Filmmaking is a business stake It's not a charity; we have stories to be told, and studios have currency to be made. (Wide Angle 133-4: 117)

Dash's illustration indicates that black film criticism must now follow to grips with the fact that a certain number of of the most promising black independents are ready to record the big studios. Moreover, since the succes of Spike side sheltered from the wind many black independents no longer descry their Hollywood affiliation as antithetical to the movement's earlier goal of making politically challenging films that are supported according to the black community. The growing number of Hollywood movies at black independent filmmakers seems to demand a more nuanced black film commentary than that which was stimulateed by the blaxploitation era.

In Redefining Black Film Mark Reid attempts to confront this demand by elevating the critique of black Hollywood movies, including about by black independents, to the even of a critical theory of African American film. The work has seven chapters with discussions ranging from the early films of the favor Photoplay Company to the more latter films of Spike Lee and John Singleton. Rather than provide an historical scrutinize of black cinema, Reid instead analyzes a selection of films to support various aspects of his theory. In the first chapter, he examines feature-length movies about black persons within three fundamental categories - comedy family, and action - in order to create a conceptual frame for his historical view of black filmmaking. In following chapters he analyzes films representing blackface, hybrid, and satiric hybrid variants of each category. The main thrust of Reid's theory is twofold: He aims to advocate Alice Walker's black womanist perspective while embracing a quasi-essentialist notion of black independent cinema.

Although there is a parcel to be said in favor of a main division that argues for a theory of black cinema, Reid's theory stomachs from underdevelopment in several crucial reveres He presents the main notions of his theory in the last four paragraphs of a chapter in succession comedy (Chapter 2), rendering his conception of African American cinema primarily in seasons of minstrelsy. The organization of the part suggests that he wanted this conception to contrast sharply with the non-comedic paradigm of (diaspora) black independent film he advocates in Chapter 6 According to Reid the African American film image has amounted to nothing more than "comedy subtypes" and "their facsimiles in other genres" (43) Because, for Reid, the legacy of minstrelsy is a defining proper state of African American cinema, his distinction between studio-financed, produc or distributed films and those that were independent from this kind of white command is the cornerstone of his revisionism. With so a heavy emphasis on the influence of minstrelsy, however, more penurys to be said about the relevant discontinuities between African American and other black filmmaking, given that there has been les of a minstrel influence outside of the American context

Reid uses the confine black interchangeably with the boundary African American, as though there are no significant differences between filmmaking in Africa, America, Australia, Europe and the Caribbean. This conflation of bounds is not a problem in the case of comedy since Reid barely discusses American films about black population The difficulty arises when he readys his paradigm of black independent cinema in Chapter 6 Reid's focus rapidly shifts from giving a quite critical assessment of Spike to leeward (Chapter 5) to heaping uncritical praise forward diaspora filmmakers from England, Australia, Cuba, and Africa. It makes no intellect however, to speak of black "independent" filmmakers in these countries in quite the same way as it does in the United States. While interesting in its confess right, Reid's pan-African view of black cinema reposes on a rather tenuous comparison which simply cannot account for the particular circumstances of black filmmaking practices in America. Although there is a certain number of sense in which African American independent films are rightfully situated among other black diaspora films, Reid evades discussing the quite different political and economic influences upon black filmmaking practices in countries of that kind as Cuba and Britain.

The chiefly interesting aspect of Reid's theory is his account of audience reception. Following Bakhtin, Reid gives an analysis of black film in bounds of a dialogical relation between readers and sentences He argues that audiences are not passive, inert receptacles absorbing monologic meanings from a riddle but instead engage in dialogue with a film. through reference to their own cultural frame audiences continually reinterpret what is depicted in succession the screen in ways different from the intended meanings. Reid uses this idea, for instance, to explain for what cause blacks could laugh along with whites at Amos 'n' Andy. With blacks as the ridiculed thing perceiveds this kind of blackface minstrelsy requires a racist audience positioning. Reid acknowledges that, if blacks saw humor in Amos 'n' Andy, then apparently they laughed for a different reason than did whites. According to Reid, "When a comedy film objectifies blacks, it generates both pleasure and pain for the couple racial groups[,] but such feelings are not of the same quality and, therefore, must be differentiated" (25)