Hood film

Hood film is a film genre originating in the United States in the late 1980s, which features aspects of primarily African American urban culture, including hip hop music, street gangs, racial discrimination, and the problems of young black men coming of age or struggling with a predominantly white society.

The prototypical hood films are "Boyz n the Hood" and "Menace II Society", whose serious storytelling approach popularized the type. As early as 1996, however, hood films was seen as a stereotype against which black filmmakers constantly struggled to avoid comparison or compartmentalization.

British films of this genre are also being made such as Bullet Boy.

John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles and the Hughes Brothers are examples of directors in this genre.

Several critical essays about the genre were written by Paula J. Massood, now a professor at Brooklyn College. Critic Murray Forman notes that the "spatial logic" of hip-hop culture, with heavy emphasis on place-based identity, locates "black youth urban experience within an environment of continual proximate danger", and this quality defines the hood film.cite book
title=The 'Hood Comes First: race, space, and place in rap and hip-hop
author=Murray Forman
year=2002
publisher=Wesleyan University Press] In a 1992 essay in "Cineaction", Canadian critic Rinaldo Walcott identified the hood film's primary concerns as issues of masculinity and "(re)gaining manhood for black men".cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0802093884&id=S04JUEA3FnsC&pg=PA247&lpg=PA247&ots=46rh9mgpWM&dq=hood.film&sig=8YgAp-tKRCranf7nJWzzG5Iv1Wg#PPA247,M1
title=Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema
chapter="Rude" and the Representation of Class Relations in Canadian Film
author=John McCullough
publisher=University of Toronto Press
year=2006]

References

ources

* [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/MenaceII.html "Menace II Society"] - "Cineaste" review pointing out several aspects of the "hood film" genre
* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2_35/ai_77828281 Which Way to the Promised Land?: Spike Lee's Clockers and the Legacy of the African American City] , Paula J. Massood, "African American Review", Summer 2001
* [http://www.blackfilm.com/20060428/features/loweringthebar.shtml Lowering the bar: State of black film at the moment] , by the Unknown Film Critic; defines hood film as one of three predominant subgenres of African-American film