“A Woman with Film Reels for Eyes”: The Many Genres and Speculative Possibilities of Black Women’s Film Criticism

This essay argues that African American women’s writing became a crucial repository for film-critical thought in the second half of the twentieth century. I focus on writing by Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Walker, and bell hooks, and I show how they experimented with a wide range of literary genres—including novels, plays, memoirs, and poetry—to depict, criticize, and develop powerful alternative visions for film. Never content with analyzing only what cinema was, these authors speculatively imagined what cinema could be: more inclusive, more politically radical, more aesthetically innovative. To tell this story, I blend archival research and close readings to examine these writers’ work in its historical context, employing an interdisciplinary set of methods for film historiography by tracing the cinematic thought of Black women writers who turned to film