Black Women are Getting Production Jobs Like Never Before

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Black women filmmakers have faced both race and gender disparity in their field; despite challenges, however, notable contributions have been made throughout the history of film by black women who have broken through the celluloid ceiling to become pioneers in filmmaking.

The film industry has been difficult for black women to break into. According to Nsenga Burton, writer for The Root, "the film industry remains overwhelmingly white and male." In her book Black Women Film and Video Artists, Jacqueline Bobo notes that "there is a substantial body of work created by Black women film/video makers, extending back to the early part of this century. Unfortunately, the work is overlooked not only by many distributors, but also by critical reviews and scholarly analyses, with the notable exception of those by Black women scholars, have been few and far between."

One of the issues concerning the involvement of Black females in film making is not simply the lack of numbers, but the influence given to them. Ada Gay Griffin examines in Seizing the Moving Image the issues in telling a Black story in film, which cannot be resolved by adding a couple of black actors or hiring black crews to produce the film, but by seizing control of the image; as Griffin argues, this is to be done by gaining production ownership of the films that are made by Black women, with Black women gaining more studio executive positions in the film industry, which is severely lacking in this respect.Therefore, when looking at the Hollywood film industry, while Black women filmmakers hae become more unnoticeable, they exist only in the periphery of the industry. In other words, while it may be apparent that Black women filmmakers are small in numbers, in fact there are many black woman filmmakers who actively contribute to the film industry.

Jacqueline Bobo, an associate professor in the women's studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that the general public sees Black women's works as small, irregular, and of interest to small circle of intimate friends.