LOS ANGELES – Long before Denzel Washington, Spike Lee or even Sidney Poitier, generations of pioneering and revolutionary Black US filmmakers played a key role in shaping early American cinema and dispelling pejorative stereotypes, a major new Hollywood exhibition argues.
“Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971,” opening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on Sunday, charts key moments in Black film history that were either ignored by mainstream Hollywood studios and audiences in their day, or have been long forgotten.
Starting with a recently re-discovered 1898 reel…