Hood film is a film genre originating in the United States, which features aspects of urban African-American or Hispanic-American culture such as hip hop music, street gangs, maras, racial discrimination, broken families, drug use and trafficking, illegal immigration into the United States and the problems of young men coming of age or struggling amid the relative poverty and violent gang activity within such neighborhoods.
Criteria
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. 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".
Among the directors who have made films in this genre are John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, F. Gary Gray, Hughes Brothers, and Spike Lee. The genre has also been parodied with such films as Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. The genre reached the height of its popularity in the 90s due to the acclaim of films Boyz n the Hood, Juice and Menace II Society. With the plethora horrors of films both dramas and comedies, hood films of the 90s are in a sense neo-Blaxploitation films.
See also
- African-American neighborhood
References
External links
- "Menace II Society" â€" Cineaste review pointing out several aspects of the genre
- 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
- Lowering the bar: State of black film at the moment
