If contemporary filmmakers have felt compelled to do away with the explicit racism of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood movie-making and make African-Americans the subjects rather than the objects of their gaze, then the vexed question of how successfully have their ambitions been realised needs to be addressed. For while there has long been a slow trickle of ‘worthy’ films made by white liberal directors whose integrationist politics usually requires initially hostile black and white protagonists to put aside their differences and prejudices and join forces to tackle some kind of ‘outside’ threat (that is, In the Heat of the Night, Mississippi Burning and The Hurricane), there has also been a small but growing number of films made by African-American directors (that is, Spike Lee, Mario Van Peebles) whose focus is predominantly African-American subjects and which tend to privilege conflict and confrontation rather than reconciliation and assimilation. Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Panther and Dead Presidents would be examples of this type of film.

Such a distinction has provoked scholars like Manthia Diawara and Ed Guerrero to differentiate between what they refer to as ‘Black independent cinema’ or ‘a new black film wave’ and mainstream Hollywood cinema, although Diawara in particular is careful to draw attention to the multiple ways in which ‘mainstream cinema … feeds on independent cinema and appropriates its themes and narrative forms’. Nonetheless, despite such cross-fertilisation, the appropriateness of such a distinction, for Guerrero at least, remains. The lines of demarcation are clear.