Ralph Ellison and Cinema

Ralph Ellison and Cinema reveals the crucial role of cinema throughout Ellisons career. In his most famous work, Invisible Man (1952), cinema is part of a cultural and institutional landscape; as such, it is integral to the way the novels protagonist feels and thinks. In Ellisons critical essays, cinema is simultaneously a crystallization of racial prejudice, a vehicle of ideas about history, and an index of the variously illusory and the revelatory character of dreams. But it is in his monumental, unfinished second novel, posthumously published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010), that Ellisons thinking about cinema is brought to its imaginative and theoretical peak. Here, Ellison gives full rein to a sensibility that is both cinephile and cine-sceptical; in the book, Ellison is as much concerned with cinematic form as he is with cinematic content. To chart the breadth and depth of Ellisons cinematic interests, Ralph Ellison and Cinema discusses the authors major works alongside private correspondence, Hollywood films in which Ellison took particular interest, and marginalia in the authors personal library. Ralph Ellison and Cinema also provides a detailed account of the intellectual and social contexts in which Ellisons works took shape.