The depiction of African-Americans in film posters through the decades offers a fascinating reflection of the role of race in the movies – and life

A dazzling new book from Reel Art Press, Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art, which is drawn from the collection of archivist John Kisch, charts the increasing presence and importance of African-Americans in film and the ways they have been depicted on posters by artists worldwide. As the critic Henry Louis Gates Jr argues in the foreword, these posters “constitute their own art form and pattern of representation, like a parallel visual universe, mirroring what an artist or a producer felt to be the dominant message about race in America that these films contained.”