Clyde Taylor, literary scholar who took black cinema to a higher level, dies at the age of 92

Clyde Taylor, a scholar who played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating black cinema as an art form in the 1970s and 1980s, died on January 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.

His daughter, Rahdi Taylora filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

As a young professor in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s—first at California State University, Long Beach, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles—Dr. Taylor found himself at the epicenter of an effort to expand the study of Black culture to academia.

Black culture was not merely an appendage of white culture, he argued, but had its own logic, history, and dynamics that emerged from the Black Power and Pan-African movements. And filmmaking, he said, was as important to black culture as literature and art.

He was particularly impressed by the work of a circle of young black filmmakers in the 1970s whom he would later call the 'LA Rebellion'. Among them were directors Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, all of whom had a huge impact on black directors like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.

Like Dr. Taylor documented, these directors created their own stripped-down approach to story and form. They borrowed from the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and Brazilian Cinema Novo to offer an unfettered look at everyday black life, often filming in Watts and other black neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.

“He did the work on the ground, discovering new filmmakers and bringing them into the academic conversation,” said Ellen Scott, a professor of film studies at UCLA, in a telephone interview.

For these directors, film was more than just art; it was a tool the camera used to highlight the ways in which racial differences shaped the lives of black Americans.

Dr. Taylor praised their work as an essential part of the revolutionary changes underway across Black America. In an essay accompanying a 1986 exhibition on black filmmakers at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, he wrote that their “bold, even extravagant innovation sought cinematic equivalents of black social and cultural discourse.”

“These young filmmakers have committed themselves to dramatic films,” he added, “a commitment fueled by the discomfort of living in the belly of the beast: just minutes away, Hollywood was reviving itself economically through a glut of mercenary black exploitation films.'

Clyde Russell Taylor was born in Boston on July 3, 1931, the youngest of eight children. Both parents were active in the civil rights movement. His father, Frank Taylor, was a Pullman train porter and member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the nation's largest black unions; his mother, E. Alice (Tyson) Taylor, was an entrepreneur and longtime board member of the Boston chapter of the NAACP.

Dr. Taylor attended Howard University, where he received a bachelor's degree in English in 1953 and a master's degree in the subject in 1959. Howard was historically the nation's premier black college, and he met a long list of future artistic luminaries there, including the novelist Toni Morrison. and the playwright Amiri Baraka.

He also fell under the sway of one of Howard's leading intellectual lights, the philosopher Alain Lockewhose concept of “the new Negro” and the promotion of blackness as a social and cultural category helped shape the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s—and would later prove influential on Dr. Taylor's own work.

He attended Wayne State University in Detroit for his doctorate, which he received in 1968 with a thesis on the English poet and painter William Blake.

By then he was teaching at California State University, Long Beach, where he became chairman of the Black Studies department in 1969. He later taught at UCLA; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and Mills College (now part of Northeastern University) in Oakland, California, before moving east to Tufts in 1982. He retired from NYU in 2008.

Dr. Taylor married JoAnn Spencer in 1960; they divorced in 1970. His second marriage, to Marti Wilson, also ended in divorce. He and his daughter, Mrs. Taylor, are survived by a granddaughter. Another daughter, Shelley Zinzi Taylor, died in 2007.

Although he wrote only one major book, “The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract – Film and Literature” (1998), Dr. Taylor was also productive in other ways.

With Beth Deare he wrote the script for the documentary “Midnight Ramble” (1994), about the early black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. He also curated several major museum exhibitions, wrote extensively in magazines such as Jump Cut and Black Film Review, and appeared as a commentator on documentaries about black actors such as Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

Such work made him a guiding light for generations of younger scholars, and an important center of black cultural studies to this day.

“You deal with Clyde when you talk about black cinema,” Manthia Diawara, a professor of film studies at New York University, said by phone, “just as you deal with certain people when you talk about African-American literature. .”