FQ Associate Editor interviews film scholar Michael Boyce Gillespie on his new book Film Blackness and the Idea of Black Film. Gillespie begins his book with a series of questions that seem to be posed to reader and author alike, for he declares that this book is “driven by the belief that the idea of black film is always a question, never an answer,” and pushes the reader to think through some of the past and present iterations of blackness in American culture and media. Gillespie shows that there have always been multiple ways of being black, becoming black, performing blackness, challenging blackness, embodying blackness, defying blackness, and transcending the conventional understanding of blackness. Read the column then download a selection from the book made available thanks to Duke University Press.