HOLLYWOOD IN BRIEF : A...

The peculiar diversion of collecting movie posters has detonated in recent years, and the chroniclers are trying to catch up, offering this season two new coffee-table books--colorful, inveigling, intriguing and each quite different.

There’s historical importance in “A Separate Cinema,” which presents about 200 posters from the African-American screen experience, 1915 to 1965, proving that there was life before Spike Lee--who actually shows up here with a disappointingly paltry (290-word) introduction.

Historian Don Bogle adds a few thousand words of perspective. The posters come mostly from accumulations by the co-authors, collector-dealer-photographer John Kisch and Prof. Edward Mapp of Manhattan Community College.

At the moment, the black genre is just about the hottest category in the curious underground world of movie collecting. Of course, dollars are only incidental to the emotional importance of these artifacts. Nor is the power of this collection in graphic beauty--many of these posters are indeed pedestrian, since cheap printing was the order of the day. The power lies in the message of hope and ambition of a group trying to find identity.

There are very few books on the “all-colored cast” or “race” movies; this effort suggests the tempting possibilities of definitive study of the black pioneers that would include Norman Film and Oscar Micheaux, the great black filmmaker (“Body and Soul,” 1924, with Paul Robeson; “The Exile,” 1931; “God’s Step Children,” 1937). They fought incredible odds. Of course, the fighting isn’t over.

The genres represented in “Graven Images” have been the most cherished in moving pictures and this occasion brought out essays by such men as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Robert Block, among others, who know scare when they write it.

On every other page there seems to be a most striking visual--among them John Barrymore in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1920), Lon Chaney in “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925), the French “Frankenstein” (1931), Bela Lugosi in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1932), Carole Lombard in “Supernatural” (1933) and, well, this list could go on for feet.

Suffice it to say that probably more than any other type of film, this one seems to elevate the graphic arts. Most of these 500-some American and foreign posters and illustrations reflect the joy that art directors must have felt getting these gruesome assignments, to be able to use the awesome terrors to evoke visceral fear and loathing.

It may seem silly, but most of these images show a lot of love. Or perhaps zeal is the word.