September 20, 2004

What Time Is IT? Clocking The Soul of The Black Cinema Nation

By Rahdi Taylor

You can be in New York, Atlanta, Oakland, or Cincinnati. The crazy thing is, you can't twist a dreadlock without hitting an independent Black filmmaker. And yet, with all these artists of color, where is the new school of Black cinema? As a writer/director I look around myself and I see talent for days and plenty of moments of brilliance. But where are we in terms of Black film movements? The question might be better put--WHEN are we? For each generation or movement in Black Cinema, we can ID a unique and even defining code of aesthetic tendencies, narrative trajectories, and even modes of production. Each wave also struggled to articulate a different set of political philosophies, bringing a new answer to the ever present question facing Black America-- which way forward?

As a community we respond intensely to the creative auteurs who create Black cinematic life. Why? Because Black filmmakers represent their historic moment. What we make does matter. The films we make and view today are as much a sign of our era as Afros were to the 70s and jherri curls were to the 80s. We can quickly clock the generations before us; bold, brave, inventive, pioneering, painfully on the edge, never forgetting that Black cinema IS Black politics. Lets drop a little history.

WHEN WE WERE NEGRO

Oscar Micheaux and his silent cinema cohort were creative hustlers who struggled to make a dolla out of 15 cents. Maybe their films were dramatic titillation for the unwashed masses, maybe they employed a legion of Black artists on both sides of the camera. No doubt they provided Black art for Black people, free from the brutalizing hegemony of white producers like DW Griffith, who kept Black folk relegated to performative minstrelsy and a racist white fantasy of Black immorality. Whats most important about Micheaux is not that he answered white racism, rather his work privileged the particular dilemmas of Black life at the time. His stories that juxtaposed urban city slicksters with rural agricultural folk articulated vital questions facing Black folks at the time; Migration to the cities? Integration? Miscegenation? Echoes abound of Booker T. Washington vs. WEB Du Bois battling it out in passionate engagement with the question: which way forward?

WHEN WE WERE COLORED

The Civil Rights movements brought African Americans again face to face with questions about integration, as Martin Luther King argued for us to be judged by the content of our character. Racism was thought to be a moral problem, and colored people strove against the odds to prove ourselves to be moral, industrious, civilized. When we were colored, we asked the question which way forward, and because separate meant unequal, the answer was integration in civil and political life as it was in Black cinema. Enter actor/directors such as Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, and genres such as the Black/White buddy film and Guess Whos Coming to Dinner.

WHEN WE WERE BLACK AND PROUD!
Gordon Parks, Ossie Davis and Melvin Van Peebles ushered in an era of Independent Black Cinema, and Van Peebles Sweet Sweetbacks Baadaasss Song launched a cinematic revolution. Released in 1971, the film channeled the new political and cultural moment of Black folks onto screen for the first time. Showing not just the brutality of white society but the revolutionary resistance of Black people and the power of Black pride, Black filmmakers got hit with the Malcolm X Factor, saying it loud, Black and PROUD! In addition to opening the doorway for a decade of blaxploitation films made by both blacks and whites, it also made space for an era of Black independent film with personal, uncompromising, and untraditional approaches that followed.

Known by film scholar Clyde Taylor as the LA Rebellion, what followed was a late 70s movement that was comprised of artists such as Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, John Clark et all. Magic realism, non-linear narratives and quiet moral dilemmas and victories ensued. Still vigilantly anti-establishment, theirs was a cinema about personal __expression, spirituality and anti-heroes, just as the Black power movement was starting to shift to different vibrations of personal, spiritual and cultural--heck nutritional--movements. Meanwhile, after the success of social issue documentaries and of public affairs journalism (including Black Journal) the black documentary movement reached full tilt. Henry Hampton and St. Claire Bourne gave rise to Orlando Bagwell, Sam Pollard, Kathe Sandler, Stanley Nelson, Yvonne Welbon all waded in the water.

WE GOT HYPHENATED

1980s America was all about the Me generation (aka the money generation). Black folks still hadnt found racial amelioration and continued to try to find a new way. Money meant progress, the revolution was shelved and it was all about the Benjamins. Black folks got hyphenated. As African-Americans we got the Huxtables and House Party; cinematic visions of a Black middle class with romance and comedies. Representing the other side of the Black economy we had Gangsploitation; films about young, urban (mostly male) Blacks trying to get up out of the hood through gang banging or other vices, or tragically succumbing to the oppression of poverty. Bouncing off the beat of the Golden Age of Hip Hop, films like New Jack City, Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and Juice played like extended video homages to the darker side being a street soldier.

PEOPLE OF COLOR AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

In the 90s social politics were shaped by identity politics, which were increasingly about cultural hybridity and exploring the margins. Black folks found the global majority and became people of color. Filmmakers made films about What kind of Black person are you? (Shes Gotta Have It). The Black Queer Nation came out of the cinema closet, with offerings from Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs breaking new ground with self-reflectivity and creative agility both in cinema and cultural politics. Sistas burst onto the scene in record number, following in the creative trail blazed by Julie Dash and Euzane Palcy. Leslie Harris, Kasi Lemmons, Ayoka Chinzira, Darnell Martin, Bridgett Davis Zeinabu i. Davis, and Cauleen Smith all put a female perspective on the race thang.

SANKOFA BLUES

If history is any indicator, a smart lock on where we are in the Black film calendar might hip us to what is happening politically on the Black world stage. This year, Mario Van Peebles, son of Melvin Van Peebles, released BaadAsssss!, a critical and cinematic re-examination of his fathers watershed film SweetBack, and about the impact of being the sacrificial son of the film revolutionary. In it, Melvins character argues with himself about the sanity of making a revolutionary film in that historic moment. Marios film functions like a Sankofa, the spiritual Andinka symbol from Ghana of a bird who looks back in order to move forward (and the title and theme of a Haile Gerima Opus).

Are we Negroes? Colored? Black? African American? African? When are we? On any given day I use all of those terms in varying social contexts, sometimes tongue in check, sometimes with irony, sometimes with love, and sometimes just cuz. And as an independent film director, I struggle with genre (with or against the convention?), struggle with the mode of production (to Hollywood or not to Hollywood), and with politics (when is the political too impersonal?). We look around and see offerings from BaadAsssss! AND Soul Plane AND Antoine Fisher AND Love and Basketball; a cornucopia of aesthetic and narrative traditions and approaches all in the same generation.

We are in a Sankofa moment, to use the Andinka symbol. We look back in order to look and move forward. To me, this mirrors our current political strategy. We cullud folk are quietly assessing our cultural and political context, strategies and options. And our cinema is in the quiet before the storm. So partake of all that our cultureand cinema has to offer. The best is yet to come.

Rahdi Taylor is a feature film director and on the Board of Directors of AIVF, The Association of Independent Video & Filmmakers. She lives in Oakland, CA.

Blog ON:

The top seven questions you always wanted to ask about Black Film:

Which era of Black cinema got GAME?!
Which Era had the baddest most beautiful females?
Which era had the baddest most beautiful brothas?
Which era had the hippest sounds?
Which era was right on about politics?
Which most closely represents the next wave?
What do you predict for the future of black cinema?

Posted at September 20, 2004 12:13 PM

Comments

I love black film.. I've heard about your monthly film forum and would love to attend. Please send me info.
Thanks!

Posted by: foiegras at September 11, 2005 10:32 PM