This was the film where I first saw myself on screen. This was the film where everything was jazz, cool, yet real. This was the film that showed relationships as I came to witness and experience them.
I just wrote an essay for TheRoot about why this film has endured for so long. And how black writers and filmmakers must re-commit themselves to telling our stories on this level.
Take a look.
Tzyna Pynchback, one of my good writer-friends and I decided to have a conversation about 2009 in all of its beauty and ugliness. We examine the personal and the public and what I think this blog is all about–interrogating culture. What it all means and what can we gather from the music, films, and books that build our cultural lives. This will be the last post for 2009.
abdul ali: Tzyna, thanks so much for talking to me about 2009. We’re less than three days out of this year….decade!
Tzynya: and i want to say good riddance, but with love and respect for all the decade has taught us
aa: what are some of those things this almost decade have taught you? I’ve learned so much about faith–not so much in an institution but in the divine and how we’re a part of that spirit world. We have the power to manifest our visions
t: this decade has been one of personal transformation. i think it’s important for individuals and for artists to be aware of their ability and need to be a changeling, and to embrace reinvention.
aa: can you speak more on the idea of changeling?
t: at the start of this decade I was a messy twenty-something– half wife, half mother, leftover daughter–even worse, I was a messy writer without focus.
aa: I always feel like a messy writer without focus
t: at the end of this decade, I am a better writer because I better understand who I am and who I am not.
aa: that’s awesome…
t: tell me, do you feel 2009 was a profound ending to this decade or just more of the same?
aa: hmm…well as my friend says, 2010 is the actual bookend to the decade but I think there’s always the changing same. There was so much hope and excitement around Obama and it’s difficult to see so much of that waiver. But, I’ve always felt that New Years offers a sense of possibility
t: I think 2010 will be the birth of some collective awareness for people globally (and now I sound like a new age wanna-be guru). I started to feel this way at the year’s half way mark. 2009 was ripe with tumult: hope riding shotgun with fear, despair, and longing.
aa: I suppose it’s what we make it (or don’t make it) i the end. But, you have to admit there were so serious things that happened this year. Michael Jackson’s passing was huge and it was interesting to reflect on why it was so huge.
t: his death came around the time I reconnected with my first love from high school. I learned of MJ’s death via txt message sent from a friend in St. Louis, just as I had been found by a former lover on Facebook. That first night of his death, I sat up most of the night singing all the songs from his Thriller album with my brother.
t: I remembered sitting in the living room of my parents house waiting for the world premier of the music viedo
Thriller, I remembered my brothers, my excitement at being the only family on the block to record that video on VHS.
aa: What does his songs mean/represent to you? For me, they signal the slow co-option of black culture by cultural forces. That’s what his life reminds me of. But his music celebrates life. I really enjoyed it. Still do. He was a genius.
t: MJ’s songs were the soundtrack of my tweens–that wonderful time when you just aware of everything around you and everything is still beautiful. MJ reminds me of being 12 years old and having a crush on the boy across the street and daydreaming of my first kiss, before I understood this world is not safe.
aa: I remember black and white. Thriller was played on TV when music videos began to take off but what I recall most was how lavish his lifesyle was. He seemed bigger than anyone, even himself. I wonder was that the media’s doing or his own orchestration?
t: Maybe both? There has to be a comfort hiding behind spectacle.
aa: ha ha. MJ reminds us of the images of black people on and off the camere.I continue to be unimpressed with what’s happening with Black Cinema, at least as far as American black movies go. Skin was an indie film about a South African situation that was compelling.
t: Recently I saw the film Yesterday, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (note: i will check the exact award title) amazing story of a woman in a small African village living with AIDS and trying to get her young daughter into school.
aa: Why is it films about black folks in other spaces seem more compelling than what’s happening here in the states?
t: I am underwhelmed by what passes as Black Cinema in this country.
aa: Absolutely, by why is this? Black Americans are a dynamic people. Why isn’t our film showing this?
t: I watched The Jefferson’s the other night on television, and George replied to another character, “Nigga please!”, I was shocked, and then suddenly I was not. So much of what is on television, in fiction, on film today is a high-tech rehash of the same outcry from three decades ago.
aa: I’m not so bothered by “Nigga please! I am, however, disturbed to see improvements in so many aspects of black American living but with our art it seems as it it’s frozen, stuck in a time machine. I rarely see myself reflected in film. In fact, I see more of myself in the films like “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader” that have no black people in the film. This is painful to admit.
t: I look at performers like George Lopez and consider the arc of his comedic career and what that reflects for Mexican-Amercians. Lopez’s new late night show is the spin on the Arsenio Hall show from the 90′s, almost twenty years later how far has Black entertainment evolved?
We talk about film often, the two of us, and so often the films we discuss, we love, are not Black films.
aa: Not very much. There’s been a paradigm shift. You cannot assume that just because you throw a script together with some black actors that ALL black people will love it.
We’ve become more sophisticated as an audience. I wonder if black writers and directors should eventually stop writing “black” stories as they’re so ridiculous.
t: Yes!
aa: and just write good stories. which will mean we need more visionary casting directors so that a black actor can get casted in a script that calls for an actor not black person necessarily
t: one of my favorite films this decade was “Closer” with Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Judd Law. The dialogue is sexy and the characters and their relationships and interactions with one another are loving, and wretched, and loathsome–real. I am so immersed in the film, and the characters, the fact they are not black is of no concern or consideration. I see the faces of my friends, of myself in these characters and situations.
Often when I am watching a black American film, their blackness never leaves me, it’s always worn on the top layer of skin. Publisher’s Weekly recently had an article that speaks to that in publishing.
aa: do you mean that their humanity dosn’t show—only their blackness?
t: I think the writing formula for too long has been: 1)black; 2)woman/man/child/
aa: So, after all is said and don what do you think as writers can do in our small way to contribute to the change we want to see?
t: There are too many stories on screen, on page where the emphasis is how, why, when this black man/woman responds to a particular catalyst.
Tell the stories we want to read.
aa: or maybe we should write the stories we want to read and see to quote Toni Morrison.
t: yes, you know i stole that quote from ms. Morrison lol exactly
Publishers Weekly printed a great article on AA Books in Today’s Marketplace. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6711430.html
t: Highlighting what some refer to as the ghetto of publishing: major publishing houses with black imprints. books by, for, and about black people.
t: I do think it comes down to change, reinvention. Black art is ready, dying for reinvention.
aa: I wonder if it needs to die in order to have a rebirth or renaissance…
t: a little death is not always a bad thing. it has not gone gentle into that good night, lol
In my post about the film Precious, I said that contemporary black cinema was/is lacking. Of course the causes for this are many. For one, in the United States commerce comes before art so a lot of films targeting black audiences are often comedies rather than serious dramas. Not to mention less polished screenplays (this is my opinion!) Also we cannot ignore the long history of racism that pervades the Arts in the US. If black Americans were featured in comparable situations to white actors then the idea that we’re equal or even human wouldn’t be so hard to believe. The other thing is that black moviegoers, even middle- and upper- income black moviegoers, tend not to support what you would consider “artsy” films for a number of social and cultural reasons. They’d be right next to you at a Tyler Perry opening. And, I’m not criticizing this. There simply aren’t enough options for black audiences or those who enjoy black cinema. There’s should be a critical study of this.
One of my readers left a comment asking “well, what would you consider a “good” black film according to your criteria?” I’m very grateful for this question as I don’t get to think in terms very often.
So for whatever’s it’s worth, here are some films I believe to be not only good but fresh, important, essential for those who care about film and how black stories are adapted for the silver screen. (Big ups to all my friends who sent me names of movies, participating in this conversation)
As an aside, I’ve joined forces with an amazing team, consisting of a magazine editor, a filmmaker to create an online magazine, dedicated to promoting and critically discussing independent black films. (This will be a future post.)
These are all films I’ve either seen or want to see and got a recommendation for. Feel free to take me to task on any of these films or ones that were omitted.
Daughters of the Dust
The Color Purple
A Lesson Before Dying
When the Levees Broke
Trouble the Water
I am Ali
Sankofa
School Daze
Miracle at St. Ann
Crooklyn
Love Jones
Inkwell
Claudine
Cooley High
Cornbread, Earl, and Me
Something the Lord Made
Glory
Roots
Mama Flora’s Family
The Great Debators
Miss Jane Pittman
Women of Brewster Place
Black Girl
Eve’s Bayou
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Wedding
Malcolm X
Lackawanna Blues
Idlewild
Follow Me Home
Dead Presidents
She Hate Me
Love Jones
I’m Gonna Get You Sucka
Coming to America
Boomerang
Harlem Nights
Be Kind Rewind
The Wiz
Feast of All Saints
Boyz n the Hood
The Josephine Baker Story
She’s Gotta Have It
Do the Right Thing
Bamboozled
In appreciation suggestions made by Kupdena Auset, Michael Wilson, Tzynia L. Pinchback, Angela Koi, Angela Watkins, Asha Bandele, and Juan Gaddis via Facebook.
I’m not sure if there’s been a film in my generation that has been the object of so much mixed emotion, and perhaps vitriol, drawing a line in the sand along gender lines. Almost all of the guys that I know have talked about Precious at arm’s length. Some of us have even said “I’m not ready to see that film.” Yet my female friends have almost unanimously said “I got to go see it”, etc.
The movie’s been out for a few weeks now. Granted, I’ve been busy but I know I could have seen it sooner. There was almost an instant retreat when I saw the extra large darkskinned black women featured prominently on film—a rarity for contemporary film. And this is unfortunate as the darkskinned black woman is a part of all of us, so why the hesitation? I suppose it’s because the big-boned black women aren’t framed in a flattering way and this is a part of a larger narrative. Remember growing up we’d call the fat black girl in class “fat and ugly?” Seeing this film made me confront the inherent self-loathing that so many of us have inherited.
For starters, I’ve always felt that American film, Black American cinema in particular, was lacking in so many ways. It didn’t have the pacing of indie films that I so love. I didn’t treat its viewers as intelligent. There wasn’t much poetry or going on with the cinematography—as these are all things I look for in films, as well as literature. And of course, most black characters are written as flat, stereotypes, never truly inhabiting that space that we all know is human and difficult to categorize.
Add to that, in my entire twenty years of movie going there may have been only ten films worthy of discussion on an intelligent level. The rest of them seem to embarrass the race rather than illuminate audiences about black life.
Considering all of that, I said “what the hell” and went to see a 9:30 showing yesterday evening and I was instantly surprised. Surprised because I knew angry black women back home in New York who were that cruel to their children, who were that mentally ill, and who were that invisible to society at large. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t think much about all of the “stereotyping rhetoric” that has been programmed from reading Donald Bogle and taking literary criticism in college.
Instead, what I saw was a young woman-child who was curious, fierce, and longing to be more fully human. I didn’t cry or anything but there was great satisfaction seeing her fight back. And I was appalled that her mother would throw a television at her own daughter holding a baby.
If nothing else, this film raised the issue of mental illness and abuse in a way that we haven’t seen it before. Of course, there’s The Color Purple but it’s so dated that it almost feels a world away. Harlem in the 1980s feels very real and close. There still are young black men who disrespect women walking by. There still are depressed black women who are scarily codependent on the system. There are so many parents who are jealous of their children and don’t want to see them advance. And as hard as this is to admit, there’s so much sexual, physical, and psychological abuse that goes on. I can’t imagine the shame the survivors (not victims) of those abuses must feel daily.
And yet while I think Precious was ultimate important to see notwithstanding its technical flaws. Have you ever seen a film so ham-handed in stacking so many negatives on one character? Not only was Precious an illiterate, but she was obese, portrayed as less than attractive even though in her fantasies she was quite pretty and glamorous. She was raped twice from her father, poor, and to top that off she contracted the HIV virus. Something felt imbalanced. I don’t know maybe it’s just me.
I still insist that writers, filmmakers, directors, moviegoers (of all colors, education, class) demand more nuanced stories of black life. It’s disheartening to be a film lover and to never see yourself depicted on silver screen. I don’t know what to tell my five year-old when she gets a little older when she goes looking for herself on screen. Maybe precious can PUSH each of us closer to see black life mirror art. This film felt more or less like a documentary adaptation to a novel. And it was a good film but it had the potential to be great. (This might be another conversation.)
