Films shed light on black people’s struggle
Whether we want to be or not, right now, we’re all part of a historic tidal wave bigger than each of us. In the current COVID era, when you might not be able to be out on the front lines taking a stand against police brutality, you might want to see what you can do from home. One answer: Watch as many films by, about and for black lives as you can.
Many people are sharing reading lists, stories and secondslong protest videos — but don’t forget the crucial role that feature films have played in the past 100 years as testament, as education, as a builder of values of love and solidarity and struggle. Recent bigscreen releases available for streaming include Oaklandborn director Ryan Coogler’s first feature
film, “Fruitvale Station,” starring Michael B. Jordan as 22yearold Oscar Grant, who was fatally shot by a BART police officer in 2009, and “Just Mercy,” starring Jordan opposite Jamie Foxx as wrongfully convicted death row inmate Walter McMillian.
Here are several other options to better understand the newest chapter of the African American freedom struggle: “Sorry to Bother You” (2018): Probably the most energetic, brassy and mercilessly funny satire to make a splash in the mainstream in quite a while, Boots Riley (born to a family of Chicago social justice organizers who moved to Oakland) holds no quarter. His targets are multifaceted: telemarketers, labor strikes, Bay Area big tech, leftists (white and black) who talk a good talk but never walk it, the white voice that guarantees “success” even if the speaker is hopelessly mediocre, and the instant meme that people share without serious critical reflection.
Watch it: Streaming on Hulu.
“Black Panthers” (1968): French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda (“Cléo From 5 to 7,” “Le Bonheur”) was one of her generation’s premium documentarians. Here, Varda follows an Oakland protest against the imprisonment of Huey P. Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party. This nonfiction short is one of her typically remarkable glimpses at the mood of a powerful political moment, 1968, a year that’s back with us today with a vengeance.
For supplementary viewing on the Panthers and their legacy, you might want to check out Howard Alk and Mike Gray’s “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971; rent or buy on Amazon) and Stanley Nelson Jr.’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” (2015; stream on PBS through July 4).
Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.
“Losing Ground” (1982): The visionary Kathleen Collins is behind this recently rediscovered 1982 jewel, one of the first fictional features directed by a black woman. We follow a black philosophy professor, played by the luminescent Seret Scott, who feels stifled by her husband, played by the playwright/ novelist/director Bill Gunn, while on the search for the ecstasy that she theorizes about in her latest essay. On an impulse that turns out to be her path to selfrealization, she agrees to be the leading lady, Frankie, of a film by a young aspiring black director (her leading man, Johnny, is Duane Jones, the star of George A. Romero’s 1968 horror classic “Night of the Living Dead”).
Collins’ film is a fluid, devastating study of disintegrating love, as well as a black woman’s profound meditation on what it means to create one’s self again. What should have been a prolific career was cut tragically short in 1988, when Collins died from breast cancer in Manhattan.
Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.
“America to Me” (2018): This 10episode miniseries from Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) is one of the most urgent pieces of U.S. nonfiction filmmaking to come out in the past few years.
James and a crew of directors follow a diverse cross section of kids — black, white, Latino, biracial — in the suburban Chicago public high school of Oak Park and River Forest. They track each student across the 201516 school year, mixing big, set events (homecoming, prom, sporting events, spoken word competitions, graduation) with spontaneous everyday interactions among teachers, students, staff and administrators — and the misunderstandings, microaggressions and frustrations that arise as many push for more frank discussions of race and school equity. The conversations are widereaching: class, white privilege, black hair, biracial identities, interracial dating, artistic expression.
Watch it: Streaming on Amazon Prime, Starz and DirecTV.
“South” (1999): Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s unforgettable 1999 film is about antiblack brutality in the U.S. Her jumpingoff points are James Baldwin’s essay “Nobody Knows My Name” and the 1999 lynching of James Byrd Jr. by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas.
For minutes, Akerman’s camera tracks the curves of the road where Byrd’s body was dragged by a pickup truck, which is heightened by her cinematic replication of the sinuous curves of Baldwin’s sentences. It’s a film that has less to do with sensationalizing the murder than giving an accurate, foreigner’s report of the place where the crime occurred and the atmosphere of the people who come together to mourn yet another lost member of their family.
Deeply painful to watch, Akerman spiritually grapples with America’s countless sins against black flesh.
Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.
“Killer of Sheep” (1978): Perhaps the definitive film of the black independent film movement known as the L.A. Rebellion, Charles Burnett’s 1978 masterpiece focuses on the majorityblack neighborhood of Watts in South Central Los Angeles during the later 1970s.
We follow a black family led by Stan (Henry G. Sanders), the father who works at a slaughterhouse, his unemployed wife (Kaycee Moore), and their two children. The memory of the 1965 Watts rebellion hangs over each scene.
Burnett focuses on a black family’s quotidian doldrums in a radical respect for the burden of labor, in all the forms it assumes, that, for the poor, can often seem for nothing. It’s a movie crafted out of felt observations rather than empty projections of what the filmmakers think people should be.
Watch it: Available through Milestone Films.