Black Film Archive’s 3rd Birthday: 3 Answers to My 3 Most Frequently Asked Questions

On representation, trauma, and Black film’s future.

Friends, three years ago today Black Film Archive was born! It has been a whirlwind of gratitude and transformation. I am endlessly in awe of the community we’ve built here and the care you all have for the work. As one birthday treat I am answering my most frequently asked questions. As another, in the comments, tell me a film you love and I will give you a recommendation from Black Film Archive to watch this week. I also stand firm in the full reflections I offered last year as well.

What does representational politics mean to you and your work? 

Foxy Brown (1974)

As a child I longed to be represented by the media I consumed. It is the way of children. I, a Native New Orleanian, was in middle school when Hurricane Katrina disrupted the way of American life and in return burst my idea of representation’s endless possibility. People in my direct community were flattened to one-note illustrations of their humanity. Instead of being viewed as Black New Orleanians hoping to survive a once-in-a-lifetime storm they were purported to be savages, looters, and criminals. The news reports that painted us that way circulated widely and has had endless effects on how New Orleanians and Black survival is portrayed across all narrative media. Representational politics around cinema, as it is widely discussed, requires us to be flattened to another’s idea of who we can be. “To be entrapped in other people’s fictions puts us under arrest,” Toni Cade Bambara succinctly says in her guiding essay “Why Black Cinema?”

Representations value, in my opinion, is not in the ways visibility can be weaponized as a silencing dagger (or beacon) but in its ability to be challenged, contested, and contextualized. Often these conversations boil down to believing the only way forward for Black media is to be visible in a positive manner. But I do not think cultural representation can be positive or negative,¹ nor that racial codes as we understand them intracommunally nor externally should limit how we define ourselves on screen or otherwise. To be seen by media is something, a special something, but to demand more of our work is the only way the fullness of our humanity can be visible on screen.² It is not in my personal politics to organize my desires by notions of inferiority or lack. When I view a film for Black Film Archive, I am often thinking of the cultural / societal codes the film is trying to convey, the actor who is asked to convey them, and how the film registers with me in an emotional and historical context.

I think about films I consider among my favorites like Fronza Woods’s “Killing Time” or Powell and Pressburger’s “A Matter of Life and Death”³ These films are not my favorite because I render visibility of myself in them but because they — deeply considered explorations of humanity’s possibilities — render me infinitely anew as I view or think of them.

…If that’s so, what do you think about trauma in Black film? 

Claudine (1974)

Many of the conversations about trauma in Black film rely on flattening it, as I mention above. Consider this: There is a film from the 1970s I love. It centers a Black single mother on welfare with six children trying to survive the grittiness of Harlem. The film, Claudine (1974) —which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month— is a revelation that stems from a scenario many consider ‘traumatic.’ Infused by the pulsating sounds of Gladys Knight and the Pips, the romantic drama makes the rhythm of Black life and love legible without negating the hardships that are often wrapped up in the legibility. Our motifs, thoughts, sensuality, and desires are not second fiddle but the main event as it showcases the ways love is possible in a world where Black people are often asked to make impossible choices.

As I say in Black Film Archive’s original note:

As debates about Black film’s association with trauma rage on, I hope Black Film Archive can offer a different lens through which to understand Black cinematic history, one that takes into consideration the full weight of the past. Through this lens, it is easy to see that the notion that “Black films are only traumatic” is based on generalizations and impressions of recent times (often pinned to the success of films like “12 Years a Slave”) rather than a deeper engagement with history, which reveals that “slave films” constitute only a small percentage of the Black films that have been made. I hope conversations evolve to consider the expansive archive of radical ideas and expression found in Black films’ past.

….My theory about trauma in Black film is akin to Frankie Beverly and Maze’s “Joy and Pain,” one cannot exist without the other. I created Black Film Archive: Tenderness in Black Film microsite as a response to this curiosity. Writing in my introductory note:

In the February 1926 issue of Crisis Magazine, W.E.B Du Bois poses ‘a questionnaire’ to the magazine’s readership about the ways Black people are represented in art. “What are Negroes to do when they are continually painted at their worst and judged by the public as they are painted?” the pioneer scholar asks.

That question is echoed in the post-George Floyd Black audience that asked if Black films’s only offering is trauma. This ponderance is the tenant to which the Black Film Archive: Tenderness in Black Film exhibition responds directly. How does tenderness– defined here as pointed moments of affection where Black possibility, transformation, and connection bloom– offer a new mode of understanding our filmic past, present, and future?

As pioneering Black film director Oscar Micheaux writes, “I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the colored heart from close range.” In this close read, new truths about Black cinema and ourselves are revealed.

Which is to say, I am interested in films about all subjects and facets of Black life: slavery, crime, ‘hood films,’ and anything in between or beyond because we have only scratched the surface on presenting Black life on screen, ‘trauma’ and all. I want to see films that unmask Black life; films that mirrors what I know to be true and truths I have not yet been able to confront; films that don’t bend to propagandic desires to flatten us into assumed nothingness as media without tension, conflict, and truth would.

What do you imagine the future of Black film is? 

Sun Ra: Joyful Noise (1980)

Claudine (1974) was produced by Ossie Davis’s Third World Cinema Corporation —whose mission was to create and produce films from a ‘minority perspective.’ The corporation filled most production jobs with talent of color as their organizing principle was to disrupt conventional narratives from the bottom up. To me, the future of Black film has artists, programmers, critics, cultural spectators, and the infinite others have a relationship to Black film’s past and work together to reach its future. There are organizations that artists can model themselves after, like Third World Cinema… that make sense in today’s everchanging film reality. There are an endless amount of lessons to learn from Black cinema’s independent movements and negotiations in Hollywood that can inform today’s artists.

I believe Black film’s future is all of us recognizing that art— its creation and engagement— is something larger than our individual selves and requires care in every mode from creation, distribution, exhibition, and viewing; I believe that our tools of care must always expand as the form does.

What do I believe Black film’s future is? …I believe it to be infinite if artists are given the space to create and decisionmakers trust them to do so without squandering their vision. …I believe it to be infinite if Black critics are allowed to challenge the ways of Black cinema without it seeming as a negative representation of the race. …I believe it to be infinite if audiences were consistently delivered what is promised and owed. …I believe it to be infinite…

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In the comments below, tell me a film you love (any film at all—old or new) and I will give you a recommendation from Black Film Archive to watch this week.

1. The work of assessing positive and negative racial codes are often done by non-Black people. In that view, I do not believe it is my assertion as an artist, writer, critic, or

2. I write about what I believe the role of an artist is here if you’re searching for more.

3. This article predates Black Film Archive; back when this Substack was for my casual writing.