Black Movies Matter: breakout black American cinema

Denzel Washington’s Oscar-nominated Fences is in cinemas, the latest in a breakout year for black American film 

For two years running, the Academy for Motion Picture Arts failed to nominate a black artist in an acting category, prompting an #OscarsSoWhite Twitter campaign and protests against the lack of diversity in the film industry generally. However, the last 12 months has seen a bumper year, reflected in a range of non-white talent being recognised in the Oscar nominations both in front of and behind the camera. Seven non-white performers have received acting nods and Bradford Young is only the second black cinematographer to be nominated, while Moonlight’s editor, Joi McMillon, is the first black woman to receive a nomination for editing. Gil Robertson, President and co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association, effused to Variety: “By any measurement, it’s been an exceptional year for blacks in film. From comedies to high-quality dramas and documentaries, 2016 will forever represent a bonanza year for black cinema and all cinema really.”

Fences and the specifics of black American culture

Fences has received four nominations, including Best Picture, but the film’s torturous journey to the screen is symptomatic of the difficulty black filmmakers have to contend with. There were plans to film August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play in the late 80s with Eddie Murphy in a supporting role and Barry Levinson directing. However, these were scuppered by Wilson’s insistence on the director being black. This led to a falling out with Murphy and what looked like a terminal stall in development purgatory. A couple of years later, Wilson penned his side of the argument in Spin Magazine, October 1990 (reprinted in full here): “I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans.”

The director and star of the new film version – Denzel Washington – fits Wilson’s criteria nigh-on perfectly. In fact, Washington not only shares the specifics of black American culture, he has contributed magnificently to it over the last four decades – The Magnificent Seven notwithstanding. Working from Wilson’s own screenplay, Washington has produced a mature and nuanced piece of drama. Troy (Washington) is a working stiff, a garbage man with a gift for the gab who unwinds in his yard by weaving his self-aggrandising mythology to his best friend Bono (Stephen Henderson), his long-suffering wife Rose (Viola Davis) and his sons Lyons and Cory. Initially, he appears as an almost heroic patriarch, espousing a philosophy of sacrifice and manly responsibility but whose love is going to be so tough, it might not even be love. “Liking you ain’t part of the bargain,” he tells his youngest son. Of course, Troy doth protest too much and the clay feet of the head of the family will be exposed, as will be the naked desire of a heart not quite calloused over.

With no white speaking parts at all, the black experience for once has nothing to do with the behaviour of whites: racist, well-meaning or otherwise. Being black isn’t addressed as a ‘problem’, but what it is is a lived experience. Troy is a working-class homeowner. His promotion from garbage slinger to driver is both a sign of incremental progress and paradoxically alienating. Sitting up there in the cab, he might be warm and dry but he misses jawing with his pals out in the weather. Ultimately though, this is about generations and how a powerfully ambiguous father figure is trapped trying to teach the lessons he learned, which are no longer relevant to his uncomprehending son.

The troubled black masculinity of Moonlight

If Fences is about the oppressive presence of family and a father who sucks all the oxygen out of the house, Moonlight takes as its subject, Chiron ‘Little’ – played in order of youth by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes – who grows to manhood without a father and whose mother (an unrecognisable Naomie Harris) is a sporadically threatening drug addict. Based on the unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Barry Jenkins’ second feature is a bildungsroman in three chapters. Dealing with his loneliness, bullying and his nascent sexuality, Little receives friendship and support from local drug dealer Juan (a career best turn from Mahershala Ali). Having a dealer as the moral centre is just one of many original turns Jenkins makes. Once more white people are little more than a distant noise in a life that is coming to terms with itself. As with Fences, survival strategies – the armour we put on and the walls we build – trap what they’re supposed to protect and our safe spaces become little more than mobile prisons of loneliness.

The true-life black stories of Loving and Hidden Figures

The troubled masculine angst of Moonlight and Fences gives way to the altogether more conventionally inspirational story of Hidden Figures. Pre-tooled for school viewing during Black History Month, Theodore Melfi’s movie is a slick and entertaining corrective of all the Space Race movies – The Right Stuff, Apollo 13 – which showed NASA’s staff to be as pale as moon dust. Here instead we learn about the segregated Western Computer Division, back when computers weren’t machines but the smart people who crunched the numbers that made space flight possible. A trio of friends made up of Katherine G Johnson (Taraji P Henson), a numbers whiz who out thinks her male white colleagues and contributes vitally to the Mercury program; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), who runs the section though she’s not recognised or paid as a supervisor; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who becomes the first black female engineer to work for NASA.

Whereas Fences and Moonlight are both driven by black visions behind and in front of the camera, Hidden Figures – though based on a black writer’s work – was directed by a white man from a screenplay by Melfi and Allison Schroeder, also white. This might be neither here nor there, but the film also requires that Johnson's white boss (played by Kevin Costner) comes to the defence of his black protégé in a crowd-pleasing scene of creaking unoriginality, while racist Kirsten Dunst has to go on her own journey and learn from a teachable moment in history – and about that history. The facts are significantly tweaked to make the racial divisions more clear cut and familiar. In fact, NASA was desegregated a full three years before the supposed beginning of the film in 1961. And Dorothy Vaughn had been working as a supervisor since 1949. Perhaps, seeing the indignity of Katherine having to dash across the length of the facility to reach the ‘coloureds only’ restrooms adds a comfortingly familiar way of thinking about civil rights, but it also diminishes the women who stood toe to toe with their white male counterparts. Of course, civil rights was about bus seats, rest rooms and drinking fountains, but it wasn’t only about those things. (Read an extract from Margot Lee Shetterly’s book on which the film is based here.)

Loving is also a true story and also directed by a white man, Jeff Nichols, but here a white man is one half of the couple that are at the centre of the story. Ruth Negga plays Mildred Loving (neé Jeter), whose marriage to Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton), a quiet and unassuming construction worker, breaks the state of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws and prompts a protracted and historical legal battle. The film is as solid and workmanlike as the houses Richard builds. All emotions are kept modestly in check and years go by as the case winds its way through the courts. The key scene of the film comes when Life photographer Grey Villet (played by the consistently brilliant Michael Shannon) visits the couple at home and takes a couple of photographs which will become iconic. The quiet normality and the dignity of the couple are mimicked by the film itself, relying on the underplayed performances of the two principle actors.

Black filmmakers dominate in non-fiction category

The fictionalised true stories of Loving and Hidden Figures are one thing but perhaps even more significantly the documentary category at this year’s Oscars is dominated by black filmmakers: Ava DuVernay for 13th, Raoul Peck for I Am Not Your Negro, Ezra Edelman for OJ: Made in America and Roger Ross Williams for Life Animated. For all we might hold ourselves occasionally aloof of the glitz of the Oscars, they matter. They confer visibility and power. They inspire. And this year, more than any other they give a platform that will almost necessarily be political. Now, there’s a good chance that La La Land will sweep the board. There’s already a pre-emptive backlash to what is being looked at, with its yearning for ‘the good old days’ as a film that’s too Trump for comfort: a MA GA Land if you will. And there is the worry that this success might breed complacency. As Barry Jenkins told the Guardian, the “films this year won’t be the same films as next year. We just have to be diligent and be mindful of these different voices and different kinds of work.”

---

Loving was released 3 Feb by Universal

Fences is released 10 Feb by Paramount

Hidden Figures is released 17 Feb by 20th Century Fox

Moonlight is released 17 Feb by Altitude

13th is available to stream on Netflix

I Am Not Your Negro is released 4 Apr by Altitude

Life Animated is available to watch on iTunes and video-on-demand