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african-american directors series: eleven p.m. (richard maurice, 1928)

A true curio, an historic film, and a perfect fit for Black History Month. Richard D. Maurice was (and is) a little-known figure in early film making who founded a film company in Detroit in 1920. The company's first feature, Nobody's Children, was released that year ... there are no known existing prints. The exact release date of Eleven P.M. is unknown, but it came near the end of the 1920s. Those are the only two feature films known to have been produced by the Maurice Film Company. Maurice went on to become involved in railroad workers unions.

Surviving prints of Eleven P.M. are in poor shape, but it is possible to watch the film today. And it's an oddball, silent, filled with imaginative techniques, narrative complexity, and unexpected turns. One can assume a low budget, as many of the actors play multiple parts. This gets very confusing at times ... Orine Johnson appears to play a key character's girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother (those two appear in the same scene, I'm not so sure about that), and the girlfriend's daughter as a grown woman. So much of the film is confusing, as the story jumps ahead years at a time ... sometimes we see a title card reading "A few days later", other times we're left to infer on our own that years have gone by. Generous film historians have called Maurice's film "experimental", and that's certainly possible. However odd the movie gets, you're regularly reminded that there is some talent behind the camera. But having said that, the final result isn't notably better than cult trash classics by the likes of Ed Wood. The acting is variable (and that's putting it kindly), the plot is incoherent (intended or not), and while it's kinda fun to see the hero reincarnated as a dog who gets revenge on the villain, the effects are painful. It's no surprise when, after barely more than an hour of screen time, everything is wrapped up with "it was all a dream".

Eleven P.M. is worth seeing, although its presence on the Slate New Black Film Canon of the 75 best movies by Black directors says more about the few existing examples of silent Black films than it does about the quality about this film. You can watch the entire picture on YouTube.

african-american directors series: rodney king (spike lee, 2017)

This is the seventeenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 17 is called "True Crime Week":

If you listened to any podcasts over the winter break, there's a good chance some of them were true crime. Truman Capote's groundbreaking non-fiction novel In Cold Blood is generally credited with creating the modern true crime genre, and the genre has seen a resurgence in the past decade, particularly with podcasts like Serial and My Favorite Murder. They've gotten so popular that we're now seeing fictional stories about true crime podcasts, like the show Only Murders in the Building or the novel Devil House. There have also been countless new movies and shows, as well as controversy regarding the sensationalizing of real tragedies. Murders, crimes, journalism, and investigations fascinate us, and this week we're on the hunt for the best examples in film. This list may be a good place to start.

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen true crime film.

This film has the imprimatur of Spike Lee, but it's not clear how much he "directed" Rodney King. The film documents the one-man show, written by and starring Roger Guenveur Smith, and it's Smith who appears to be the real auteur. There's no point in evaluating it as a film ... it's a stage presentation with few frills. Smith's powerful performance makes it all worthwhile. He adopts several voices over the course of the film while relying on research he did about King, the case, and the social ramifications. We don't really get to know the man Rodney King ... in fact, Smith shows that "Rodney King" is almost a blank slate onto which people project their opinions. It must be hard to be that blank slate, and King is a sympathetic figure here, but Smith goes at it from the outside, which is how most people reference Rodney King to this day. Smith opens with the words of Texas rapper Willie D, from his song "Rodney K":

Fuck Rodney King in his ass
When I see tha mothafucka I'mma blast
Boom in his head, boom, boom in his back
Just like that

People who don't recognize this as the lyrics to a song will be shocked into the film's beginning, as Smith doesn't specify that he is quoting from someone else. It's use here shows that Smith is going to look at King from a variety of perspectives. All the while, Smith's work as an actor is superb, as he works up a sweat, gets emotionally involved, puts us in the shoes of King and everyone else. At these times, the lack of artifice in the film making might actually help.

african-american directors series/film fatales #219: love & basketball (gina prince-bythewood, 2000)

Here I go again. I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. The first category is "Watch a film from the CC40 Boxset."

This was an interesting way to begin the Challenge. The CC40 Boxset was produced by Criterion to celebrate their 40 years in the collection business, and features 40 films of all sorts. I had never seen Love & Basketball, but was definitely looking forward to it. It made Slate's New Black Film Canon, and is #493 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century. I have liked the films I have seen from Gina Prince-Bythewood, especially The Woman King, and was happy to see her debut.

Love & Basketball is another strong film from the writer-director. It follows the life of two neighbors from childhood through adulthood. Both love basketball, but while one (Quincy, played by Omar Epps) has a fairly straightforward path, since he is male and his father is an NBA star, Monica (Sanaa Lathan) must fight both the social stigma of being a female athlete and the fewer potential options open to her when she becomes an adult. Prince-Bythewood efficiently blends both angles in the title. The love story and the sports story both land within the norms of their respective genres, but the even balance in the film benefits both, plus the title shows an additional angle, for the love is not just between the leads, but also between each of them and the sport.

The cast is filled with recognizable names who are fun to see when they were all 25 years younger than today: Alfre Woodard, Regina Hall, Harry Lennix, Dennis Haysbert, Gabrielle Union, Tyra Banks, Boris Kodjoe. But the film is rightfully carried by the two leads, who have good charisma, on their own and together. Lathan might be the most impressive, in that she had never played basketball before, yet is acceptably talented in the movie. (The IMDB gives a related anecdote. "Producer Spike Lee believed the female lead should have believable basketball skills. Gina Prince-Bythewood said in an interview 'I saw over 700 people for the part: actors, ballplayers, people who had never acted before in their life. It finally came down to Sanaa Lathan and Niesha Butler [a star player at Georgia Tech and 1999 Atlantic Coast Conference rookie of the year]. I put Sanaa with a basketball coach for two months and Niesha with an acting coach.'")

african-american directors series/film fatales #214: alma's rainbow (ayoka chenzira, 1994)

Alma's Rainbow has an interesting history. It was the first feature for writer/director Ayoka Chenzira, who had made several shorts. It was self-funded by Chenzira, and featured a cast of unknowns ... heck, 30 years later, and I still didn't recognize anyone but Isaiah Washington, who had a small role. The talent behind the camera was impressive, including editor Lillian Benson, cinematographer Ronald K. Gray, and costume designer Sidney Kai Innis, all of them new to me. The film looks great, helped by a fairly recent 4k restoration.

It's a coming-of-age movie, and I love the title: Rainbow is the daughter of Alma. It's a slice of life, and it offers a lot of insight into the culture of African-American women. There is a confidence in the film making that makes the movie feel "real". The acting is solid ... there's pretty much nothing bad I can say about the movie. It doesn't jump out at you, nor is that Chenzira's intention. It's never boring, and something is always catching your eye. It's an indie film that succeeds. It was ignored at the time, and was barely distributed, but the restoration resulted in the film finally getting the attention it has always deserved. It is one of 75 films selected for Slate's New Black Film Canon.

african-american directors series: sweet sweetback's baadassss song (melvin van peebles, 1971)

This is the first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 1 is called "The American History of X Week":

Hollywood has a fickle relationship with the letter X. These days it's a popular (if increasingly uninspired) choice for the rare franchise that makes it to a tenth installment: The Land Before Time, Friday the 13th, The Fast and Furious, and Saw have all adopted the roman numeral. But before this new millennium fad, X meant something very different.

In 1968, in response to the desire for a more faceted system of ratings—and, in its early days, to promote the kind of artistic freedom the Motion Picture Production Code had quashed—the MPAA replaced its "approved" and "not approved" seals with a quartet of letters: G, M, R, and X. The X-rating indicated, simply, that a film was appropriate for adults only.

Soon after, in 1969, Midnight Cowboy burst onto the scene. Worried about exposing youngsters to the film's frank homosexual content and depictions of drug use, United Artists chose to self-apply the X-rating, hoping the choice would not only protect American youth but drum up publicity, too. Because the MPAA had failed to trademark their new content advisory system, everyone from Walt Disney to Gerard Damiano (director of Deep Throat) could slap any rating they wished on their work. And the porn industry wished. Once the floodgates had opened, however, the X-rating didn't last long. By 1973, Hollywood studios had given up on the rating (the adult film industry's tongue-in-cheek co-opting having soured it), and the purveyors of explicit films had done the same, instead preferring to use "XXX" to denote the strength of the adult content in their movies. The X-rating languished in Hollywood until 1990 (although independent and international filmmakers didn't shy away), when the MPAA replaced it with the newly minted—and trademarked—NC-17.

To kick off The Letterboxd Season Challenge's tenth installment (LSC10, incidentally, not LSCX), we take a look back at the original era of X. This week's challenge is to watch a mainstream (non-porn) MPAA X-rated film from the rating's 22-year lifespan, conveniently compiled in this list from C Collins.

In 1971, Huey Newton wrote an extensive analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, beginning, "It is the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man." Newton found the film ripe for explication, and his lengthy piece provides insight into the film and the times. Watching Sweet Sweetback in 2024, we recognize it as a movie of its times, but it retains relevance today, for the situation for black men in America is only partly improved from 1971.

Speaking solely in terms of its impact on American cinema, Sweet Sweetback is trendsetting. Yes, it was "rated X by an all-white jury", and it comes by that rating honestly, with several seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. There is also extreme violence, but these scenes affect us differently depending on who is performing the violence. When white men beat black men, we feel anger ... when black men retaliate, we feel redemption.

As a kid, I remember hearing music on FM radio made by Van Peebles. It was like nothing I'd heard, a combination of jazzy underpinnings and poetic readings. Van Peebles told of lives outside of my white suburban situation, and it was memorable ... it opened up some odd new worlds. Van Peebles is present on the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback, backed by Earth, Wind & Fire, who released their first two albums in 1971. What sounded like music from outer space on the radio makes perfect sense as the accompaniment to Sweetback's adventures.

Van Peebles worked on a very low budget, partly because no big studios would finance him, although that gave him the independence he needed. He uses an experimental touch at times ... the film has roots in the French New Wave. Things get repetitive near the end, but it doesn't ruin the movie. There is a clear auteur behind the film, as befits a movie where the same person is producer, director, writer, editor, star, and soundtrack contributor. No one else could have made Sweet Sweetback. Along with Shaft, also released in 1971, Sweetback also kicked off the blaxploitation genre.

african-american directors series: menace ii society (albert and allen hughes, 1993)

I'm not sure, but I don't think I've seen this movie since it came out more than 30 years ago. It had a huge impact on me, in particular, the performance of Larenz Tate as O-Dog.

It's an amazing supporting cast: Glenn Plummer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Samuel L. Jackson (I have seen him in more movies than any other actor, 41 and counting), Khandi Alexander, Arnold Johnson, Saafir, Pooh Man, MC Eiht, Too $hort, Bill Duke, Charles S. Dutton, and more. Tate's co-lead, Tyrin Turner, is by necessity less flamboyant, but he is effective. But it's Tate who grabs the screen. Credit to the Hughes Brothers and writer Tyger Williams for creating the character Tate portrays. Over the past 30 years, Larenz Tate has shown his versatile side ... his work isn't defined by O-Dog. But I didn't know that in 1993, and his acting is so believable I forgot he was an actor.

O-Dog seems to take joy out of killing people, and the way he shows off a surveillance tape of one of his murder/robberies is cringe-worthy, except Tate makes that seem joyful, too. The film is not exactly celebratory ... most of the main characters come to tragic ends due to their ways of life. But, in an odd way for a movie so full of excessive violence, the Hughes Brothers don't overplay their hands.

In 2002, a Brazilian film, City of God, reminded me a lot of Menace II Society. It's a better film, one of the all-time classics in fact, and the "O-Dog" character in the Brazilian movie makes O-Dog seem almost subdued. But it's no crime to fall short of a great movie like City of God, and Menace II Society is even better than I remembered it. It is astonishing that this was not only the directorial debut for the Hughes Brothers, who previously had only done a few music videos, but they were only 20 years old at the time.

african-american directors series: is that black enough for you ?!? (elvis mitchell, 2022)

This is the thirty-second film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 32 is called "Remembering Belafonte Week":

From pbs.org:

With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, [Harry] Belafonte was one of the first Black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer; many still know him for his signature hit "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)," and its call of "Day-O! Daaaaay-O." But he forged a greater legacy once he scaled back his performing career in the 1960s and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artists are "gatekeepers of truth."

He stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist. Few kept up with Belafonte’s time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights movement.

This week, your task is to watch a film starring Harry Belafonte as we mark the first anniversary of his passing. Whether as an actor, singer, or activist, Belafonte was a formidable force, and the world is made poorer by his absence, yet undoubtedly richer in the wake of his presence.

It's a bit of a cheat to use this documentary as "a film starring Harry Belafonte," although it appears on the list we are supplied, so it's not an official cheat. Belafonte is fairly prominent, both as an example of black cinema and as a commentator on cinema. But the driving force behind Black Enough is writer/director Elvis Mitchell. whose career as a film critic spans more than 40 years.

The films that Mitchell chooses to demonstrate how blackness was presented in films are the usual. Two things make Black Enough especially valuable. First, he has a good selection of commentators, not just Belafonte, but also people like Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, Margaret Avery, and Billy Dee Williams. Since Mitchell's primary focus is on the Black cinema of the 70s, he gives us Antonio Fargas, Glynn Turman, and others. There are behind the scenes people like director Charles Burnett and producer Suzanne De Passe. Even Zendaya turns up, saying "We have so many stories to tell. We just wanna see more of us existing in all different forms, and I think that is a common frustration, I think, amongst my peers. We just wanna see us just being kids or, like, in sci-fi, whatever."

It's Mitchell's take on 70s Black Cinema that is most important for the film. His vast knowledge of film matters, but he also shows a genuine affection for the movies and stars of the day that don't always get positive reactions. Pam Grier was almost a genre all by herself. Mitchell doesn't just show us Superfly, he talks about the sequels. And he discusses the more mainstream films of the day like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues. There is a lot to learn from Black Enough, but Mitchell never talks down to his audience.

african-american directors series: symbiopsychotaxiplasm: take one (willliam greaves, 1968)

This film is as hard to describe as it is to pronounce its title. Letterboxd and the IMDB classify it as a documentary. Writer/director William Greaves produced more than 200 documentaries, and in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm he is the on-screen director and writer of the film, as himself. The actors all appear as themselves ... the only one you might recognize is Susan Anspach, two years before Five Easy Pieces. In the film, Greaves is making a movie with the actors ... the crew also appear in the film, and we see the process of filmmaking. We see the same scene over and over ... it seems to serve as a screen test for the various actors. The best equivalent I can come up with is Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up.

There is no real narrative thrust to the film, and the cinéma vérité appearance adds to the documentary feel. But I don't know ... sometimes it feels about as "real" as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Wikipedia describes it thusly: "Greaves creates a circular meta-documentary about a documentary, a documentary about a documentary and a documentary documenting a documentary about a documentary."

You can't make this stuff up. The IMDB tells us that "William Greaves believed that he had made a masterpiece, and that the only place to première it was the Cannes Film Festival. So he carried the print to France himself, where it was screened for programmers. However, the projectionist made the mistake of showing the reels out of order. The film was turned down. Greaves came home, figured he had made a mistake, and put the film in his closet." It appears to have mostly stayed in that closet until the early 90s, when it was shown once or twice. Steve Buscemi saw it and loved it ... Steven Soderberg soon joined the list of admirers. The film was finally re-released in 2005. It was named to the Slate Black Film Canon, and is #627 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

geezer cinema/african-american directors series: bob marley: one love (reinaldo marcus green, 2024)

Biopics. I don't hate 'em, I see a lot of them, but I rarely look forward to them. My expectations are always low. I have never thought too hard about why that is. Biopics about musicians are especially problematic, because if they don't include the artist's music, there's a big hole in the center of the film, but if they do include the music, it's often in an attempt to tie events in the artist's life to specific songs, and I've always found that to be nonsense. Rocketman was an exceptionally awful example of this, since the lyrics which supposedly reflected things in Elton John's life were written by Bernie Taupin.

Another problem with biopics comes with the participation of people close to the figure in question. The Marley family was involved with the making of One Love, and the film has access to elements of Marley's life and music that might be missing from an "unauthorized" film. But as in most such cases, the result borders on hagiography: Marley is presented in a positive light, which might seem appropriate given his status as an almost godlike figure to his many fans, but it prevents the film from giving a more all-encompassing picture of Marley.

Also, while it's understandable to limit the film to a specific period in Marley's life (1976-1978), this means the musical focus is entirely on Bob Marley and the Wailers, with only rare considerations of the years when The Wailers included Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. OK, it's not a movie about those two, and however good their music was (as Wailers and as solo artists), their cultural impact is nothing like Marley's. But I missed Tosh and Bunny.

Biopics rise or fall in large part on the performances, and here, One Love succeeds. Kingsley Ben-Adir is excellent as Marley ... he makes the movie worth seeing. (He was also great as Malcolm X in One Night in Miami, a film that works in part because it's not a biopic but a fictionalized representation of a moment when four icons were together for a night.) Lashana Lynch, still only in her mid-30s, has offered a wide variety of roles as disparate as a 00-agent in a Bond movie, a warrior in The Woman King, and Maria Rambeau from the Marvel world. Now we can add her portrayal of Rita Marley to the list. The music sounds great in One Love, as well it might. It's a movie you'll enjoy while you're watching it. But down the road, you're more likely to listen to the music than you are to return to One Love, which is merely passable.

african-american directors series: neptune frost (saul williams and anisia uzeyman, 2021)

This is the twenty-first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 21 is called "Afrofuturism Week":

Afrofuturism is an exciting subgenre of science-fiction movies that has been gaining traction in the past few years with mainstream offerings such as the Black Panther and Spider-Verse films, as well as the TV show Lovecraft Country. Afrofuturism is all about centering and taking pride in the Black experience in alternate or imagined realities where Black people can define themselves, potentially without the influence of Western ideas or understandings. These stories can inspire people to build toward a better future and question the past and present social structures that create and maintain cultural and economic inequality between races. Common tropes include the use of African iconography, a rich color palette, and a focus on how technology and culture intersect.

This week, let’s escape the real world and venture forth into a world of new realities made possible by Afrofuturism with this list here.

From the examples I have seen, I think I had a mistaken sense of what made Afrofuturism. I'd seen the mainstream offerings, the Black Panther and Spider-Verse films and the TV show Lovecraft Country. If I'd looked at the suggested list more closely, I might have had a better feel for what Neptune Frost might be like. Touki Bouki ("unencumbered by the 'rules' of cinema"), Sankofa ("uses time travel to place a woman from modern times back into the horrors of the old South"), Fast Color ("a superhero movie, although a very low-key one that can be approached as just a mysterious fantasy"). The introduction above of Afrofuturism is a useful description of what happens in Neptune Frost: "centering and taking pride in the Black experience in alternate or imagined realities where Black people can define themselves, potentially without the influence of Western ideas or understandings" including "the use of African iconography, a rich color palette, and a focus on how technology and culture intersect."

That describes Neptune Frost, but in truth it's a film that defies ordinary description. Saul Williams and Anisia Useyman create a unique world, rooted in Burundi but taking place in a future connected intrinsically to technology. A community of young adults, dedicated to a different kind of world, use unexplained hacking skills to subvert the larger society while staying hidden (China and Russia are initially blamed for the hacks). The connection to "The Internet" eventually destroys them, or rather, the discovery of the community by the outside world allows the powers that be to destroy them. One person remains ... I don't know if this was meant as a positive ending, perhaps it's meant to be ambiguous.

Oh, and it's a musical.

Gender fluidity, colonialism, and yes, science-fiction ... it's a unique blend. Willliams and Useyman deserve praise for creating something new. Sometimes inscrutable, but always fascinating to look at ... I, at least, had never seen anything like it.