The 1970s was perhaps the most exciting decade for American movies since the birth of sound, a time when audiences actually craved the unconventional, when some of our greatest filmmakers were in their creative infancy and willing to try anything. Unmoored from the traditional studio system, they tested the boundaries of decorum and stylistic experimentation, and in deliberately sidestepping the mainstream, they became mainstream themselves.
Of course, many primers on this so-called New Hollywood era relegate its revolutionary Black filmmakers to the footnotes. And yet the most vital of those filmmakers arguably captured the social upheaval and anti-establishment ethos of the time better than any of their white counterparts, all while challenging the traditional notions of how Black characters were depicted on-screen.
Longtime film critic and radio host Elvis Mitchell has given these groundbreakers their due in his visual essay Is That Black Enough for You?!?, whose title comes from dialogue in Ossie Davis’ 1970 comic thriller Cotton Comes to Harlem. That movie, often cited as the starting place of the Blaxploitation genre, is indicative of the best work Mitchell highlights: It reorients genre conventions by centering them on Black heroes and locales, it taps into the electricity of its time and place, and it’s just as conducive to empowerment as stereotype.
I love documentaries like this, which weave together curated film clips to form a thesis about greater social and stylistic trends, and Mitchell intersperses the footage with current interviews from people who were influenced by those ’70s films and some of the people who actually made and appeared in them.
Although Mitchell gives time to the definitive Blaxploitation classics, he also considers films from the era that showed the panoply of Black American experiences, and that moved out of the action and horror genres to communicate joy, longing and family values.
Some of my favorite unsung classics mentioned here include Michael Schultz’s bittersweet Cooley High, the Black response to American Graffiti, set in ’60s Chicago and filled with Motown music; Bill Gunn’s eerie Ganja & Hess, an impressionistic, borderline surrealistic reimagining of the vampire legend; Charles Burnett’s watershed Killer of Sheep, a lyrical portrait of a working class Black family in Watts. These films aren’t explicit in their social messaging, and yet they’re inherently indebted to the politics of being Black in America: Even a breezy romp like 1976’s Car Wash deals with class disparity, homophobia, religious prejudice and petty crime.
But Is That Black Enough for You?!? is more than just a clip show. Mitchell has made a thoughtful treatise on the consequences of cultural influence: Independent Black cinema of the 1970s catered to an audience that Hollywood had ignored, and once the financial returns were in, it was commodified and made more “palatable” for white audiences.
The New Hollywood movement ended much the way it began, with a series of expensive, auteur-driven flops that crippled studios, except this particular sea change didn’t usher in a new era of unprecedented artistic freedom. Is That Black Enough for You?!? reminds us of a time when even the cheapest movies were reaching audiences in profound ways and that even the least experienced filmmakers were reflecting the world as they saw it. Not only does this documentary remind you of movies you love, it can point you in the direction of important work you’ve never heard of.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101,” Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.