BLACK HISTORY MONTH PLAYLIST
To celebrate Black History Month, the Department of Film and Media has selected a series of films, television, and media works that engage with Black histories in the USA and Canada. Most of the works below, and others we’ll add over the month, can be streamed here (some are only accessible through Queen’s library with your NetID). A few more recent ones are also available on platforms such as Netflix and Crave. This first list is not a Top 10 list or list of canonical works, but just a sampling of the wide range of material produced in various contexts over the last 100 years, many of them relatively unknown.
Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, USA, 1920) Micheaux was the most productive and innovative Black filmmaker in the early years of cinema. Critics see Within Our Gates as a response to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Micheaux argued that the film was a contemporary portrait of race in America.
The Cry of Jazz (Edward O. Bland, USA, 1959) In 1959, Edward O. Bland made a short independent documentary in Chicago called The Cry of Jazz. Interspersing documentary images of Sun Ra and his group Solar Arkestra playing different forms of jazz, with images of Chicago ghettos and White bourgeois suburbs intercut with a staged docudrama of a biracial jazz club debating the form’s history and meaning. A positive review argued: “Bland’s view is that jazz is the cry of the Negro confronting the hazards and suffering of being a Negro in America; that jazz is now aesthetically dead; and that in a moral sense the Negro controls the destiny of America -- for he poses to the whites their worst problem of conscience.”
Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, USA, 1989) Color Adjustment (Marlon Riggs, USA, 1991)
Two works by Queer Black artist Marlon Riggs are presented here, foregrounding the diversity of his work and its political salience. Tongues Untied is an experimental manifesto addressing the dual marginalization experienced by Queer Black men, made at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The work continues to provoke political firestorms on the right. Color Adjustment, drawing on a vast array f found footage, examines the history of racialized and racist images of Black Americans throughout the history of television.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, USA, 2006)
Spike Lee is best known for his wide range of fiction films addressing the contemporary and historical Black experience. Lesser known is his equally important work as a documentarian. In this four part documentary, originally released on HBO, Lee documents the experiences of Black Americans abandoned by state and federal authorities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, giving voices to those left out of the accounts of dominant media (the link above is to the first episode; all four can be streamed through the same site).
Ninth Floor (Mina Shum, Canada, 2015) Made by BIPOC filmmaker Mina Shum, this NFB/ONF documentary “reopen[s] the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations – the infamous Sir George Williams Riot [in Montreal]. Over four decades after a group of Caribbean students accused their professor of racism, triggering an explosive student uprising, Shum locates the protagonists and listens as they set the record straight, trying to make peace with the past.
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, USA, 2016) Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is based on one of James Baldwin’s works. Examining Baldwin’s relationships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., along with Baldwin’s own reflections on race in America, the work is an explosive essay film, weaving together various Black political voices on race in America in the 1960s.
Intermittent Delight (Akosua Adoma Owusu, USA, 2017) Intermittent Delight is an experimental collage exploring the intersection of cultural appropriation and identity, juxtaposing “close-ups of batik textiles, fashion and design from the 1950s and ’60s, images of men weaving and women sewing in Ghana, and fragments of a vintage Westinghouse commercial.”
A Love Song for Latasha (Sophia Nahli Allison, USA, 2020) Streamable through Netflix
A Love Song for Latasha addresses the murder of Latasha Harlins, which was a catalyst for the L.A. Riots. Harlins was killed a little under two weeks after the Rodney King attack, and her story has been overshadowed in the history of the uprising. Displacing the image of her murder as the only one to represent her, A Love Song for Latasha is an experimental work that gives voice to those who knew and loved her.