Black is Not a Genre

There’s hardly any film genre more intrinsically allegorical than horror. If social borders, both conscious and unconscious, along acceptance and exclusion, empathy and revulsion, good and evil, are dictated by the mass projection of society’s fears onto whomever threatens its norms, then horror is the exaggerated projection of its basest, most grotesque imaginations around those boundaries onto the silver screen. While the human rights analogy of the Living Dead series and the Cold War nihilism of Texas Chainsaw Massacre prodded at social themes from the perspective of the cultural mainstream looking outward at the groups it excluded, there’s a rarer vein of the genre written from the purview of those on the outside looking in.

These unheralded gems represent a major void in horror that underscores the genre’s social significance. If horror is film’s window into society’s subconscious, its narration of who is worthy of fear and death and who is worthy of life and salvation, then the lack of films from America’s socially and racially ostracized has a host of real-life implications. 

About the guests:

Jazz and Kat are hosts of the horror & sci-fi podcast, Girl, That's Scary!

Jearold Hersey is an Austin based designer, former film critic for The Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, and curator and founder of a local film club now in its fourth year of weekly programming.

This week we look at musicals with Jazmyne Moreno, programmer of the Lates series at Austin Film Society.   

Much of what we think of as the aesthetic of the modern musical evolved from a long history of co-opting Black musical and performative styles and gentrifying them for white audiences. In that context, Spike Lee’s second feature film School Daze (1988) is transgressive on two frons. For one, it wrested creative control back from genre tradition that had largely erased the influence of Blackness from its history and re-infused it with the most cutting-edge Black music of its time. Two, it reversed the white-dominant insularity of musical theatre culture and reflected that alienation back onto audiences by setting School Daze within the culturally esoteric world of historically Black colleges.  

Like many of his early films, Lee’s second film opened to mixed reviews, many of which had more to do with a lack of familiarity by white critics with the palette he was painting with. And, while for much of his career, it was seen as a relative misstep between his precocious debut (She’s Gotta Have It) and his iconic third feature (Do The Right Thing), over time, the cultural perception of School Daze has grown to include an appreciation not only of the huge risk Spike took in releasing a full-blown musical as his sophomore effort but in its honest and unabashed willingness to, as the ol’ folks say “air out dirty laundry,” outside the safety of Black communal spaces.

Kathleen Collins said, “No one is going to mythologize my life. No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences, neither outside nor inside.”

Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich is the writer and director on the feature film Madame Négritude - Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in Film Festivals such as Doclisboa, True / False, Images Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Blackstar Film Festival. She has been featured in Essence Magazine, Studio Museum’s Studio Magazine, ARC Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Guernica Magazine, Small Axe journal among others. She is the recipient of a 2020 SF Film Rainin Grant, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO fellowship and grant from Uniondocs / Just Films, a 2015 TFI Future Filmmaker Award and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her work has been recognized by the Time Inc. Black Girl Magic Emerging Director's series, the National Magazine (ELLIE) Awards and she has received grants from the National Black Programming Consortium and Glassbreaker Films. Madeleine has a degree in Film and Photography from Hampshire College and has an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University.

We’re kicking off August with the coming-of-age classic The Wood (1999). Directed by Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, Dope, The Mandalorian) and starring a who’s-who of young Black It girls and boys of the late ’90s and early aughts, The Wood was the seventh film produced by MTV Films and part of a barnstorming spate of four movies released by the newly formed studio that year alone. Black coming-of-age films, outside of the so-called “homeboy” canon, were sparse before this era and seem to have receded back into rarity since. Grossing over $25 million on $6 million budget, the film’s relative box office success eerily belies its lack of currency in mainstream culture. But, like a lot of films from the era, its cult status among Black millennials is unequivocal and a testament to Todd Boyd’s and Famuyiwa’s ability to write young Black best friends whose universal earnestness and love for each other transcend the white-perceived social barriers of their environment. The Wood’s version of 1980s Inglewood is less a counterpoint to the South Central L.A. of Boyz n the Hood and more a vibrant, necessary companion text, of which there should have been many more. From an industry standpoint, it’s a classic indie film from the height of the American indie wave that’s rarely mentioned in conversations around more widely adored coming-of-age films of the era like Dazed And Confused, Rushmore, or Slums of Beverly Hills. ⁣

Featured guests:

Matthew S. Robinson is a Washington, D.C. native, writer, director, and playwright based in Los Angeles. He graduated from Pepperdine University in 2012 with a Bachelor’s in Media Production with an emphasis in Political Science. After making his feature directorial debut with, “My Friend Violet,” Robinson wrote and directed various short and feature-length plays. Robinson has won several awards while working with some of the most talented individuals in the LA community. His original plays, “Mary's Medicine" and "BlackBalled” won the Encore Producers award at the LA Fringe Festival in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Steven DeBose is a writer and podcaster from Austin, Texas. He has worked as a judge for the Austin Youth Film Festival, Conference Coordinator for the GTX Film Conference and most recently as director of script competitions at Austin Film Festival.

When it comes to filmmaking, there’s modesty and then there’s Carl Franklin. The Bay-Area-bred actor cum director, screenwriter, and producer, who once said of thrillers, “that’s not my forté,” is one of the genre’s most eloquent, if reluctant savants. Featuring star turns from the likes of Denzel, Don Cheadle, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bill Paxton, Franklin’s films are as criminally under-seen as they are brimming with craft.

For Week 4 of Black Is Not A Genre, we’ll be celebrating a double feature of two Franklin classics: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the noir period piece, based on the serial detective novels of Walter Mosley, and Franklin’s striking, critically acclaimed feature debut, One False Move (1992). The former, an inexplicable box-office flop despite its tailor-made franchise potential, the latter, a sleeper-hit crime drama originally destined for straight-to-video release; both films are indicative of the peculiar, often confounding plight of Black filmmakers working in distinct genres. ⁣

Our special guests are:

Jearold Hersey is an Austin based designer and lifelong film fan. many moons ago he was a film critic for his college newspaper and for the tribune in Mesa, Arizona. Locally, he’s a member of Austin film society and runs a weekly movie club, which is now in it’s fourth year and is currently doing a monthly genre study for 2020

Kahron Spearman is an Austin-based writer, journalist and culture critic, whose work can be found in the Austin chronicle, the daily dot, Localeur, and Texas music magazine.

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed the Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial "genre" that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value. 

In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized and warrant re-contextualizing, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre. Each film will be accompanied by a weekly podcast in which series programmer Graham Cumberbatch will discuss the week’s movie and genre with a different featured guest.

For Week 3 of Black Is Not A Genre, we explore "rom-coms."  We’ll be viewing Stella Meghie’s The Weekend (1997) together and discussing the genre of rom-coms to include Black culture’s essential contribution. 

Our special guests are:  

Dominic Jones  

Jazmyne Moreno

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed the Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial "genre" that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value.

In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized and warrant re-contextualizing, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre. Each film will be accompanied by a weekly podcast in which series programmer Graham Cumberbatch will discuss the week’s movie and genre with a different featured guest.

For Week 2 of Black Is Not A Genre, we explore "science fiction" and Lizzie Borden's 1983 Born in Flames. Our special guest is:

Ronnita L. Miller

For Graham's full essay on Born in Flames and the Sci-Fi genre visit: https://hyperrealfilm.club/reviews/binag-born-in-flames

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed the Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial "genre" that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value.

In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized and warrant re-contextualizing, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre. Each film will be accompanied by a weekly podcast in which series programmer Graham Cumberbatch will discuss the week’s movie and genre with a different featured guest.

For Week 1 of Black Is Not A Genre, we explore "camp."  We’ll be viewing Robert Townsend’s B*A*P*S* (1997) together and reimagining the genre of camp to include Black culture’s essential contribution. Our special guests are:

Film school dropout, Comedian, actor, writer Ronnita L. Miller has played lead roles in the short film Beta and the We Are short film series featured on the Issa Rae Presents YouTube channel. She is also a founding member of the award-winning comedy group Damn Gina!, Texas’ first all-Black-woman-identifying improv troupe.

Brooke Burnside

Born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, Brooke Burnside has written essays on and conducted research in TV, film, and mass media culture. Having studied film and made several shorts in college, she eventually moved to Texas to pursue a graduate degree in an effort to further develop her skills as a creator of media and is a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Brooke is also a practicing artist whose work includes drawing, printmaking, and digital college. And, she is a 2020 recipient of the Big Medium Art Residency at The Line.

For Graham's full essay on B*A*P*S and the Camp genre visit: https://hyperrealfilm.club/reviews/binag-baps