Tuesday, 5/20/97 Black cinema suffering from creative regression
COLUMN: Fresh ideas badly needed in order to move toward next
stage
The funny thing is I didn’t even notice its passing. But on the
way home from a screening one night last week, I happened to take
Melrose, a street I normally try to stay off of. As I neared La
Brea, I turned to see the storefront of Spike’s Joint, only to see
it cleared out. Not even the sign was left out front. On the
surface this bit of news may seem of no consequence, simply another
store biting the dust on Melrose, an area where stores can have the
life span of a common housefly. But the passing of Spike’s Joint
reads like another indicator that the 40 Acres and a Mule
production entity is on the ropes and has fallen short of the
promise its early works hinted at. Larger than that, it seems to me
that on the whole, black cinema in America seems to be in a
quandary; like a trail of ants with the scent wiped away. It seems
that black cinema is pacing along a precipice, unsure how to go
forward or what to do next. Nothing made that more clear than last
year’s "Get on the Bus," which this film student had the
unfortunate duty of panning in this very publication. A commentary
which ran in the L.A. Times asked a reasonable question of Lee; if
"Get on the Bus" was the best he could do with a whole decade of
filmmaking under his belt. Lee also put out the largely avoidable
"Girl 6" that same year, as if to compound the sad state of
affairs. Let me say that I don’t raise this question to Spike bash
or engage in that favorite pastime of black folks in the media
tearing each other down publicly. Spike has inspired a whole
generation of black and, otherwise, independent filmmakers in this
country like no one else in the medium’s short history. I raise
this issue because, as a quick glance at my byline will inform you,
I myself am a filmmaker of African descent, and I’m a touch
concerned that our cinema has hit a brick wall, and that the
revolution sparked by Lee 11 years prior has wound to a premature
and anticlimactic conclusion. Next to the folding of Spike’s Joint,
the only handier metaphor for the sad state of affairs is the fact
that John Singleton, a man who has shown himself to be an uneven
director in the past yet still holds a place of prominence
outstretched only by Lee, has chosen as his next project a remake
of "Shaft." A remake of "Shaft." Besides seeking to cash in on the
mid-’90s blaxploitation renaissance, what possible reason could the
young man wish to take on such a fool’s errand? Is he that bereft
of ideas that he must do an outright remake (as opposed to subtler
forms of reinventing an earlier genre)? This creative regression
(in this case a literal backward movement) sums up the lamentable
condition of black cinema in a way more eloquent than anything to
be read in this column. Of course, this century has seen more than
one movement in the arts of African Americans: from the Harlem
renaissance of the ’20s and ’30s, to the black arts movement of the
’60s and ’70s, (not to mention UCLA’s own L.A. Rebellion
filmmakers, most of whom diligently continue following their muses,
even if the industry chooses to ignore their efforts). Yet these
movements tend to last about 10 years before they dissipate leaving
a few individual black artists to toil on before the next
revolution begins (music is the one medium that seems exempt from
this rule of thumb, though if you ask me, black music in the ’90s
is also in grave peril but that’s another column for someone more
insightful than myself to write). So does this mean that the page
is turning on black cinema which seems to have cooled off to the
point of dormancy? There are some encouraging signs. Young cats
like Theodore Witcher ("Love Jones") and Robert Patton-Spruill
("Squeeze") demonstrate a certain freshness so badly in need.
Because an even worse reality than the notion that my friends and I
are the only black kids in the nation that want to take black
cinema past stage 1 (where we have remained for the last 10 years)
to a more sophisticated level, the scarier prospect is that a new
generation of black filmmakers is already out there and simply
can’t make it through the blandification quality filters of the
movie industry. For prospective filmmakers like myself, this
possibility can be a chilling one. So what is to be done?
Admittedly, artists who aren’t upper or middle class heterosexual
white males have an almost unfair burden in that they must
represent a whole underrepresented group, whether we like it or
not. Stage I of the black cinema movement, as I have already called
it, has been more than completed; even Vibe magazine recently
pointed out that it’s time for some more diverse and unique voices
to emerge from the "Black Pack" (although American cinema at large
has produced few distinguished amateurs in the ’90s, even if the
films themselves are a cut above the previous decade). It’s time
for the black slab monolith from "2001" to appear and herald a new
age in black cinema, for certainly there is more to us than what a
current movie listing might lead you to believe. I’ll do my part by
just making the films I want to see, films you don’t typically
associate with African American directors, and I know I won’t be
alone. There is a place for populist entertainment, but it’s high
time we filled up the art houses along with the multiplexes, and
leave our mark on cinema the way we have in music, sports and
dance. Surely "B.A.P.S." is not the highest mountaintop our
beleaguered people are destined to scale. One can only hope. Wilson
is a graduate student in film directing. Brandon Wilson