The New Path

Commentary on African American filmmaking exploring new terrain from the shadows of the past

At the annual South by Southwest Film Festival this past March the movie which garnered the most attention and acclaim was the film Jezebel, the first feature film by filmmaker and artist Numa Perrier. In the film a young black girl, and not a fully complex adult, Tiffany (played by Tiffany Tenille) is confused and rudderless after the death of her mother. Stuck in a lousy situation in a crowded apartment with her older sister (played by Perrier) who works at home as a sex phone operator and her no-account live-in white boyfriend and an older and equally lost unemployed brother, Tiffany is desperate for a way out her hopeless predicament.

Tiffany's seemingly questionable salvation comes in the form of a want ad discovered by her sister looking for models for a fetish webcam site where scantily clad women communicate with anonymous men over the internet who are into peculiar fetishes such as bare feet.

The twist in the story is that the film is not simply a story of the exploitation and degradation of some naive innocent woman, but instead is a film about a young black woman discovering and reveling in her sexuality and gaining a newfound self-awareness and confidence.  We follow Tiffany, or as she calls her when she's working Jezebel, as she grows in her assertiveness and as a black woman giving more power to herself. And no more so than in one particular sequence where one of her so-called online admirers calls her a racial slur and she demands respect from her boss and displays anger that she had not ever expressed before.

But what is even more significant is the fact that a black film such as this by a black director about a sexually confident young black woman could not have been made even just a few years ago by an independent black filmmaker. The closest to anything like it is Spike Lee's 1986 seminal film She's Gotta Have It and even then the main character of Nola Darling is brutally raped by one of her suitors as a form of punishment for being so sexually free and unapologetic. In effect, she must be put back in her place for expressing her freedom. Though it must be noted that Lee himself has tried to rectify that message in the film with his reboot of She's Gotta Have It for the Netflix series version of the film.  

However, Tiffany suffers from no such fate. She has changed by the end of the film into a woman confident in her herself. Jezebel upends and subverts all the usual expected black stereotypes and cliches. Even the film's title Jezebel challenges and removes the usual connotation that the word has, that of a black woman who is some wanton woman of loose morals.

Jezebel can be considered as perhaps one of the most exciting and adventurous examples of films currently being created by a new generation of black filmmakers. They are forging their own path and not following the same patterns and tropes of black filmmakers from the past.

Every new decade brings forth a new crop of black filmmakers ready to challenge the world with the intention of showcasing different aspects of black life and culture usually ignored by Hollywood, and they are successful for a while. That is until the nature and demands of the film business begin to take their toll and a new generation comes forth to take their place.

Some, such as Spike Lee, have managed to continue for decades but with mixed results. His earlier period from the mid '80s through the '90s was, without question, the high point with films that still reverberate today. But that period was followed by a long stretch where Lee was lost in the wilderness with both ambitious and modest projects that failed to connect. That is until he seemed to begin to find his sense of purpose again with his aforementioned She's Gotta Have It Netflix series and his very successful film BlacKkKlansman for which Lee finally received his first Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Some earlier black filmmakers have faded and others have continued to thrive such as Antoine Fuqua who has established his niche making big budget Hollywood fare. And then there are others who have stretched out and adapted to other opportunities such as Reginald Hudlin (House Party, Boomerang) who has continued to direct features, TV episodes and even producing awards shows such as the Oscar Awards and the NAACP  Awards and features such as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained proving the old adage  that in order to continue working and be successful in the business you have to “stay at the table”  like a poker player.

Starting around 15 years ago, and for several years after that, one could make the argument that the most successful and popular black filmmaker was Tyler Perry, who was praised or scorned for his films which catered to a primarily working class, religious black film audience.

His massive success eventually lead him to establish his own film studio in Atlanta, which recently has been replaced by an even larger one. But his success in films began to diminish when his audience began to tire of this sloppy filmmaking, inattention to detail and his constant recycling of premises and ideas from other films. Though he still makes films and has a devoted following, though it's smaller than what it once was, it's still enough to make his films box office successes for the most part. However, his film output has slowed and in the past few years, he has concentrated his efforts for TV producing several shows for cable networks such as Oprah Winfrey's OWN channel and has just signed an extensive deal to produce new programming for BET.

However, in just the past few years there had been a radical shift in the output of indie black filmmakers. In fact, one would have to go back to what is now the Golden Era of Black Films during the 1990’s with films as diverse as Boomerang, love jones, Higher Learning, Crooklyn, Set it Off, Friday, Daughters of the Dust, Sankofa and many others to find such a vibrant crop of films and filmmakers who are challenging the old, tired  preconceived  concepts of what makes a black film.

Filmmakers such as Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You), Justin Warren (and then There was Joe), Stella Meghie (Jean of the Joneses, Everything, Everything), Nijla Mu’min (jinn), Terrence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness) and of course the man of the moment, Jordan Peele among others. But the difference among black filmmakers today, compared to those in the past, is the shift in consciousness to what defines blackness and black cinema.

Riley’s Sorry to Bother You may be the extreme example of pushing the boundaries of black cinema with its surrealistic, topsy-turvy fantasy sequences, strange characters, and the weird bizarre world with its naked half-man half-horses monsters. And all this along with an aggressive, progressive political agenda dealing with income inequality and the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. In addition, its' totally unpredictable storyline where every sequence has a surprise and you have a film that not only pushes all the boundaries. It breaks right through them.

The new crop of filmmakers have expanded the definition of black films to encompass ideas, themes, and subjects that previously were, for the most part, rarely if ever explored or were considered not “black enough” by some cultural gatekeepers. They have not been limited by borders of the self-imposed “black box” even if it means upending or subverting established tropes and stereotypes of black life and culture.

Terrence Nance's limited experiential HBO series  Random Acts of Flyness takes the concepts of surrealism and unpredictability to even further limits creating a visually dazzling,  unique series that a viewer could make the argument was hard to understand at times (and one could make the argument that was intentional as well) but pulled no punches in its dissection of black consciousness. And further, through Nance's  (as well as other directors who were involved with the series such as Darius Clark Monroe, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Jamund Washington and Mariana Diallo) distinctive vision, the show used a panorama of genres and topics from satire to Afrofuturism to stretch the very definition of black cinema.

However, the question remains, will this new trend in black films continue to exist? The answer is that it definitely will. Not only because of these new filmmakers who are increasing in number, but also because of new modes of distribution such as streaming platforms which enable filmmakers to bypass the old and increasingly outmoded form of distributions and which have created a hunger and an audience to see something new and different.