Mark Reviews Movies: IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!?

Is That Black Enough for You?!?

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 27, 2022

Is That Black Enough for You?!? marks the great film critic Elvis Mitchell's debut as a movie director, and to his credit, Mitchell's documentary is mainly a feature-length piece of film journalism. The subject is the history of Black filmmaking, centering primarily on the period from the late 1960s to about ten years later. It's a time when Sidney Poitier was the biggest box-office draw of a single year, when films about the experience of being African American in the United States were being made—independently and even in Hollywood—by Black screenwriters and directors, and when a private detective in a leather coat helped to start an entire genre of films.

Mitchell's approach to this history is both academic, in that it helps us to make connections from this period and to before it and even to now, and quite personal. After all, the director grew up during this period of momentous societal and cultural change. So, too, did a number of his interview subjects, such as Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg—if they weren't direct participants in that creative and commercial revolution, such as Harry Belafonte, Margaret Avery, Glynn Turman, and Billy Dee Williams.

The mainstream movies Mitchell and his interview subjects saw in their youths or beyond barely had Black actors in them—and almost certainly weren't made by Black filmmakers. The canon of the most successful and "most important" films, as it still does to this day, included the likes of Gone with the Wind, with the 1939 film's blind acceptance of slavery as part of some "golden age," and The Birth of a Nation, with the 1915 movie's revisionist view of the Civil War and overtly racist assessment of Reconstruction.

The problems for and within American movies regarding the depiction—or absence therein—of Black people during and after either of those were much larger and deeper than two examples, of course. Mitchell documents that, as he must in order to establish just how revolutionary some of the accomplishments of that decade-long period of movies was. Blackface, as well as its inherently demeaning origins in minstrel-style caricatures, was all-too common. While Jackson and Fishburne fondly recall watching the Westerns that were released during their respective youths, it's not as if they were able to see Black cowboys on screen as heroes like John Wayne—if at all.

Jackson recalls how a scene of Poitier slapping a white person in one movie was simply cut from the reel when he first saw it. Mitchell trusts us enough to draw the line from that memory to the famous slap Poitier landed in In the Heat of the Night. Things do change.

In Mitchell's view, that change is both a point of pride, since this period of Black creativity had such a great impact on so many and on the culture of filmmaking at large, and of disappointment, because it did come to a sudden end. In the mind of the filmmaker/critic, the accomplishments and prevalence of that ten years have yet to be repeated on the same level.

After establishing the long road movies took from a popular epic that celebrated the KKK to Poitier's dominance at theaters in 1967 (Mitchell doesn't avoid that some, such as Belafonte, weren't entirely on board with how Black characters were portrayed during that transitional period), the film becomes a celebration of movies, actors, filmmakers, and industry innovations. The academic side of Mitchell's approach remains, to be sure, but his narration gives away a level of joy that's almost equal to that of his interview subjects. Critics do love movies, lest that obvious fact be forgotten.

Mitchell's love for this period and its movies is apparent, extensive, and infectious (Be prepared to note a lot of titles on your writing medium of choice for later viewing for a first time or re-visiting with some new context, if only because the number of them is so large). It's a thorough documenting of film history over the course of a decade, focusing on Black actors and filmmakers, the movies' commercial success and accolades, and the innovations they brought about, such as how the likes of Super Fly, Shaft, and others used the early release of the soundtrack as a form of marketing.

This was the first era of independently made films—a situation that had been forced upon early Black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux—crossing over into the mainstream, well before the indie movement of the 1990s—and not nearly as celebrated for the innovation nowadays, as Mitchell makes it clear. Obviously, the big studios would become involved, because the low-budget movies could be purchased for distribution at a low cost and a high profit. As has been the trend in American history, those smart money-making tactics would be appropriated soon enough by the studios, just as white heroes in movies would start showing as much confidence in their introductions as the protagonists of the so-called Blaxploitation ones.

Because Mitchell has so many movies to champion and so many people to mention and so many ideas to convey, the centerpiece section of the film does sometimes have difficulty keeping up with its multiple goals. Transitions between movies or thoughts are occasionally awkward or non-existent, but then again, Is That Black Enough for You?!? isn't just some visual essay. At the film's core, it's about the joy of feeling recognized and acknowledged (In the most endearing moment here, Williams gushes over seeing himself on screen as a romantic lead). That's about as personal as it gets, and Mitchell wisely embraces that over some stuff notion of structure. He really is quite good at film criticism, to put it mildly.

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