STREAMING CINEMA
Hidden Under Plain White
Opportunities to view overlooked Black cinema treasures
BY STEVE ERICKSON
In the immediate aftermath
of this summer’s protests,
the best-seller lists were fi lled
with books like Ibram X.
Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”
and Michelle Alexander’s “The New
Jim Crow.” In an essay in New York
Magazine, Lauren Michele Jackson
warned against the danger of
treating fi ction written by African
Americans as a lesson in antiracism
rather than art. Her point is
well worth taking.
But all art, even the most fanciful
narratives, is full of ideology
and refl ects the perspective of its
creator and the larger society that
formed it. At this moment, it feels
important to direct attention to
parts of American fi lm history that
have been forgotten, if not suppressed.
For all their talent, Black directors
like Billy Woodberry and Julie
Dash have only completed one
feature. The ‘70s blaxploitation
movement may have reinforced
stereotypes about Black criminality,
but it also opened up space
for leftfi eld fi lms like Ivan Dixon’s
“The Spook Who Sat by the Door”
and Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess” to
get produced. Around the same
time, the LA Rebellion movement,
consisting of UCLA students like
Dash, Woodberry, Larry Clark, Jamaa
Fanaka, and Haile Gerima,
set out to offer an alternative vision
of African-American life.
The ‘70s are frequently celebrated
as the last great decade of
American cinema, but odes to New
Hollywood tend to endlessly recycle
praise for Coppola and Scorsese
without mentioning the Black directors
working at the same time.
In an admittedly modest way,
this article is an attempt to go
beyond the standard streaming
consumer guide to challenge the
dominant canon. It’s a start, not
an end, especially for me. I would
also encourage Gay City News
readers to check out K. Austin Collins’
extensive guide to the history
of Black cinema in Vanity Fair and
the YouTube channel of Solidarity
Damien Leake in Bill Duke’s 1984 “The Killing Floor.”
Leilah Weinraub’s 2018 “Shakedown’ is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Cinema, which offers radical cinema
of all kinds.
If you want parties, bank robberies,
and ass-kicking set to a
funk soundtrack,“Emma Mae,”
directed in 1976, has them. But
at heart, it takes a story about a
country mouse corrupted by the
big city and changes it to suit the
specifi cs of African-American life.
Emma Mae (Jerri Hayes) is radicalized
and then disillusioned after
moving from a small town in Mississippi
to Compton. After dating
a drug dealer who gets arrested,
she turns herself into a successful
businessperson to fund his freedom.
She fi nds that white people
still don’t let her win by their rules.
She then turns to crime, but her
FILM MOVEMENT CLASSICS
SHAKEDOWN.FILM
own community betrays her.
Hayes initially oversells Emma
Mae’s shyness and naivete, but her
emotional journey is very believable,
refl ecting her awakening to
the stacked deck against African
Americans. A college drama student,
this was her only fi lm role.
This was one of three features
Jamaa Fanaka directed while a
UCLA student, and it refl ects his
ambivalent but adjacent relationship
to blaxploitation. Without
gratuitous gore or nudity, it shows
drugs and violence as part of its
characters’ life. Fanaka’s direction
is slicker than his LA Rebellion
peers, with bright, colorful
cinematography. One can see why
Hollywood came calling.
Christopher St. John’s “Top of
the Heap” played in competition at
the Berlin Film Festival in 1972,
but it was dismissed by American
fi lm critics at the time and forgotten.
Recent interest in leftist Black
cinema has brought attention
back to it. A freeze-frame of the
actor, accompanied by wah-wah
guitar, says “directed, produced,
written by, and starring Christopher
St. John.” But the rest of the
fi lm breaks down that bravado. St.
John plays George, a cop whose job
consists of boring shifts standing
guard and enduring humiliations
from his superiors but also offers
him the chance to abuse power
and take small revenge on the
white men who commit microaggressions
against him.
The structure and editing of “Top
of the Heap” are unique. St. John
mixed memories, daydreams, and
George’s present-day life. The fi lm
devotes an unusual amount of time
to George’s fantasies of life as an
astronaut. The character dreams
of getting to represent the US in an
offi cial capacity, being able to succeed
on his own terms. (The whiteness
of the costumes and sets in
the NASA scenes is no accident.)
His dreary reality doesn’t live up to
it. While much of his pain comes
from grief over his mother’s death
and uncertainty about how to discipline
his daughter for her experimentation
with sex and drugs, he
gradually realizes that he’s part of
a corrupt institution, that his job
has damaged him deeply and that
there’s no easy way out.
George’s experiences as a cop
paralleled those of St. John as a
fi lmmaker. Made at the height of
blaxploitation, “Top of the Heap”
contains a few of its elements, but
it’s essentially an art fi lm infl uenced
by the French New Wave.
It’s also a far more critical vision
of the out-of-control-cop archetype
depicted in contemporary fi lms by
white directors like “Dirty Harry”
and “The French Connection.” An
actor who appeared in “Shaft” and
would later have a role on the TV
➤ BLACK CINEMA, continued on p.19
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