When Elvis Mitchell, director of Is That Black Enough For You?!?, was growing up, he took inspiration from his grandmother’s pragmatic approach not just to cinema but to life in general.
She used to tell him that movies had changed the way she dreamed. Watching Dracula gave her nightmares. Nonetheless, as a woman of colour in Mississippi, she could see through the Hollywood subterfuge and racial hypocrisy. If there was a sitcom set in the south that didn’t have any Black characters in it, she wouldn’t watch. She’d know it wasn’t real.
Mitchell talks of her “common sense take” on everything. “She would ask the question that hasn’t been asked. She would ask about what is not there,” he remembers, adding how, “She would by no means consider herself to be astute about popular culture. I think she stopped going to movies after she saw her first couple.”
She once watched a film in a barn that had been converted into a movie theatre. The screening had to be stopped because there were too many bat cobwebs in the auditorium. “I can get this at home. I don’t have to pay money for it,” she pronounced as she left.
A renowned film reviewer, historian and cultural commentator, Mitchell shares his grandmother’s questioning instincts. He too always asks about what is not there, “what is the implicit message, what is important by virtue of exclusion. As a person of colour coming up in the 70s, those are really pertinent questions to step on.”
Mitchell’s documentary, which offers a whistle stop tour of Black US cinema, is now being tipped as a potential Oscar contender. The film (due to hit Netflix on 11 November) is executive produced by two heavyweight directors, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher.
Ironically, the project wasn’t originally intended as a film at all. Mitchell had set out to write a book on Black cinema history. No publisher wanted it. Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison had volunteered to write the introduction but not even that could secure him the commission.
“I guess failure takes you in other directions,” Mitchell reflects ruefully on how the project was re-thought as a film.
“I was convinced there had to be a place for a book such as this just because there had been so many looks at what film culture was in that period, and I had not seen anyone really reflect on the contributions of Black culture to that [film] culture,” the director says. He thought he had a “terrific subject.” The publishers didn’t agree.
Flash forward a few months. Mitchell was talking to the Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen about his idea. “I don’t think that is a book,” McQueen told him. “You’re not alone,” Mitchell replied. But McQueen added: “I think it is a documentary.”
Then Soderbergh told him “let’s make it.” Soderbergh brought in Fincher. They went to Netflix – and, in no time at all, Mitchell had his green light. “That’s the short of it. I never lost faith in it as a project. I was just thinking how best to do it.”
In some respects, making a movie was better anyway. Rather than describing the film in painstaking detail on the page, Mitchell could just show the clips and “let them do the work – and let people experience them as they may.”
Mitchell will still be “thrilled” to write the book if the opportunity now arises thanks to the success of the film. After all, in two hours on screen, there are limits to what you can cover.
As the director acknowledges, conversations about movies “always have footnotes built in.” That is why, although he sticks to a broadly chronological approach in the documentary, he occasionally throws in asides.
As a former New York Times critic, how does Mitchell feel about having his film dissected by his fellow journalists? He is sanguine at the prospect, suggesting some have provided him with new insights into his own work. “And given where we are now, there are so many people who practice criticism. When I started 40 years ago, being a person of colour [as a critic] in the United States or anywhere doing this, people looked at you as if you were some kind of talking animal. They’d say ‘you want to write about movies – is there any movies about Black people?’”
Thankfully, there are now “so many more voices writing about movies” than when Mitchell began his reviewing career.
When Mitchell was starting out, the New Yorker’s revered critic Pauline Kael was one of his early champions. He met her when she came to Detroit on a book tour. He was in the audience at a live radio show in which she was a guest and she befriended him. At the end of the show, she invited him and some of his friends to watch the Academy Awards with her. “In some ways, she reminded me of my grandmother. There is this way of being true to who you are and what you think but also asking about what hasn’t been said.”
Kael may have been getting old but she was still charismatic and very feisty. “You were mesmerised by her power of rhetoric and her command of language,” he remembers. She was also excellent company. “She was somebody you want to talk to and it was not just about movies. She followed theatre, she followed sports, she watched television and she was into music…she understood that movies were part of this mosaic of culture.”
Is That Black Enough for You?!? has clips from dozens of movies, everything from Shaft to Once Upon A Time In The West, and lots of music. Yes, securing the permissions was a challenge…sometimes.
“Some things were shockingly easy [to license] and some things we still never got. I wish I could say that between Netflix, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, the walls came tumbling down but that wasn’t the case,” the director sighs. If he “hit a wall,” he’d always look for another way to make his point.
Mitchell has assembled some impressive interviewees, everybody from Zendaya and Laurence Fishburne to Harry Belafonte. The latter speaks very frankly and with salty humour about some of the challenges he faced in his film career and when he was continually being undermined by ‘backhanded racism.’
“This goes back to my grandmother and what is not being said. So often, when there is some treatise on Black film of the 70s, it’s about blaxploitation. I wanted to say, no, there is history before that. What led us to that moment. Harry Belafonte is insanely talented…how in god’s name is it possible that people were so racist that they couldn’t see what he had to offer,” Mitchell asks.
“[But] he wouldn’t be bowed by that. I’d met him a couple of times in the past and there is this impish grandeur about him. He is both epic and playful, and also completely understanding of what he is. Rather than have to hurt himself, he just chose another direction and to take those energies and put them into the Civil Rights struggle. Thank goodness he did those things…”
