The Black List

Coming from a documentary filmmaker, there are few insults worse than “It was all talking heads.” People talking, that’s just not cinematic, they say. Tell the story through action!

To me, when done right, people talking can be just as exciting as the most eye-popping action, the most beautiful cinematography. The Black List is a perfect example.

Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and interviewer Elvis Mitchell set out to explore the African-American experience, and to rehabilitate the term “black list." They pulled together an incredible line-up of interviewees, from Colin Powell, to Sean “Puffy” Combs, to Toni Morrison. The results are riveting.

I used to be sceptical about Errol Morris’s Interrotron device, which allows the interview subject to look directly into the camera and feel like he or she is talking to the interviewer. Morris’s The Fog of War changed my mind; The Black List has sealed the deal. The subjects, about twenty of them, all beautifully, lovingly lit, sit in front of a plain slate-coloured backdrop and talk directly to the audience – directly to me. It’s hard not to pay attention.

It’s also hard not to pay attention when you’re expecting to see the usual African-American suspects, and the first person who pops up on screen is Slash. Slash! The guitarist from Guns’n’Roses (who also makes an appearance in Anvil! The Story of Anvil). Dude’s black? I would have said Jewish before black. Hell, given the history of G’n’R, anything but black. Turns out Slash’s mother is African-American, and he learned to play guitar while hanging out with his cousins in South-Central. And hey, Slash is actually articulate and interesting. And he’s followed by Toni Morrison. Can you see Slash and Toni Morrison chit-chatting at a party? That would just cause a rift in the space-time continuum. So the film gets off to a great start.

What follows is a list of people who cover the range of the African-American experience: Keenen Ivory Wayans, women’s erotica writer Zane, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, Suzan-Lori Parks (if I hadn’t seen this film, I never would have known how beautiful her eyes are), Bill T. Jones, etc., etc. Each of them appears on screen for maybe four minutes, and each interview vignette ends with an interesting climax. Who says that an interview film can’t have a decisive moment just like a Cartier-Bresson photograph or a cinema vérité film. (All those people who worked on Wild Blue Yonder should watch The Black List.)

This is a film that works well in the theatre, but is also perfect for TV, the medium of the close-up. It’s just too bad it’ll likely never make it to Canadian TV – too American, too unconnected to the “Canadian” experience, the broadcasters will say.

It's too bad. One of the most memorable moments in the film comes from Chris Rock, who says, ”True equality is the equality to suck like the white man. We want the license to fail and come back, and learn.”

Those of us who work in Canadian TV know a little bit about that. We want to be able to suck like the Americans.

The Glow of White Women

Yunus Vally is very charming man. He's quite a talker, and he has a lot to say. About growing up Muslim in small-town apartheid South Africa, about relationships between men and women, between black and white, brown and white -- about sexual politics in apartheid-era South Africa. He makes a great documentary subject, but he also happens to be the director of The Glow of White Women, and so he talks... and talks, and talks... unchallenged, for most of 78 minutes.

Here's how it goes: Vally sits in front of a green screen, and talks. He talks to an unseen interviewer, and not to the camera. We see various images behind him (though sometimes we see a plain black background), and we see lots of apartheid-era newsreels, magazine images, etc. And we hear from some other people: white women who slept with black men when it was illegal, the one-time star of a titillating photo-comic-book series, a former censor, etc. They are all participants in Vally's exercise: turning the sexual objectification and dehumanization of black men around... and focusing it on white women. He wants to look honestly at the relationship between the respectable white woman and her sweating, glistening gardener / manservant / driver. We see images of various (white) Miss South Africas, of waiter-races where white audiences watch black men in uniform run with trays of drinks. And lots of people talk about sex. The sex they had, the sex they dreamt about... anything as long as it has to do with sex.

Vally is engaging, the images are both shocking and entertaining, and he clearly had a great compositor who made liberal use of animation software. It's a great way to say a few things that I'm sure black men have wanted to say to white women (and men) for a long time. But it doesn't sustain. The Glow of White Women delivers a serious message in an entertaining package, but it runs out of things to say long before its 78 minutes are up. I lasted just under an hour. The last phrase I heard before I walked out was "I fucked for the struggle."