Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film by Michael Boyce Gillespie (review)

In his book Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, Michael Boyce Gillespie intervenes in the study of racial representation to give media scholars and film viewers a better accounting of how race in general and blackness in particular have been configured and regarded in US narrative films of the past forty years. Film Blackness avails itself of the theoretical gestures from the scholarly work of Kara Keeling, Nathaniel Mackey, and Fred Moten to move us far, far away from determinist arguments about black art that is measured "exclusively by the social category of race or veracity claims about black existential life."¹ It is a necessary book that incorporates the vibrancy of black studies in this moment when the field is contributing substantially to our understanding not only of blackness as a constitutive concept for US (if not global) society but also of how art processes and analysis are crucially embedded in racialized systems of sense making.

Gillespie's work is to be commended for its serious and sustained consideration of film materiality, something too frequently left out of theoretical considerations of film. He writes with a solid knowledge of filmmaking practices, referencing cinematic elements that might go overlooked by other writers. Film stock and process in particular feature heavily in his assessment of how the films in his study make meaning. Gillespie also wisely attends to the box-office and circulation reports of each film he analyzes to help interpret the aesthetic, cultural, and economic conditions of possibility for film blackness.

Film Blackness was published at a time when we are seeing more and more accolades heaped upon black films. From Moonlight to Get Out to Black Panther to the upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, the range of blackness on-screen seems only to be increasing. Gillespie's work primes us to this present by reminding us, as the book's subtitle states, that American cinema has always incorporated an idea—indeed, a theory—of black film that has attuned cinema to reflect the conditions of black existence. Dissertations on the burden of representation no longer adequately serve a thoroughgoing analysis of the enduring presence—to paraphrase Toni Morrison—of blackness in one of America's most robust narrative media. Blackness is more than surface and stigma. Film blackness—an artistic play with the already-complex notion of blackness—is, therefore, always more than the term "representation" suggests: "What if black film is art or creative interpretation and not merely the visual transcription of the black lifeworld?"² Gillespie responds to this rhetorical question with ample evidence that interpretation is indeed a more accurate assessment of black filmmaking, and he goes on to model the kind of critical inquiry that such a recognition warrants.

The films Gillespie has selected to analyze are delightfully unexpected and wide ranging. Sleepers and independent films such as Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1975), Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989), and Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008) are three of the films explored. The selection underscores Gillespie's point regarding the irreducibility of racial blackness. Each of the works touches on and brushes against the representation of blackness in film and the tendency for films to be regarded as making a statement (rather than posing questions) about the unalterability of blackness. Gillespie's reading of Chameleon Street, which grounds the book's second chapter, is a case in point.

In parsing Harris's film, a fictionalized account of the con artist Douglas Street Jr., Gillespie shows how the film's form (its use of voice-over, lighting, and narrative structure) conspires with Harris's performance and Street's biography to enact blackness as personae. The contemplation leads him not only to regard a fugitive blackness in action (the main character quite literally eludes capture by authorities by assuming multiple identities) but also to consider the psychology of...