Meditations on Russia, Paul Robeson, the morality of a camera, and the embryo of a wobbly cinema.
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Our blog contributor Dennis Leroy Kangalee is joined by fellow screenwriter & actor Maxx Pinkins with a critical conversation of Jordan Peele’s NOPE using the cut up technique
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We’ve lost three solid brothers and friends to The Luminal
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Too often for Black performers the real elephant in the room is one's relationship to the camera. Until the mainstream critics like Scott and Hoberman and Dargis at the NY Times cease using their self-satisfied knowledge about historical racism in Hollywood, how “difficult” things are for Blacks, etc – we must consistently inject our point-of-view into the ether. We are not invisible. Our perceptions are just constantly marginalized.
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Public Toilet Africa expresses this angst and frustration of 21st century capitalism, and shows that the entire world has taken a piece of Africa and similarly shat upon it.
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Charles Burnett, Ben Caldwell, Alile Sharon Larkin have a intergenerational conversation with audiences at the first-ever Thuh Juneteenth Film Festival
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With The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Dixon could pick up where he left off with the remarkable creative caliber of Duff in Nothing But a Man, but now as a director…and his, and screenwriter Sam Greenlee’s, greatest achievement.
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Jacinto Taras Riddick and Che Ayende have partnered to give us not only the best collaboration in cinema of the past year, but a shocking example of the concussive force of writing, directing and performing for the screen that I have been waiting to see for a long time. I went into the screening a lapsed filmmaker, and emerged with my faith restored.
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The actor, by nature, is the most political of all artists because he is literally using his body as an instrument to engage in our accepted or disregarded mores, injustices, dreams, longings, etc. The actor marries double consciousness seamlessly – the past and the present - in order to leave the audience with a potential future…he is a shaman, and we rely on him to heal the tribe or at least tell us what ails us. THIS is Ivan Dixon.
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“Passing” tries to normalize behavior indicative of the crisis and mental states Frantz Fanon - a man who died trying to free the colonized mind - warned us about. This should be a harbinger for every filmmaker who even THINKS about making a movie about Black self-hatred and “passing.”
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Is film the optimal medium for presenting history?
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Todd Haynes’ new documentary “The Velvet Underground” dismisses the exceptionalism of super-producer Tom Wilson, whitewashing his accomplishments from a seminal period of rock n’ roll. There’s little doubt on how that happened, but we explore further.
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The producer responsible for the greatest rock & roll single is still a mystery nearly six decades later. Ishmael Reed often iterates that Black people have to be paranoid to survive. Nothing prepares one for the atrocious behavior of those who “cover up” the crime of dwindling and exiling an artist’s influence, contributions, and impression left behind.
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