Black Film:
From Exclusion to Excellence

The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D.W. Griffith, is simultaneously one of the most technically innovative films ever made and one of the most politically harmful. It was the first feature-length film in American cinema. It was also propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan: depicting Black men as violent criminals and sexual predators, depicting the Klan as heroic protectors of white civilization, depicting Reconstruction as a period of Black depravity. President Woodrow Wilson screened it at the White House and praised it. The NAACP organized campaigns against it. The film's theatrical release was accompanied by a resurgence of KKK activity nationwide.

Oscar Micheaux was a homesteader from South Dakota who had been writing and selling his own novels door-to-door. He began making films in 1919 — financing them himself, distributing them himself, traveling a circuit of theaters in Black neighborhoods called the "chitlin circuit." His 1920 film Within Our Gates was an explicit rebuttal to Birth of a Nation: it depicted the lynching of an innocent Black man and the economic exploitation of Black sharecroppers. He made 44 films between 1919 and 1948. He was the first major Black film director in history. He did it without a studio, without distribution, without any institutional support.

The "race film" industry — films made by and for Black audiences, screened in segregated Black theaters — existed as a parallel cinema to Hollywood from the 1910s through the 1950s. It produced hundreds of films, employed thousands of Black actors and crew, and created a body of work that documented Black life in ways that Hollywood never would. Segregation created it. Integration, paradoxically, destroyed it: as Black audiences gained access to mainstream theaters, the market for race films collapsed. The infrastructure disappeared, and most of the films went with it.

Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft (1971) opened a door that Black filmmakers had been trying to force open for fifty years. Shaft's commercial success proved that Black-led films were profitable — not as a niche market but as a mainstream one. Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), made outside the studio system for $150,000, grossed $15 million and was perhaps more influential than Shaft: it proved you could make a politically radical Black film outside Hollywood and have it reach an audience.

The Blaxploitation era that followed (1971–1975) was commercially successful and artistically uneven. Films like Super Fly, Foxy Brown, and Cleopatra Jones gave Black audiences protagonists who were powerful, sexually confident, and in control of their own narratives — a radical departure from the servile or comic roles that had been Hollywood's standard Black offering. The NAACP criticized the genre for perpetuating stereotypes about criminality. Black filmmakers and audiences pushed back: the alternative was not better roles in mainstream films. The alternative was no films at all. The choice was between imperfect representation and no representation.

Hollywood ended the Blaxploitation era by simply deciding not to make those films anymore. The studios had no obligation to Black filmmakers or Black audiences. When white audiences moved on to science fiction and disaster films, the window closed. It would not open again for a decade.

In 1986, Spike Lee made She's Gotta Have It for $175,000 and grossed $7 million. He had financed it through deferred salaries, credit cards, and a grant from the American Film Institute. The film was made outside Hollywood, distributed by a small independent label, and became one of the defining American films of its decade. Its subject was Black female desire — a subject that commercial cinema had literally never addressed. Lee's next film, School Daze (1988), was made through Columbia Pictures — his entry into studio filmmaking. Do the Right Thing (1989), his masterpiece, was submitted for the Academy Awards and not nominated for Best Picture. Driving Miss Daisy — a film about a white woman's relationship with her Black chauffeur, told from the white woman's perspective — won instead.

Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) was the first feature film by a Black American woman to receive wide theatrical release. Set in the Gullah community of the Sea Islands in 1902, it was formally experimental, narratively non-linear, linguistically specific, and visually extraordinary. It was made for $800,000. It was Beyoncé's primary visual reference for Lemonade (2016). The film that would influence one of the most watched visual albums in history was made by a Black woman who spent years trying to get distribution.

The L.A. Rebellion — a loose movement of Black and Third World filmmakers trained at UCLA in the 1970s — produced Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, 1977), Julie Dash, and Haile Gerima (Ashes and Embers, 1982). They were making formally sophisticated, politically serious films on tiny budgets, outside the studio system, using documentary and international art cinema techniques. The films they made in the 1970s and 1980s would not reach significant audiences for decades. The audiences were there. The distribution was not.

In 1991, two films opened within months of each other that defined a new moment in Black cinema: John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood and Mario Van Peebles' New Jack City. Singleton was 23 years old and had been accepted to USC's film school at 16; he wrote Boyz n the Hood as his thesis. He was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay — the first time a Black director had been nominated for Best Director, and the youngest person ever nominated. Boyz n the Hood cost $6.5 million and grossed $57 million. It documented South Central Los Angeles with the same specific, intimate authority that N.W.A. had brought to the same neighborhood in music three years earlier.

The early 1990s produced an extraordinary wave of Black-directed films: Menace II Society (Albert and Allen Hughes, 1993), Friday (F. Gary Gray, 1995), Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996), Love Jones (Theodore Witcher, 1997). These were genre films — crime films, comedies, romantic dramas — that happened to have Black casts, Black settings, and Black directors. They demonstrated that Black filmmakers could work in every genre, at every budget level, for every kind of audience. Hollywood had no ideological objection to this once it proved profitable. Its resistance had always been commercial, not moral — which meant it could be overcome by commercial success.

The wave receded by the early 2000s. Studio interest in Black films became intermittent — driven by commercial results rather than any sustained commitment to Black storytelling. Individual filmmakers — Lee Daniels, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen — continued making important work. The door was open. It was just never fully open.

In 2013, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave — the first major Hollywood film to tell the story of American slavery from the enslaved person's perspective, 148 years after the end of slavery — won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2017, Barry Jenkins's Moonlight — a film about a young Black gay man growing up in poverty in Miami, with a budget of $1.5 million — won Best Picture in perhaps the most dramatic upset in Academy history. In 2018, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther — the first Marvel film with a Black director and predominantly Black cast — grossed $1.35 billion worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture.

These three films, within five years of each other, represented a transformation in what was considered possible for Black cinema at the highest commercial and critical levels. But the conditions that produced them were not new. The tradition ran from Oscar Micheaux's self-distributed race films in 1919 through the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers of the 1970s through Spike Lee and Julie Dash in the 1980s and 1990s. Each generation of Black filmmakers had been making excellent work. What changed was the institutional willingness to recognize and distribute it. The excellence was always there. The recognition was the variable.

The 2020 killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests produced a brief moment of institutional self-examination in Hollywood. Diversity commitments were made. Some were kept. The structural dynamics that had produced a century of exclusion — who controls the studios, who greenlights films, who sits in the decision-making chairs — changed slowly if at all. Black cinema will continue to be made. Whether it will be fairly distributed, fairly compensated, and fairly remembered is a different question — one that the preceding century suggests requires sustained vigilance to answer correctly.