Is That Black Enough for You?!? (2022)
dir. Elvis Mitchell
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Netflix
What Questlove did last year for a single music festival with his documentary Summer of Soul, film and cultural critic Elvis Mitchell has done for an entire decade of cinema and beyond with Is That Black Enough for You?!?, the first-time director’s new Netflix documentary.
With a focus on the 1970s, one of the greatest decades in American cinema by almost any measure, Mitchell succeeds wildly with Black Enough as a reclamation project for Black cinema of the era. His film is an erudite mix of interviews with numerous luminaries of the film and entertainment world – Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg are only a few – and incisive video essay-style film and cultural criticism from Mitchell.
When I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fifteen years ago, I was taken aback by an exhibit focused on Led Zeppelin’s theft, for lack of a better word – then again, perhaps it’s exactly the right word – of key elements in many of the band’s signature blues-infused hits from earlier Black blues artists. There’s a thin line between homage and larceny; the exhibit made clear that Zeppelin had engaged in the latter.
So, it should have been no surprise when a clip from one of the dozens of films – a proper count would likely put it over 100 – featured in Black Enough clued me in to a little bit of petty larceny in one of my own favorite movies. In They Live, wrestler-cum-actor "Rowdy" Roddy Piper delivers the hilarious classic line, “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubble gum.” Imagine my knowing grin when I heard an astonishingly similar sentiment in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it length clip from Mitchell’s picture.
I don’t think director John Carpenter had any nefarious intent behind the pilfered line. It’s possible – if he really did lift it – that he was a fan of the movie referenced in Black Enough, and that was his own little tribute. (I want to stress that I have not done the proper research into these two movies – I didn’t catch the title of the one in Black Enough because it went by too quickly – to determine their relationship. It was impossible, though, not to notice the similarity.) But it’s telling that Carpenter’s version is the one that is remembered by cinephiles, while I couldn’t find a single reference to the earlier iteration of it when I looked online.
Mitchell devotes a significant portion of his movie to this exact phenomenon. One of the most fascinating topics covered in the documentary is how Black filmmakers invented the concept of releasing a movie’s soundtrack before its theatrical release. As Mitchell himself puts it – the poly-hyphenate narrates the film, in addition to writing, directing, and working as an executive producer – this strategy served as an invitation to these movies for audiences. It made the movies’ titles, music, and images, in the form of the records’ album covers and liner notes, a familiar entity before their release, as a way to build anticipation.
It's a strategy that Hollywood completely embraced – prior to Black soundtrack smash hits like Shaft and Super Fly, the major studios treated soundtrack sales as an afterthought – and it’s been standard operating procedure now for well over 40 years. As a young cineaste and film student, I heard and read endlessly about George Lucas revolutionizing movie merchandizing with Star Wars action figures and Steven Spielberg inventing the blockbuster with Jaws. I heard nary a peep about this equally important innovation from the Black film community.
And a strong, creative, and supportive community it is, too. Mitchell talks to over a dozen actors and filmmakers about their role in the explosion of Black cinema in the 1970s, a time when Blaxploitation films like Blacula and Black Momma, White Momma were finding success with Black and white audiences alike. Mitchell speaks eloquently and lovingly of the period, a time of his own cultural awakening, hence the movie’s tagline: how one decade forever changed the movies (and me).
Glynn Turman – probably most recognizable to my generation as Colonel Bradford Taylor on the TV series A Different World – speaks in depth about his experiences making Cooley High, the so-called Black American Graffiti. Turman waxes nostalgic about how one sequence in the film, in which the core cast hitches a ride on the back bumper of a city bus, felt so real to him, because it was something he had done in his own high school days.
Black Enough stresses the level of authenticity that Black filmmakers found in the low budget Blaxploitation world – as the doc makes clear, this Black-led movement was indie before Quentin Tarantino and the 90s Sundance scene made indie cool. There was a creative freedom, even if proper economic compensation and industry success never materialized, in boundary-pushing fare like Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man, for example. That movie tells the story of a bigoted white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has transformed into a Black man.
Freaky Friday, indeed.
Van Peebles’s revolutionary 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is also covered in Black Enough, and Mitchell gets insights about the production from Van Peebles’s son, actor and filmmaker Mario (Melvin Van Peebles died in September of 2021 at age 89). The fight for Black liberation from white oppression as seen in Sweet Sweetback – the key musical refrain throughout the film features the lyrics “You bled my Momma, you bled my Poppa, but you won’t bleed me” – is balanced in Is That Black Enough for You?!? by more comedic moments in 70s Black cinema. They are still incredibly powerful, though, because they mocked the white power structure in ways that would have been unimaginable only ten years before.
In Cotton Comes to Harlem, Mitchell discusses how seeing a Black woman humiliate a racist white cop – she convinces him she’ll have sex with him if he’ll strip down and put a brown paper bag over his head first, only to then lock him out of her apartment – was a comedic act of liberation in and of itself. Cotton Comes to Harlem is also where Mitchell’s documentary gets its title. As is covered by Mitchell, “Is that Black enough for you?” is repeated by various characters throughout actor and director Ossie Davis’s film. The question serves many different roles, as an exclamation, as a joke, and as a genuine question.
Mitchell isn’t content to restrict his documentary to only the dozen or so years of the late 1960s and 70s Black cinema renaissance. He puts his film history and cultural critic bona fides on display by laying the groundwork for the importance of Black cinema from the earliest days of the art form, and how it led to the Black film movement of the 1970s. He gives us background on trailblazers like Oscar Micheaux, widely regarded as the first major Black filmmaker, and Alice Guy-Blaché, a white filmmaker and the first woman to direct a feature film. Guy-Blaché made A Fool and His Money in 1912, what was probably the first film to feature an all-Black cast.
From there he takes us to legendary figures like Harry Belafonte and, of course, the iconic Sidney Poitier. Mitchell weaves an intricate and fascinating analysis of how George Romero’s casting of a Black man as Ben, the lead of his seminal 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, was revolutionary. He brilliantly juxtaposes the scenes of a posse killing and burning zombies – considering what happens to Ben in the final minutes of Living Dead, these scenes can be read as lynchings – with contemporary television footage of the Black uprisings taking place all over America at the time.
(There’s also a sly observation from interviewee Whoopi Goldberg about horror movies in general, that turns an infamous trope of the genre on its head. Everybody knows that horror movies are famous for including a Black character, only to have that character invariably be the first one to die at the hands of the monster. Goldberg complicates that legacy by commenting on how, if there is a Black character in a horror movie, he or she is the one who knows how to get out of deadly or dangerous situations, as a nod to the lived experiences of people in Black communities. That observation holds, until the (usually white) filmmakers send the character to their doom.)
Near the beginning of Is That Black Enough for You?!?, Mitchell remarks on how 1939 is regarded in many circles as the greatest year in American movie history. He says this as monstrously racist depictions of Black people in one release from that year, Gone with the Wind, play on the screen. Films regarded as history-making and classic, like the aforementioned Civil War-set and Lost Cause promoting Gone With the Wind, and the virulently racist and white supremacist The Birth of a Nation, make it, as he puts it, “hard for me to love the movies.”
Still, he loves them. And, as Samuel L. Jackson says in the film, all Black people had to look up to on screen for decades were caricatures like Stepin Fetchit. Still, Jackson says, he wanted to be on that screen, too. For decades, he and other Black actors and film artists like him were forced to squeeze the round peg of their cultural and personal experiences into the square hole of the white film culture and power structure. Elvis Mitchell has shone a light on a group of filmmakers and films that bucked that trend and changed the way movies were made by challenging who holds the power to tell stories, and what kind of stories are told.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Thoroughly engaging, entertaining, and deeply researched, Is That Black Enough for You?!? is one of the best documentaries of the year. Mitchell can wax didactic on just about any topic, as far as I’m concerned.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There are 172 films referenced in Black Enough (I know that thanks to a patient Letterboxd user who created a list on the site naming each one). There are dozens of films among them that I need to catch up with. None more so than filmmaker William Greaves’s 1968 experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Based on the description from Mitchell, this is an absolute must-see for me.
- After learning that Isaac Hayes was inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West to create his iconic album Hot Buttered Soul, I am now resolved to get to get my hands on the soul classic.
- Bill Cosby’s name is not mentioned once in Mitchell’s doc, although the disgraced actor and comedian does fleetingly appear in a few clips. The silence, as it concerns Cosby’s complicated legacy, is deafening.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
Is That Black Enough for You?!? is available exclusively on Netflix, which is how I screened it.