Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      The World Has Finally Caught Up to Colman Domingo

      by

      Colman Domingo was at the Equinox on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue when his agent called. A rush of hope overtook him: After a week spent auditioning for eight film and television roles, finally he was about to get something.This was in 2014, which Domingo experienced as a year of incredible highs and dangerously low lows. He had just come off a successful, soul-enriching transfer of the stage musical “The Scottsboro Boys” in London, but upon returning to New York, he felt quickly cut down to size. Despite his Tony nomination for the Kander and Ebb musical, Domingo was stuck auditioning for “under-fives,” screen roles that had little more to offer than a line or two. Still, he felt backed into a corner, praying that one of them would hit.The most promising was a callback for HBO’s Prohibition-era drama “Boardwalk Empire”: To audition for a maître d’ at a Black-owned nightclub, Domingo had donned a tuxedo to sing and tap dance for the producers. You can imagine how he felt, then, when his agent began that call at the gym by saying that everyone on “Boardwalk Empire” had loved his audition. This is the one that’s going to change it up for me, Domingo thought. This is the one that’s going to finally be my big break.There was just one problem, his agent said. After the callback, a historical researcher on the show reminded producers that the maître d’s in those nightclubs were typically light-skinned, and Domingo was not. “Boardwalk Empire” had passed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’

      by

      The Emmy-winning writer and former journalist drew on personal experience for his feature debut, a layered sendup of race and hypocrisy in the book and film worlds.Before he read “Erasure,” Percival Everett’s satirical novel about Black representation in the publishing industry, Cord Jefferson had never really thought of himself as a movie director. He had hoped to direct for television — his writing credits include several episodes of “Master of None,” “The Good Place” and HBO’s “Watchmen,” for which he shared an Emmy in 2020 — but even that seemed like a stretch.“I thought they might let me direct something that I helped write or create,” he said in a recent interview. “And even then it would be like Episode 4 of 10, not the pilot or the finale.”Things changed in December 2020, when Jefferson, 41, picked up “Erasure” and became enchanted. The book, published in 2001, is the story of Thelonius Ellison, known as Monk, a disillusioned Black intellectual whose mocking attempt at writing a stereotypical “ghetto novel” becomes a straightforward best seller.“Twenty pages in, I knew I had to write a film adaptation,” Jefferson said. “By the time I finished the book, I knew I had to direct it.” “American Fiction,” his take on the novel — and feature film debut as both a writer and director — is in theaters Friday. It stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, Issa Rae as a rival novelist and Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s siblings. In September, it won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, a precursor for an Academy Awards nomination for best picture for the past 11 years.Over lunch in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, Jefferson, a former journalist and editor at Gawker, discussed his personal connection to Everett’s story, his adoration of the writer-director Nicole Holofcener and shedding tears in a pitch meeting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it about the book that spoke to you?There was so much. The most obvious is just the conversation that it’s having about the expectations of a Black artist in this country, what people want or think that Black art should be. That was a huge part of my life when I was still working in journalism. I wrote this article called “The Racism Beat,” which is very much about the expectation that Black journalists are just there to write about the bad things that happen to Black people and racism and violence.But besides that, there are three siblings in the book, and I have two older siblings. And there’s an ailing parent in the book, and my mother passed of cancer in 2016, after two years of struggling. One of the siblings in the book is charged with caring for the parent because the other two are off doing their own thing, and that was the dynamic with us. My oldest brother shouldered that responsibility. He went about it stoically and never complained or anything, but I had this residual guilt over not being there.From big things to small things, there was just all of this stuff that felt like it was speaking to me directly. I went to a college in Virginia called William & Mary, and there’s a reference to William & Mary in the novel. Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture! It just felt like somebody had written a gift specifically for me, like, “I made this for you.”The parts about the expectations facing Black artists, did they match your own experience when you arrived in Hollywood?Oh, definitely. I thought I was going to get there and it would be like, “Oh yeah, there’s a world of opportunity and we’re just going to write about whatever. The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.” But there’s genres for “prestige Black projects”: slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.I’ll tell you a true story of something that happened to a friend that exemplifies this perfectly. She went into a meeting at this production company and they’re like, “What are you interested in writing?” She says, “I’m interested in romantic comedies, like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ classic, generational, Nora Ephron comedies. I would also love to write a ’90s-style erotic thriller.” They’re like, “All right, great. We’ll come back to you later with some ideas.” About three hours later, they call her and say, “We’ve got this story about a blind slave who, thanks to a wealthy white benefactor, learns to play the piano and becomes a piano prodigy. Are you interested in this?”Wow.They see a Black person and they can’t see past that. I think there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, why would we hire you to write a rom-com? Why would we hire you to write an erotic thriller?” There’s an inability to think of us as having our own passions and our own complex existence outside of this very limited window of what they allow us to say about our lives. These are things that people of color have been talking about for a very long time. To me, the real spiritual ancestor for this project would be “Hollywood Shuffle” [Robert Townsend’s satire of Black representation in Hollywood, released in 1987].That was a real foundational text for me when I was a kid. I loved that movie. I probably saw it before I was 10. It opened my eyes to this idea that you can talk about these things that are very serious but also have fun with them, that not only is it OK to laugh, you need to laugh because otherwise you’ll just be miserable all the time. It blew my mind wide open.From left, Sterling K. Brown, Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander in “American Fiction.” The movie won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.Claire Folger/Orion PicturesIt’s funny because the two references I kept thinking about while watching your movie were “Hollywood Shuffle” and Nicole Holofcener, which is a cool combination.Dude, love Nicole Holofcener. She’s a genius. I’m so happy you said that. To me, that’s the greatest compliment. I love her so much. I saw “Friends With Money” [2006] when it first came out, and I was just blown away. She’s a huge influence on me. She has such a subtle, deft hand with class dynamics. And I love her character work. I’m forgetting the one with Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus …“Enough Said.”Yeah. I just feel like she has an attention to detail when it comes to how human beings actually interact and live their lives. What I set out to make with this movie was something that felt a little bit like life. To me, even in the most miserable times, I’ve always found ways to laugh and enjoy myself and time with my family and friends. There are all these things that buoy your spirits. I think it’s a disservice to the human experience to not reflect that. And that’s something Nicole Holofcener does really well. I think Noah Baumbach does, also. Spike Lee, Bong Joon Ho. All people who’ve inspired me over the years.I wanted to ask you about something that happens toward the end of the film, which is this really interesting conversation between Monk and Sintara (Issa Rae) that raises the question of whether his distaste for her novel masks a distaste for a certain kind of Black person. In your mind, what do you think Monk’s relationship is with other Black people?Something Jeffrey and I talked about the first time we met and that we agreed on instantly was we didn’t want this movie to be some Talented Tenth, respectability politics [expletive]. We didn’t want it to feel like we were finger wagging and saying, “This is the right way to be Black, and all you other people are doing it wrong.” Both of us knew the movie could not be that. So that scene was important because we didn’t want people to come away being like, “Oh, well, she’s the villain and he’s the hero.” There are no villains or heroes.What I really like about that scene is I don’t really know who I agree with, ultimately. They both make interesting points. But I will say that when she says that line, “Potential is what people see when they think what’s in front of them isn’t good enough,” I think it’s the first time we see Monk confronted with the idea that he might be a little self-loathing, that he might have an internal problem with his Blackness. It’s one of the first times that we see him really get clammed up.Do you think it’s directing now for you? Or will you go back to writing television?I’m working on four different movies right now and I want to keep writing and directing movies, but I also want to do TV. I published a short story last year, and I’d love to do more of that. I’m about 60 percent done with a stage play. I just want to keep making stuff. When T Street [a producer of “American Fiction”] told me that they were greenlighting the movie, I started crying in the meeting. I had been told no for so long. I’d worked on all these things that just sort of went nowhere. It starts to break your heart eventually. You wonder, “Is this ever going to happen for me? Or is this just going to be a thing that I wanted to do my whole life?” The fact that I was able to crack the door a little bit to make this. … I feel incredibly honored. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Norman Lear Reshaped How America Saw Black Families

      by

      “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford and Son” brought a wave of Black characters to TV, even as the shows opened up tensions over stereotypes.As a birthday present for Tyler Perry last year, a mutual acquaintance arranged for him to meet one of his heroes, Norman Lear. Perry grew up watching Lear’s groundbreaking television shows, and was awed by how several presented a fuller version of Black lives onto American television screens for the first time.Long ago, Perry had hoped to have a storied career that would emulate a speck of what Lear’s shows such as “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” displayed: that Black people can share opinions, fall in love, laugh and be fearful just like anyone else.“Had it not been for Norman, there wouldn’t have been a path for me,” said Perry, whose film and TV empire has made him one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood. “It was him bringing Black people to television and showing the world that there’s an audience for us.”Perry departed his meeting with Lear, who was 100 years old at the time, with a deeper appreciation for the craftsmanship of the pioneering television writer and producer who died at 101 on Tuesday. The reality of Lear, a white man, being responsible for bringing a fuller picture of Black lives to American TV screens was a product of the era, when most doors were still closed to Black producers and creators. Some characters in his shows were the source of flare-ups, particularly when some Black cast members complained about stereotypical portrayals, which are still debated today.Yet despite those tensions, it’s hard to find anyone in the medium of television who is held in such high regard, including by many Black writers and showrunners now creating and running today’s shows.“It’s like asking someone who played basketball if Michael Jordan influenced them,” said Kenya Barris, the creator of “black-ish.” “He changed the way contemporary storytelling was told in the genre that I was doing it in.”Barris said that Lear was an early champion of “black-ish” and even visited its writers’ room in 2016.“It’s about as impactful in modern media as a legacy could be,” Barris said of Lear’s body of work that made him a defining figure of ’70s TV.Lear’s shows touched on hot-button issues such as civil rights activism, alcoholism and abortion, going far beyond the one-dimensional existence that Black characters were previously relegated to. His shows depicted television’s first two-parent Black family, an upwardly mobile Black family and the other side of the coin to his most famous character, “All in the Family’s” Archie Bunker, in Redd Foxx’s portrayal of the oft-bigoted Fred Sanford in “Sanford and Son.”This full-rounded view of Black life in America — through characters who had failures and triumphs, struggles and aspirations — helped usher in what historians call the era of “social relevance” in television, in which TV shows and sitcoms offered more authentic depictions of Americans’ lives, said Adrien Sebro, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Scratchin’ and Survivin’: Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions,” a book about Lear’s many television productions.Redd Foxx, left, and Desmond Wilson on “Sanford and Son.”NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesBeverly McIver, an artist and professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University, remembers watching Lear’s shows every week as a child. Growing up in a housing project in Greensboro, N.C., she identified with J.J. Evans, the teenage aspiring artist who grows up in Chicago public housing, portrayed by Jimmie Walker on “Good Times.”“These shows gave me hope that I could rise out of the project, not continue the cycle of poverty, and that I could be an artist,” she said.Walker, in an interview, said Lear always looked to deliver a message through his shows, which initially threw Walker.“Norman, if you want to deliver a message, go work for Western Union,” Walker, 76, recalled telling Lear. “I’m here to work. I’m here to have fun, baby. I’m here to do comedy.”But Walker eventually grew to appreciate Lear’s stance in delivering social commentary through comedy.“He wasn’t a funny-joke writer guy,” Walker said. “He believed that both sides needed to be heard.”Fresh from the Civil Rights era, Hollywood had yet to open itself to Black shows, let alone Black showrunners.“There wasn’t a Black person who could have made that happen,” Perry said of the fuller portrayal of Black life onscreen. “It had to be Norman Lear.”He added: “It had to be a person who understands humanity and people and who we all are at our core and the things we all appreciate and care about, which are family and love and that we all feel pain.”Lear and other producers held tight to creative control of the series. As groundbreaking as the shows centering Black characters were, the creative decisions were still being made by white people who did not share the experiences of the cast onscreen.Two Black writers, Eric Monte and Mike Evans, are credited with creating “Good Times,” but have struggled to receive recognition for their contributions. Monte also argued that Lear stole his idea for “The Jeffersons.” He received a $1 million settlement and said he was eventually blacklisted from Hollywood.“Everything they wrote was stereotypic,” Monte told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006.But many who worked with Lear credited him with changing their lives.”I’ve had a very interesting life being on ‘Good Times,’” said BernNadette Stanis, who played Thelma Evans. “My whole life as an adult has been attached to ‘Good Times.’”Other actors who worked on Lear’s shows recalled him extending an open ear to their ideas and thoughts. Marla Gibbs once asked Lear why he seldom showed up on the set of “The Jeffersons.” Gibbs recalled Lear saying that the cast and show were doing just fine without him.But if she ever needed him, Lear added, he’d be there.Gibbs, who played the Jeffersons’ wisecracking maid, Florence Johnston, requested him shortly after. The show’s actors lobbied Lear for a more rounded depiction of the Willises, portrayed by Roxie Roker and Franklin Cover as television’s first interracial marriage between Black and white partners. As a result, the pair exchanged a kiss in a landmark 1974 episode.From left, Marla Gibbs, Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley in “The Jeffersons.” CBS, via Getty ImagesBeginning in 1972, NBC aired Lear’s “Sanford and Son,” which starred Foxx and Demond Wilson as a father and son in Los Angeles, and in 1974 CBS aired “Good Times,” which focused on the Evanses — the first time a Black nuclear family appeared on television.The show was originally envisioned as starring a one-parent matriarchal household, but Esther Rolle, argued that her character, Florida Evans, should be married. Stanis recalled Lear listening to Rolle and, soon after, hiring John Amos to play her husband, James.“He was lenient in that way,” Stanis said.With Rolle’s backing, Stanis talked to Lear and the show’s other producers and writers about establishing more of a voice for Thelma, the daughter of the household.“We were the first Black family show,” Stanis said. “You would have 50-, 60-year-old Caucasian men writing for a teenager and they didn’t have much to say about me.”She added: “Norman was there, the producers and the writers, all of them, the director, everybody was there. They received my viewpoint very well.”That was not the case with every conflict. A 1975 article in Ebony magazine titled “Bad Times on the ‘Good Times’ Set” described a “continuing battle among the cast members to keep the comedic flavor of the program from becoming so outlandish as to be embarrassing to Blacks.”The actors grew particularly frustrated with the outsized role of Walker’s J.J. as the loud and often lazy son with the famous catchphrase of “dyn-o-mite!” who became enormously popular with audiences.Cast members believed the performance portrayed Black Americans in a stereotypical lens. Despite these concerns, the show’s writers transformed J.J. from a minor character into one of the show’s central figures.“I thought too much emphasis was being put on J.J. and his chicken hat and saying ‘dy-no-mite’ every third page,” Amos said in a 2014 interview with the Television Academy. He added that producers resolved the conflict by getting rid of Amos’s character. “So they said, ‘Tell you what? Why don’t we kill him off and we’ll all get on with our lives?’”In addition to Amos’s firing, Rolle also left the show for a season before returning.“When we found out that John wouldn’t be back, we read the script and I thought it was mistaken identity,” Stanis said, adding that when Rolle, who died in 1998, briefly left, “I don’t think that she was very happy with having to leave the show the way it was designed.”In his 2014 autobiography, “Even This I Get to Experience,” Lear wrote that members of the Black Panthers came to his office to complain that “Good Times” perpetuated stereotypes about Black poverty. Lear responded with “The Jeffersons,” which debuted on CBS in 1975. The show featured Sherman Hemsley as George Jefferson, a Black man with a successful dry-cleaning business and a luxury apartment in Manhattan, and Isabel Sanford as his beleaguered wife, Louise.Gibbs broke out as Florence before going on to a long career that included roles on series like “227” and “The Hughleys.” When she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2021, Lear accompanied her to the ceremony. She remembered him saying that laughter adds years to one’s life and thanked her for adding years to his.“I’d say without Norman, people would not know my name,” said Gibbs, 92. “He hired me and because of the affiliation, everybody knows Marla Gibbs and they know Florence, so I’d say he definitely added years to my life.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Ellen Holly, Trailblazing Star in ‘One Life to Live,’ Dies at 92

      by

      Ms. Holly was the first Black performer to play a lead role on daytime television.Ellen Holly, whose star turn in the soap opera “One Life to Live” made her the first Black actor to play a lead role in daytime TV, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 92.Her publicist, Cheryl L. Duncan, confirmed her death in a statement. No cause was given.Ms. Holly was born in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1931, and grew up in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Her parents were William Garnet Holly, a chemical engineer, and Grayce Holly, a writer. Relatives included several prominent figures in the civil rights movement.After graduating from Hunter College, she debuted on Broadway in 1956 in “Too Late the Phalarope,” then went on to perform in several other Broadway productions.In 1968, Ms. Holly wrote in The New York Times about the difficulty of finding roles as a Black woman with lighter skin. The column caught the attention of a television producer, Agnes Nixon, who gave Ms. Holly the groundbreaking role of Carla that would catapult her to fame after “One Life to Live” launched on ABC. She played the role from 1968 to 1980 and 1983-’85.The character for a time passed as white, before revealing that she was Black, amid a love triangle with two doctors: one white and the other Black. When her character appeared to be in an interracial relationship with a Black man, a station in Texas canceled the show, and Ms. Nixon, the producer, received hate mail, she said in an interview in 1997.“A white woman falling in love with a Black man,” Ms. Holly said in a 2018 interview, “people started looking at that soap opera because they were saying, ‘This is something new, we better see where this is going.’”She wrote about her experience in a New York Times column in 1969, writing that she found the storyline of a Black woman passing as white “fascinating.”“I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could,” she wrote, because unlike a play or movie, viewers would follow the character for months.“The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater,” she wrote, “and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren’t prejudiced — are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to confront their own prejudices.”Ms. Holly wrote that while she called herself Black, she also had French, English and Shinnecock ancestry.Ms. Holly wrote an autobiography, “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress,” which was published in 1996. Over the years, she wrote opinion columns for The New York Times about the arts, race and civil rights.After retiring from acting, she became a librarian in the 1990s, working at the White Plains Public Library for years.Ms. Holly, who never married or had children, is survived by several grand-nieces, cousins and other family members. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Julianna Margulies Apologizes After Remarks on Black Support of Jews

      by

      The actress had said on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the Hamas attacks had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”The actress Julianna Margulies, who drew criticism this week after saying on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the recent attack by Hamas had been “brainwashed to hate Jews,” said on Friday that she “did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.”On the Nov. 20 episode of “The Back Room With Andy Ostroy,” Margulies, who has starred on the television series “E.R.,” “The Good Wife” and, presently, “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, accused Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people of showing insufficient support for Israel and Jews in the United States since the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.“I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect,” Margulies said in a statement on Friday afternoon to Deadline, which her publicist sent to The New York Times in response to a query. “I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop.”Some social media users objected to Margulies’s comments as racist, and questioned why she was focusing her criticism on marginalized groups.Margulies, who is Jewish, contrasted Jews’ vocal support for Black civil rights in the 1960s with the present: “Now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us?’”She added, “The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says either they just don’t know or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”She also said on the podcast that progressive protesters on college campuses, whom she accused of “spewing this antisemitic hate,” include gender nonbinary people who, she said, “will be the first people beheaded and their heads played like a soccer ball on the field” in places run by militant Islamist groups like Hamas.Margulies also said on the podcast, “There was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus, and they put signs up that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’” (The president of LionLez, a group for queer women and nonbinary people of color at the university, had emailed, “Zionists aren’t invited,” The Columbia Spectator reported.) Margulies said that to Hamas and its ilk, members of that student club would be “even lower than the Jews — A. you’re Black, and B. you’re gay. And you’re turning your back against the people who support you?”Margulies added that she was offended as someone “who plays a lesbian journalist on ‘The Morning Show.’ I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you.”In her statement on Friday, Margulies said that she usually seeks to “forge a united front against discrimination.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Play About Black Women’s Experiences, Met With Violence

      by

      Rébecca Chaillon’s “Carte Noire Named Desire” provoked harassment in France this summer, leading one actor to pull out of a new run in Paris.One performer is missing from the current Parisian run of Rébecca Chaillon’s “Carte Noire Named Desire,” an arresting show about the experiences of Black women in France. When the actors gathered onstage for a dinner scene at the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe this week, Fatou Siby’s chair remained empty, and a monologue inspired by her life was delivered instead by a guest artist.The reason for Siby’s absence? She and other members of the all-Black cast were targets of racist attacks after “Carte Noire” played this summer at the Avignon Festival, which followed widespread protests in France over the police shooting of Nahel M., a 17-year-old of North African descent.“I need to protect myself,” Siby told the French news site Mediapart of her decision to withdraw from the Paris performances.In one short scene from “Carte Noire,” the cast stages a game of charades inspired by anti-Black racism. To help the audience guess the answer “colonization” this summer, Siby went into the auditorium and jokingly took bags and coats belonging to audience members. (The items were then set aside near the exit to be collected after the show.)According to Mediapart, one male audience member forcefully twisted Siby’s arm as she performed the scene. Others physically hit performers, called them “dictators” and implied they didn’t belong in France. In the days that followed, Siby told Mediapart, an audience member accosted her and her child on the street in Avignon. Since the incidents became public — in a statement, the Avignon Festival described them as “an outpouring of hate” — Chaillon and her team have also been cyber-harassed and become the subject of far-right pundits.Sitting in the audience at the Odéon this week, I found it hard not to feel anger on behalf of the seven cast members who have soldiered on. “Carte Noire” relies on their willingness to be highly vulnerable onstage. The excessive media attention on the charades scene obscured the rest of the piece, which is by turns powerful, lyrical and visually dazzling — an ode to Black women’s imagination in a world whose default setting is whiteness.In the show, Makeda Monnet sings a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.Vincent Zobler“Carte Noire Named Desire” — the title is a play on a famous French ad for the coffee brand — offers some redress, starting with the seating arrangement. As the audience streams into the theater, a recorded announcement explains that 20 or so seats are reserved on comfortable-looking couches at the back of the stage for Black women or nonbinary people. There, they’re handed drinks, while the rest of the audience remains in folding seats for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes.The first half-hour prompts a different kind of discomfort. On her hands and knees, Chaillon, dressed in white, with white lenses covering her pupils and white powder all over her skin, tries to scrub an all-white floor clean, even as darker liquid drips from cups above her. As the scene stretches on, she starts stripping and using her own clothes as mops, ultimately dragging herself around the floor to wipe it.Coolly, without a word, the scene speaks to the disproportionate number of Black people in menial jobs in France. Chaillon, a bold performer and director who has been at the helm of her own company, Dans le Ventre, since 2006, excels at showing before telling. A castmate ultimately pulls her from the floor, and slowly washes the white powder off her body. Then the other women gather around her to braid oversized ropes into her hair — an evocative variation on a Black hair salon.The scenes that follow are often humorous and surreal. Chaillon reads from classified ads written by white men looking for Black women. Makeda Monnet, a trained soprano, trills her way through a song about coffee — a product often produced in colonized countries — on a table engulfed in white foam, before being covered in a cloud of cocoa powder.On the night I attended, however, the game of charades steered clear of its most controversial element. While the performers had audience members guess “Black Sea,” “Josephine Baker” or the film “12 Years a Slave,” the game didn’t include “colonization,” and no bags or coats were taken. While that word was intentionally removed from one Avignon performance to protect the cast, a spokeswoman for Dans Le Ventre said that its absence in Paris that night was random; charade rounds are sometimes skipped over when the game runs too long.What remained that night was a deeply felt production, interspersed with skits and monologues that walk a fine line between true accounts of pain and quasi-performance poetry. On that day, the story of the absent Siby was delivered by special guest Alice Diop, the filmmaker behind the award-winning “Saint Omer,” who sat on the couches in the back with other Black women.At the very end, the audience was left with an indelible tableau: Chaillon, naked, her heavy braids attached to a tangle of ropes above, as the other women sat at her feet — all assembled like roots in a tree of life. That any actor would be fearful of joining them onstage in “Carte Noire” only proves Chaillon’s point: For Black women, even an act of community is political.Carte Noire Named DesireOdéon–Théâtre de l’Europe through Dec. 17; theatre-odeon.eu More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse

      by

      In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ Review: Examining Racist Thought

      by

      The documentary, based on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, looks at the ugly history of anti-Black ideology.The documentary “Stamped From the Beginning,” based on the 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, begins with a trick question and ends with a sage retort.“What’s wrong with Black people?” asks the director Roger Ross Williams of the film’s heady roster of Black female scholars as they consider the ways in which the slave trade created anti-Black racism and, as Kendi argues, not the reverse. The formidable interviewees include the novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; the historian Elizabeth Hinton; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. When Davis discusses the work “not done” at slavery’s end to retool “the entire society so that it might be possible for previously enslaved individuals to be free and equal,” her words are as muscularly poignant as they are pointed.The subtitle of Kendi’s book is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Williams employs several methods to distill the National Book Award-winning tome’s ambitions as it moves from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, back to the Portuguese enslavement of Africans and forward to the rise of Trumpism in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama.In addition to interviews and archival images, film clips and news footage, Williams (“Cassandro” “Life, Animated”) leans into animation. In an engaging gambit, the director utilizes a mix of visual effects, painting and collage to tell the stories of the poet Phillis Wheatley; the author Harriet Jacobs and the journalist and anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.Stamped From the BeginningRated R for some violent content, language, drug content and nude images. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More