What is black film?

1. What is your definition of black film?
2. What films have you seen that you would define as black films?
3. Are black films defined by certain distinctive conventions or simply by their subject matter?

When you have thought about these questions and made some notes, read Joel Karamath's thoughts on these questions, below.

To many, the term 'black film' seems easy to define. Coming to prominence in the late 1980s, it tends to be associated with the output of African American directors working in and around Hollywood at the time. Films, such as She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986, USA), To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990, USA), Boyz In The Hood (John Singleton, 1991, USA), Biker Boyz (Reggie Rock Bythewood, 2003, USA) and Soul Plane (Jessy Terrero, 2004, USA), were written and directed by black filmmakers and writers, with largely black casts and crew members, covering a broad range of subject matter, thus fall under the black film umbrella.

However, on deeper inspection, a term that can accurately encompass the entire spectrum of any given culture let alone a dispersed one, inevitably finds itself running into difficulty. In no way do, or can, such films represent the full array of issues that constitute the entire black American experience, let alone that of the African diaspora as a whole. How then are we to utilise terminology that at once includes a variety of styles and ideologies as immediately diverse, in microcosm, as the works of Sembene Ousman (Senegal), Spike Lee and Julie Dash (USA), Euzhan Palcy (Martinique) or Isaac Julien (UK)?

Nevertheless just as Hollywood has become the byword for mainstream cinema around the globe, the term 'black film' has been used to encompass the disparate cinema cultures of Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean and black communities across Europe.

Yet it is this very apparent dichotomy which makes two recent DVD releases so interesting in the light of film history and contemporary race relations in Britain today.

Those people who are in Western civilization, who have grown up but yet are not completely a part, have a unique insight ... and something special to contribute. (CLR James, Ten 8, Vol. No16)

Horace Ové's Pressure (1975, UK), the first feature film made by a black director in Britain and Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981, UK) contribute a telling insight into the changing face of Britain, amidst the political and social unrest of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. They offered a minority perspective at a time when the traditional notions of class and politics were being fiercely debated and challenged, and marked a paradigm shift in what it meant to be British, in the broadest sense, and how that affected notions of race and class identity. The two films would, in retrospect, highlight some of the smouldering issues that were to become major battlegrounds of the early Thatcher years (Friedman, Lester (ed), British Cinema and Thatcherism, UCL, 1993 ).