Choosing 100 essential Black films: an interview with Ashley Clark

It’s 10 years since critic and curator Ashley Clark programmed Black Star, the major BFI season focusing on Black screen performers across the decades. Black Star would have later iterations at TIFF and MOMA, while Clark’s passion for bringing under-seen films to contemporary audiences has continued through his work as director of film programming at BAM in New York and now as curatorial director at Criterion.

Following monographs on Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Black Audio Film Collective, Clark’s latest book project is his most ambitious yet. The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films takes the reader on a rich ride through over a century of Black cinema, encompassing features and shorts, animations and docs, the mainstream and the experimental.

Strikingly designed by Violetta Boxill, and boasting a beautiful foreword by John Akomfrah, The World of Black Film offers a chronological survey, with a two-page spread dedicated to each title. From production history to star study to more personal reflections, each entry packs a lot into a relatively small space, and Clark never discusses a film in isolation. On the contrary, the book thrives on making often unexpected connections. Exploring work from Canada, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Europe, the US and across Africa, it’s especially valuable for its vivid reminder that Black cinema is global cinema.

Alex Ramon: The book came about after the publication of the updated 2023 Slate/NPR poll ‘The New Black Canon’, to which you contributed. How did the project evolve from there?

Ashley Clark: When Liz Faber, from Laurence King Publishing, got in touch, I didn’t feel like it was in my immediatefuture to be writing a book. The pivotal moment, really, was when I’d had time to reflect further on the Slate/NPR poll, which was so overwhelmingly US-centred. It occurred to me that there could definitely be scope for a book that looked at Black cinema through a much more international lens, making connections around the world. It could present a subjective and sometimes personal narrative that was exciting to me, and that might potentially be inspirational or educational to others. That was the moment when the idea came together.

Why did you choose to make it a chronological study?

I did flirt briefly with other frameworks. But a geographical focus, for instance, would have felt unbalanced. As much as the book tries to de-centre the US in some ways, it’s still a hugely important part of the story. A chronological structure made the book flow more effectively, and you can learn things as you go along. Ultimately, approaching the book chronologically informed my storytelling and helped me find so many interesting roots, connections and parallels along the way.

The title feels both expansive and cohesive. How did you decide on it?

That just came to me — in a similar way that the name Dirk Diggler comes to Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights [1997]! It was one of those moments. The subtitle – ‘A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films’ – took more tweaking, but ‘The World of Black Film’ came early on.

That subtitle feels vital too, given how important issues of place, belonging and movement – whether enforced or chosen – are across many of the films.

Exactly. That idea of movement is central; it’s a major part of the stories the films tell and it informs the conditions of a lot of the productions. Even when I’m focusing on one of the big early American stars, like Paul Robeson or Josephine Baker, they’re in Europe. Or someone like Melvin Van Peebles, who begins his feature filmmaking career in France.

So, from the title on, it was about the idea of movement and intercontinental collaborations and co-productions, and having things speak to each other across place and time. I wanted a strong feeling of fluidity in the book: the sense that Black film has a history that impacts places you might not expect, one that’s continually evolving.

You’ve talked in the past about criticism as curation, and vice versa. To what extent do you see the book as a culmination of work you’ve done at BFI, BAM, and now Criterion?

I think there’s a direct line, and the book does feel like a synthesis of what I’ve been doing as a critic, curator, programmer and broadcaster over the years. At BAM, for example, the programme ‘Fight the Power: Black Superheroes on Film’ (2018) was formed in anticipation of some of the reporting I knew would come out about Black Panther (2018): that people would say it’s the first Black superhero movie, when of course it isn’t. So I fashioned that programme as a kind of critical intervention. A lot of those ideas have worked their way into this book.

There was a programme I did at BFI in 2014 focusing on Afrofuturism. Again, it’s about those unexpected links – whether cinematic or stylistic or textual or metatextual – that connect, say, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993) with Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) .You’re creating a context to connect the films and then to make those connections legible and accessible for an audience. And I think that feeds into the book. I really wanted it to feel accessible to the reader.

It is a very hospitable, welcoming read.

Honestly, the audience I had in mind was myself at 16. It was really important to me that someone who’s just getting into film in a serious way isn’t overwhelmed by the book and the stories it’s trying to tell.

I have enormous respect for my colleagues in the academy who do that very tough intellectual labour and make breakthroughs in how we’re able to interpret and understand film. But my goal here was to put forth a subjective appreciation of Black cinema and to make it readable for those who aren’t experts. Mark Cousins’s work has always been inspiring to me: that kind of passion you can’t fake.

Are you ready for the heat that’s probably coming your way due to certain omissions from the 100?

They can give it their best shot, but no-one feels worse than I do about some of those absences! However, once I decided to feature only one film per director, I was very strict with myself because I wanted as broad a slate of films as possible. Hopefully if people read the intro and my framework for the book they’ll understand how and why certain decisions were made.

You don’t shy away from the difficulties experienced by some of the filmmakers, but the book adds up to a vision of plenitude — of Black artists working in all genres, at all budgetary scales, and in all production systems.

Yes, ultimately the book is a celebration of the existence of this work, and a testament to filmmakers who had to run through brick walls and fight the worst discrimination and exclusion but who still made these films on their own terms.

Which lesser-known films are you most excited for readers to discover?

There are so many. I was pretty blown away by Ibrahim Shaddad’s Hunting Party (1964). It could be made today — a cliche that’s often thrown out but it’s really true here. Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega (1988) is brilliant. St Clair Bourne’s doc The Black and the Green (1983) speaks to issues that we’re going through right now – it’s a compassionate film about how people commune and plan and rebel.

And Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), which I’ll present over the BFI weekend, is an amazing piece of work. For me as a writer, the most inspiring thing to know is that people might be experiencing some of these films for the first time through the book. 

The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films is out now from Laurence King Publishing.

Ashley Clark will present films featured in the book at the World of Black Film Weekend, from 20 to 22 February.