84 Time February 15/February 22, 2021
The Black Renaissance MOVIES + TELEVISION
only two minutes to reduce the move-
ment to nameless, arrogant militants
in allegiance with a domestic abuser.
The film won Best Picture at the Oscars,
earned $680 million and became part of
many high school history curriculums.
The second film, Mario Van Peebles’
Panther, portrayed the group as a grass-
roots organization of idealists system-
atically stifled and imprisoned by an un-
just legal system. The film drew vicious
attacks from conservatives and skepti-
cism from critics, with one Baltimore
Sun story citing detractors who linked
its anti government ideology to that be-
hind the recent Oklahoma City bomb-
ing. Panther took in $6.8 million before
fading from view; it’s currently unavail-
able on any streaming platform.
Those two films and their fates can
be read as an object lesson in Holly-
wood’s relationship with Black history.
While cinema has long had a love affair
with historical narratives— reverently
re- creating the lives of scientists, gang-
sters, pilots and kings—very few of those
figures have been Black. In movies about
the civil rights era like The Help and
Mississippi Burning, Black activists are
sidelined in favor of white do-gooder
protagonists. Elsewhere, Black figures
are thrust into a few reductive tracks:
“a slave, a butler or some street hood,”
as the character Jesse sums up in Robert
Townsend’s 1987 satire, Hollywood Shuf-
fle. Black filmmakers who attempted to
reframe Black history in projects like
Malcolm X, Panther and Rosewood de-
scribed overcoming years of stony in-
dustry resistance to put those movies in
front of audiences.
Over the past few years, how-
ever, a growing number of Black film-
makers have found opportunities to tell
history-based stories, determined to
reject white-savior narratives and cen-
ter Black interiority. They have grieved
anew alongside the Central Park Five
(When They See Us) and taught many
about the buried history of the Tulsa
race massacre (Watchmen). They’ve in-
stilled compassion and unruly texture
into stories of 1980s drag ball performers
(Pose); a titan of the blues (Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom); and the first Black fe-
male presidential candidate for a major
party, Shirley Chisholm (Mrs. America) —
celebrating not just greatness or injus-
tice but also parts of Black life that had
previously unfolded offscreen.
These works are not just a matter of
representation but of history itself. Re-
search has shown that powerful narra-
tive can subsume previous memories;
films can indelibly shape public under-
standing of historical events. “There’s a
responsibility to understand that if you
do your job right and enter the public
consciousness, you will have over written
actual history with your own imagina-
tion,” Trey Ellis, a filmmaker and film
professor at Columbia University, says.
This month, the Black Panthers will
get a new appraisal in Shaka King’s Judas
and the Black Messiah, which is already
receiving acclaim and Oscar buzz far
more in line with Forrest Gump than Pan-
ther. The film, which hits theaters and
HBO Max on Feb. 12, portrays Chicago
Panthers, including charismatic leader
Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), not as
cold-blooded vigilantes but as commu-
nity organizers with ideological rigor and
deep interpersonal bonds, while the FBI
embarks on a ruthless quest to silence
them—even if that requires putting bul-
lets in their sleeping bodies.
The challenge for King and other
Black creators is both providing reme-
dial education and speaking to a pres entstill rife with prejudice. “I’m not trying
to erase what’s there, because that will
never be accomplished in my lifetime.
This is generations of oppressive, calcu-
lated misinformation,” Ava DuVernay
(When They See Us, Selma) says. “But I
can assert truth and fact and say, ‘This
is information that is missing from that
narrative. This is a point of view that
was never considered.’”AmericA’s miseducAtion in Black
history starts in school systems and the
media. A 2014 report by the SouthernRECLAIMING BLACK
HISTORY ONSCREEN
Twenty-seven years ago, two films depicting
the Black Panther Party were released 10
months apart. The first, Forrest Gump, needed