He could not, for example, watch The Andy Griffith Show because there were no black people in it. Is That Black Enough For You?!? opens with a broad observation about American cinema, its rejection of Black audiences and how Mitchell’s grandmother regulated his consumption of moving images. But they also offer a welcome reprieve, a pause from the steady drum of information. Their commentary stretches Mitchell’s work, threading his thoughts into the vast quilt of Black cinema history. Interspersed throughout are interviews from an eclectic mix of Black cinema figures, from Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg and Zendaya to Harry Belafonte and Suzanne de Passe. He anchors his probing film criticism with anecdotes charting his own complicated relationship to movies. Mitchell, an influential film critic, channels Baldwinian analysis throughout Is That Black Enough For You?!?, which he wrote, directed and narrates. The personal sets the tone for this documentary, which shares structural and tonal similarities to the cinema studies embedded in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro.
For audiences quick to dismiss, or fall asleep to, the contributions of Black filmmakers, this is required viewing For those who think they know about this decade of cinematic history, I suggest you run don’t walk to turn on Netflix when it drops. Mitchell’s doc functions best as an educational primer, a (long) tasting menu that will not only expand your palette but leave you hungry for more. An expository feature-length documentary works, but bits of substance inevitably get lost to the cuts, edits and elisions required of the form.
(According to press notes, Mitchell shopped Is That Black Enough For You?!? around to different publishing houses, all of which turned him down.) The material he presents - rich, varied and incisive - is perfect fodder for a written text or, dare I say, a longer series. Sitting through the film, which covers an impressive amount of ground in its more than two-hour runtime, I bristled at publishers’ rejections of Mitchell’s book proposal. Is That Black Enough For You?!?‘s ambition is an achievement, but such a voluminous study needs the right medium. He engages with a horde of films - from William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man to Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly - to craft an argument about how Black directors, performers, writers and musicians reinvigorated cinema through both formal and narrative experimentation. Mitchell uses his film essay, which interweaves personal experiences with cultural criticism, to counter conventional thinking about that period. Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight)
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