“If this burst of freedom and fulfillment was so well-received and the thirst never really went away, why did these Black films stop getting made?,” Elvis Mitchell, serving as essayist and narrator, says in the opening of his 2022 Netflix documentary “Is That Black Enough for You?!?”
Mitchell, celebrated film critic and historian turned filmmaker, has seemingly been circling this question his entire career.
The specific era in question is 1968-1978. Mitchell categorizes it as the golden age of Black cinema in America, and he even has the financial stats to prove it.
“At one point, John Calley, who ran Warner Bros. in the ’70s said to me, ‘The dirty little secret of American films is that Black films subsidized American movies of the 1970s’,” Mitchell said in a recent New York Film Festival Q&A.
Mitchell’s formal investigation into this golden age began around 25 years ago, yet the pervasive questions regarding Black representation in film have fascinated him practically his entire critical life — a state of mind inspired, in large part, by his grandmother, a Hattiesburg, Miss., native.
“She taught me to look for the question that wasn’t being asked … the foundation of critical thinking,” Mitchell says.
In the beginning of Mitchell’s deeply personal 135-minute film, he recounts visiting her over summer vacations, where she refused to let him and his sisters watch reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show.” When confronted with the question of why, she simply said, “There are no Black people in that Southern town. What do you think happened to them?”
Difficult questions like these became the early seeds in Mitchell’s varied critical career, which has spanned the country — North, South, East and West: The Detroit Free Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The New York Times and the LA Weekly (to name only a few of the places to which Mitchell has contributed his unique insights).
Mitchell’s early conceptions of “Is That Black Enough For You?!?” began in his usual literary form: a historical deep-dive and semi-autobiographical book, aptly subtitled, “How one decade forever changed the movies (and me).”
Although armed with allies by his side, including novelist Toni Morrison, who offered to write the introduction, Mitchell’s outlines failed to generate interest, at least in the literary world.
Following a Q&A with Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh, Mitchell informed him of his long-gestating idea, and he began to flirt with the possibility of transforming it into a cinematic form.
A few months later, Soderbergh and Mitchell found themselves knocking on Netflix’s door, with the added help of Academy Award-nominated director David Fincher.
Shortly thereafter, the idea became a reality.
While beautifully realized as a work of nonfiction filmmaking, including interviews with Samuel L. Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Zendaya and Laurence Fishburne, to name a few, “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” maintains an inherent page-turning quality, one that will lead viewers down a rabbit hole of cinematic discovery.
In an early chapter, Mitchell recounts how the cinematic world, as well as his own world, shifted on its axis in 1968 with the release of “Night of the Living Dead.”
George Romero’s chilling classic quickly became one of the most profitable and influential films ever made and one of the first mainstream hits to feature a central protagonist played by a Black actor: the estimable Duane Jones.
“So much of what American cinema was about from the beginning is heroism and the kind of myths that create and propel commercial success in movies,” Mitchell said. “And that hero, which had been sold and denied to people of color, was something they were really dying to get into the movies, and the audiences responded to it.”
With the combined success of popular hits like “Night of the Living Dead,” underground arthouse fare such as William Greaves’s “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” and the oft-reliable Sidney Poitier picture, the perception of Black cinema, in turn, shifted on its axis.
And what a golden age it was.
From the joyous machismo of “Shaft” to the quiet devastation of “Killer of Sheep” (recently named one of the 100 greatest films of all time by the Sight and Sound magazine), Mitchell designates an era that seemingly illuminated as many possible sides of the Black experience as well as offered experiences and images seldom seen on the silver screen.
“For example, seeing somebody on a horse implied freedom, and they can go anywhere they want,” Mitchell said when we discussed a shot from Gordon Parks’s 1969 film, “The Learning Tree.” “How rare an occurrence it was seeing (a Black person on a horse) for the first time because it was almost like seeing a dream. It was a bombastic moment for me.”
Additionally, Mitchell highlights how the era in Black film, and the wide array of opportunities therein, often served as a direct counterweight to the mainstream ‘70s cinema America is most often associated with; for every “Last Picture Show,” there’s a “Cooley High.”
While celebratory of the opportunities afforded to artists of color at the start of the decade, “Is That Black Enough For You?!?” dons an equally derisive stance against the opportunities taken away from those very artists toward the end of the decade by the powers that be in Hollywood moviemaking.
While the industry flew to new fantastical heights with 1978’s “Superman,” it financially crashed and burned with the well-intentioned but miscalculated adaptation of “The Wiz,” marking a pendulum swing toward a financially safer, less diverse mode of expression.
The distance between these peaks and valleys is what Mitchell remains fascinated by, and what elevates “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” into a work of true profundity, capturing the empirical proof of the power that lies, not only in the films showcased, but in the medium as a whole.
“In addition to being a repository of hope, they were proof that we were here, that we exist, that we create culture, that our community is a viable community, is an important community, that we have voices and that we will be heard,” Laurence Fishburne says toward the documentary’s conclusion.
“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” is available on Netflix. Mitchell can currently be found as host of The Treatment for KCRW.
