Slate magazine has drawn up an interesting list of great black films, the twist being that they have to have been directed by a black person rather than about the black experience so out go Old Hollywood musicals like Carmen Jones or Cabin in the Sky or Oscar favorites like Sounder. In the wake of recent conversations about Hollywood's power structures and overwhelming whiteness, Slate assembled a field of critics and filmmakers and scholars to produce the list.
Eve's Bayou
I need to get cracking on my gaps in knowledge from this list, especially because of the titles I've seen from this list several were great and the ones I didn't personally connect to were still interesting (Night Catches Us) or memorable (Eve's Bayou - I've been meaning to give that another shot now that I'm older). Unsurprisingly Spike Lee has the most titles with six. Curiously, though I've seen many Spike Lee joints (and tend to like them - I'd have included Chi-Raq on this list), I've only seen half of his titles that actually made it (gotta get to Mo' Better Blues, Crooklyn, and When the Levees Broke soon). The list is after the jump...
THE 50 BEST FILMS BY BLACK DIRECTORS
in alpha order
Crooklyn
12 Years a Slave (2013), 25th Hour (2002), Ashes and Embers (1982), Belle (2014), Bessie (2015), Black Girl (1966), The Blood of Jesus (1941), Boyz n the Hood (1991), Car Wash (1976), Cooley High (1975), Creed (2015), Crooklyn (1994), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Do the Right Thing (1989), Eve's Bayou (1997), Friday (1995), Fruitvale Station (2014), Hollywood Shuffle (1987), House Party (1990), I Like it Like That (1994), Juice (1992), Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992), Killer of Sheep (1978), The Learning Tree (1969), Losing Ground (1982), Love and Basketball (2000), Malcolm X (1992), Medicine for Melancholy (2006), Middle of Nowhere (2012), Mo' Better Blues (1990), Night Catches Us (2010), O.J. Made in America (2016)...
Tongues Untied
Pariah (2011), Sankofa (1993), Selma (2014), Shaft (1971), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Sugar Cane Alley (1983), Super Fly (1972), Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song (1971), Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005), Timbuktu (2014), To Sleep With Anger (1990), Tongues Untied (1989), Touki Bouki (1973), Waiting to Exhale (1995), Within Our Gates (1920), The Watermelon Woman (1996), and When the Levees Broke (2006)
How many have you seen? What would you include that's not here? Some notable titles I've seen people mention that aren't on the list include Chameleon Street (1989), Hyenas (1992), and Menace II Society (1993) and Hunger (2008). The list skews very American, partially because of the panel and cultural dominance of US cinema, surely, but also because African cinema doesn't get much attention at all from cinephiles and film festivals. African films by black directors that were deemed strong enough to enter for the Oscar race include: Our Daughter (1980), Yaaba (1989), Lamb (2015) and three films from Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, one of the rare African filmmakers embraced by Cannes: Abouna (2002), A Screaming Man (2010), and GriGris (2013).
On a personal note, I have seen way too few of these pictures. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to see both Pariah and Tongues Untied here, because they fit another list, too: Awesome but severely underappreciated LGBT films. Film titles that made my top tens in their respective years are: 12 Years a Slave, 25th Hour, Middle of Nowhere, and Selma; Honorable mentions in their years: Malcolm X and Creed.