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We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing
Black at the Movies, 1986-2006
By
Esther Iverem—Reviewed
by Kam Williams
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We Gotta Have It
represents twenty years of seeing a new
generation of Black movies. Before this
journey began in 1986, with Spike Lee’s
She’s Gotta Have It, a Black movie meant one
of the increasingly mindless productions
starring comedians Richard Pryor or Eddie
Murphy…
Twenty years
later- this era of film has created an
explosion in the number of people recognized
as Black movie stars. At the same time,
there has also been a relative explosion of
Black Film auteurs-
director-producer-writers who, though
toiling increasingly in the obscurity of the
film festival circuit, have created and
brought to the screen a fuller panorama of
Black life.
What has
happened between these two points in time is
an amazing film journey referred to as the
‘new wave’ of black film… Included here are
reviews, (many excerpted), interviews, and
essays about movies that we sort of claimed
as ours… Movies bring words and images to us
but we also bring who we are to the movies-
to laugh, to cry, to tremble with fear, to
gaze in awe, to grow angry, to contemplate,
and, hopefully, sometimes to learn and grow.
We do keep
bringing ourselves to the movies in droves.
It seems we gotta have it.—Excerpted
from the Introduction (pg. xxvii-xxx). |
African-Americans
comprise about a quarter of the domestic movie-going
audience, which translates to over $2 billion at the box
office alone. For this reason, one would think that
blacks would exert considerable influence over the
images of them fashioned by Hollywood. But according to
Esther Iverem, despite the significant inroads made
since Spike Lee’s arrival on the scene in 1986, the film
industry has a long way to go in terms of presenting
authentic African-American characters.
Iverem, a former staff
member at the Washington Post and Newsday, is an
iconoclastic film reviewer who writes from a
point-of-view that is both black and female. We Gotta
Have It is a collection of her insightful reviews,
evocative essays and groundbreaking interviews with
everyone from Spike to actors Vin Diesel and Danny
Glover to author Alice Walker to director Julie Dash.
This book is worth the
investment just for the opening chapter alone, in which
the author assesses the predicament of blacks in the
U.S. through the prism of motion pictures. There, she
asks, “Why does a police officer feel he can get away
with sodomizing us with a broomstick; shooting us, as we
stand unarmed, forty or fifty times; or beating us
bloody on a crowded New Orleans street?”
She alleges that the
answer rests with “the cinematic power of turning lies
into truth.” For the dominant culture presumes to know
black people as a consequence of watching flicks like
Monster’s Ball for which Halle Berry won an Academy
Award. However, Esther suggests that that accolade might
have had a lot more to do with Halle’s fulfilling white
male fantasies than her portraying a recognizably
realistic African-American female.
Ms. Iverem concludes it
is “the least attractive, the most criminal, the most
seedy part of us, that is then made to become
representative of us all.” Such astute observations
abound in the aforementioned intro, and only lay the
groundwork for the cornucopia of pithy comments
contained in the chronologically-arranged entries which
ensue.
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On Soul Plane:
“How many different ways can a film call me
a nig. Will we ever learn the difference
between a film laughing with us, rather than
laughing at us?”
On Monster’s Ball:
“Tries to convince us, in a raw, depressing
Southern Gothic style that a Black woman in
a small Georgia town will turn to a white
man, who is an open racist, for sexual
comfort and companionship.”
On 8 Mile: “Blacks
make an issue of race. B-Rabbit never does,
and neither do the trailer-park White people
he comes from. How real is that?”
On The Last King of
Scotland: “It goes on, based on who
knows what, to picture African women as easy
and available sexual partners… What looks
deceptively like history writ large on the
big screen turns out to be, partly, some
White boy’s wet dream.” |
A critic who can skewer
so succinctly and delightfully is rare enough indeed,
but when you couple that talent with an uncompromising,
unique black feminist perspective, now you’re talking
about a sister with a seminal voice deserving of much
wider recognition.
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Esther Iverem is a
former staff writer for several newspapers, including
The Washington Post and Newsday. Her reviews,
essays and interviews on film and culture have appeared
widely, in publications such as Newsday, The Washington
Post, BET.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com and SeeingBlack.com,
which she founded in 2001. Iverem is a recipient of a
USC/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts
Journalism Fellowship and is a member of the Washington
Area Film Critics Association. She is also the author of
two books of poems,
The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home
and
Living in Babylon.
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Kam Williams
is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for
100+ publications around the country. He is a member of
both the African-American Film Critics Association and
The New York Film Critics Online. In addition to a BA in
Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from
Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from
Boston University. Mr. Williams lives in
Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
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posted 9 December 2007
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