Indiana State University

A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema

Author(s): Tommy L. Lott
Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, Black Film Issue (Summer, 1991), pp.
221-236
Published by: St. Louis University
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A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black
Cinema

Tommy L. Lott

When film scholars are asked to decide which are best among
a body of films they identify as "black," what is at stake is
something more than merely the aesthetic question of what
counts as a good black film. Indeed, they must consider a more
fundamental definitional question regarding the nature of black
cinema, a question which raises deeper issues concerning both
the concept of black identity and the concept of cinema itself. I
suspect that film criticism has not offered much assistance in
clarifying the concept black cinema because there exist no un-
contested criteria to which an ultimate appeal can be made to
resolve these underlying issues. This scholarly morass must be
understood in terms of the inherently political context in which
the concept of black cinema has been introduced.
In his book Black Film as Genre, Thomas Cripps demonstrates
how difficult it is to provide an adequate definition of black
cinema. He employs a notion of black cinema that refers almost
exclusively to theater films about the black experience that are
produced, written, directed, and performed by black people for a
primarily black audience (3-12). But this leaves us to wonder
what to do with a well-known group of films about black people
by white filmmakers. Although Cripps displays a rather tenuous
allegiance to his initial statement of an essentialist paradigm, he
has nonetheless presented an idea which lends credence to those
who would exclude films such as King Vidor's Hallelujah, Shirley
Clarke's The Cool World, Michael Roemer's Nothing But A Man,
Charlie Ahearn's Wild Styles, and John Sayles's The Brother
From Another Planet from the newly emerging black canon. On
Tommy L. Lott teaches In the Department of Philosophy at Stanford Univer-
sity.
BlackAmerican Literature Forum, Volume 25, Number 2 (Summer 1991)
C) 1991 Tommy L. Lott

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222 Tommy L. Lott

strictly aesthetic grounds, however, these films may strike some

critics as being better than many others which would more ade-
quately satisfy Cripps's essentialist criteria.
Some black film cataloguers have sought to avoid the essen-
tialist problem of being overly restrictive by opting for all-inclu-
sive criteria. Klotman's Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography
and Parish and Hill's Black Action Films, for instance, seem to
identify films as black if they meet any of Cripps's several cri-
teria. As might be expected, some critics have complained that
not all of the films they list ought to count as black cinema. 1
Missing from both the narrowness of essentialist criteria and
the broadness of non-essentialist criteria are criteria that would
account for the political dimensions of black filmnmaking prac-
tices. Although audience reactions may vary from film to film,
black people have a deep-seated concern with their history of
being stereotyped in Hollywood films, a concern which provides
an important reason to be skeptical of any concept of black
cinema that would include works which demean blacks. Some
would seek to abate this concern by specifying a set of wholly
aesthetic criteria by which to criticize bad films about black
people by both black and white filrnmakers. Unfortunately, this
approach contains undesirable implications for black filmmaking
practices. We need only consider the fact that low-budget pro-
ductions (e.g., Bush Mama, Bless Their Little Hearts, and Killer of
Sheep) frequently suffer in the marketplace, as well as in the
eyes of critics, when they fail to be aesthetically pleasing, or the
fact that a film's success will sometimes be due largely to its
aesthetic appeal, despite its problematic political orientation
(e.g., Roots or Shaka Zulu).
For this reason, such commentators as Teshome Gabriel and
Kobena Mercer ("Diaspora") have urged the need for film criti-
cism to address the politics of black filmmaking practice, with an
awareness that what is often referred to as "aesthetics" is linked
with important issues pertaining to the control of film production
and distribution. Incorporating aesthetics into a more politicized
account of black filmmaking practices would seem to allow crit-
ics to evade the narrowness of the essentialist view, but there is
some reason to wonder whether this move toward aesthetics
would allow the accommodation of a strictly cultural criterion for
the definition of black cinema without invoking a notion of "black
aesthetics," upon which some reconstituted version of biological
essentialism may again be reinstated.
The political aspects of the notion of aesthetics in film theory is
sometimes shielded by the latent connection between biological

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 A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema 223
essentialism and issues of control in film practice. We can, for
example, see a tendency to racialize the political concern with
control of the black film image in August Wilson's recent demand
for a black director for the movie version of his play Fences:
"Let's make a rule. Blacks don't direct Italian films. Italians don't
direct Jewish films. Jews don't direct black American films. That
might account for about 3 percent of the films that are made in
this country" (71). Although Wilson's claim might be taken to
commit him to accepting any director who is biologically black,
he clearly would not want a black director who lacked the cul-
tural sensibility required for a faithful rendering of his play. But
if even a black director could prove unsatisfactory for aesthetic
reasons, how do we make political sense of Wilson's demand for
a black director, given that there could be some white director
who might be more suitable from a cultural standpoint?
I want to advance a theory of contemporary black cinema that
accords with the fact that biological criteria are neither neces-
sary nor sufficient for the application of the concept of black
cinema. I refer to this theory as a no-theory, because I want to
avoid any commitment to an essentialized notion by not giving a
definition of black cinema. Rather, the theoretical concern of my
no-theory is primarily with the complexity of meanings we pres-
ently associate with the political aspirations of black people.
Hence, it is a theory that is designed to be discarded when those
meanings are no longer applicable.

The Aesthetic Critique of Blaxploitation

The history of black cinema can be roughly divided into four

periods: Early Silent Films (1890-1920), Early Soundies and
Race Films (1920-1945), Post-War Problem Films (1945-1960),
and Contemporary Films.2 With regard to the history of black
cinema, the so-called "blaxploitation" period is a relatively re-
cent, and short-lived, phenomenon. Although there has been a
siphoning off of black audiences since the early days of race
films, nothing approximating the Hollywood onslaught of the
early seventies has occurred at any other time.
The term blaxploitation has been used to refer to those black-
oriented films produced in Hollywood beginning in 1970 and
continuing mainly until 1975, but in various ways persisting
until the present (Miller; Pines, "Blaxploitation"; Ward). However,
in addition to its being an historical index, the term is a way of
labeling a film that fails in certain ways to represent the aes-
thetic values of black culture properly.3 Mark Reid, for instance,

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224 Tommy L. Lott
expresses this view in his account of the shortcomings of blax-
ploitation era films:
Having established the fact that there was a young black audience
receptive to thoughts about violence, it should have been possible to
create black action films that appealed to this audience while satisfying
a black aesthetic. The commercial black action films of the 1970s,
however, never reached this ideal because they were not independent
productions or because black independent producers relied on major
distributors. (25)
Although, as I shall indicate shortly, Reid's criticism rests on a
misleading dichotomy between independent and non-indepen-
dent films, his remarks inherently acknowledge the role that
production and distribution play in shaping the aesthetic char-
acteristics of a film. At a time of financial exigency, some Holly-
wood studios discovered that there was a large black audience
starving for black images on the screen. This situation provided
an immediate inducement for them to exploit the box office for-
mula of the black hero (first male, later female) which, subse-
quently, became the earmark of the blaxploitation flick.4
Although there are many issues raised by blaxploitation era
filmmaking that deserve greater attention, I want to focus on the
problem of commercialism in order to highlight the influence of
the market on certain aesthetic characteristics of black movies.5
First of all, it needs to be stated, and clarified, that not all
blaxploitation era films conformed to the box office formula.
Some were not commercially oriented, while others were very
worthwhile from a social and political standpoint.6 To reduce
them all to the hero formula, provided somewhat inadvertently
by Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, is to
overlook their many differences in style, audience orientation,
and political content.
Secondly, given the history of black cinema, there is a certain
logic to the development of the box office formula. The idea of
depicting black men as willing to engage in violent acts toward
whites was virtually taboo in Hollywood films all the way through
the sixties. But once the news footage of the sixties rebellions,
along with the media construction of the Black Panther Party,
began to appear, mainstream films such as In the Heat of the
Night made an effort to acknowledge (albeit to contain) this "New
Negro" (Ryan and Kellner 121-29). Even within these limits, how-
ever, what had made Malcolm X appear so radical to mainstream
television audiences at that time was the fact that he had pub-
licly advocated self-defense.
When Sweetback was shown in 1971, it was an immediate
success with black audiences because it captured an image of

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 A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema 225
self-defense that gave on-screen legitimation to violent retaliation
against racist police brutality. Black heroic violence against
white villains rapidly became a Hollywood commodity, and liter-
ally dozens of films were produced for black audiences that capi-
talized on this new formula. It is worth noting here that it was,
in many respects, a Hollywood-induced taboo that created a
need for such images in the black audience, a need which was
then fulfilled by Hollywood. The ultimate irony is that, once
these films began to proliferate, there was an organized effort in
the black community to demand their cessation (see Miller 149).
It is also worth noting that Sweetback provoked a critical re-
sponse that varied among different political factions within the
black community, as well as among film critics. Community-
based activists who opposed the film's image of black people
ranged from cultural nationalists, who wanted a more culturally
educational film, to middle-class black protesters, who wanted a
film that projected a more positive image of the race (Reid 29). As
Mark Reid has noted, the film's political orientation, quite inter-
estingly, received both "high praise" from Huey Newton and the
Black Panther Party newspaper in Oakland and "denunciation"
from a Kuumba Workshop nationalist publication in Chicago
(30). Although Newton was not alone in giving the film critical
praise, his allegorical interpretation of the film's sexual imagery
was not widely shared among critics, especially feminists con-
cerned with its portrayal of women (Bowser 51).
The critical controversy around Sweetback's image of black
people is not amenable to resolution on strictly aesthetic
grounds, for Sweetback clearly represents some version of the
black aesthetic. A political debate seems to have transpired be-
tween the film's supporters and detractors in an attempt to make
the case for either accepting or rejecting the film. Indeed, some
critics have argued that Sweetback lacks a politicized image
(Reid 26), while others have argued that it politicized the image
of black people to the point of lapsing into propaganda (Pines,
"Blaxploitation" 123).
With regard to the role of aesthetics, blaxploitation era films
pose a rather peculiar problem for a theory of contemporary
black cinema. Can a film count as black cinema when it merely
presents a blackface version of white films, or when it merely
reproduces stereotypical images of black people?
Commentators have maintained quite different views in answer
to this question. James Snead has argued for a very sophisti-
cated notion of recoding that requires of black cinema what he
calls the "syntagmatic" revision of stereotyped images through

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226 Tommy L. Lott
the selective use of editing and montage ("Recoding Blackness"
2). According to Snead, the syntax of traditional Hollywood cin-
ema must be reworked to recode the black image effectively.
However, against the backdrop of Hollywood's pre-blaxploitation
era stereotype of black men as sexually castrated buffoons, what
rules out the less sophisticated blaxploitation practice of substi-
tuting a highly sexualized black male hero who exercises power
over white villains as an attempt to recode the Hollywood image
of black men? Mark Reid asserts, with little hesitation, that
"blacks who would find psychological satisfaction in films featur-
ing black heroes have just as much right to have their tastes
satisfied as do whites who find pleasure in white heroes such as
those in Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson films" (30). If the
creation of black heroic images through role reversals can be
considered a recoding technique utilized by blaxploitation
filmmakers, then how does this practice compare with other,
more avant-garde recoding practices of black independent
filmmakers?
It can be quite troublesome for a theory of black cinema that
relies too strongly on aesthetics to give an account of the influ-
ence of blaxploitation films on subsequent black independent
films (see Taylor, "We Don't Need" 84-85). Given that aesthetic-
based theories, such as Snead's, want to contrast black indepen-
dent films with Hollywood-produced films about black people,
where do blaxploitation films fit into such a juxtaposition? How
do we make sense of the charge, brought by a black independent
filmmaker, of a fellow black independent filmmaker's having irre-
sponsibly produced a blaxploitation film?7 The fact that the
charge was made suggests that black independent filmmaking is
not immune from the aesthetic pitfalls of blaxploitation cinema.
For present purposes, I am less interested in deciding the
question of what films to count as blaxploitation than I am
interested in the implication the appeal to aesthetics, inherent in
the accusation, seems to carry for our understanding of the
place of aesthetics in a theory of black cinema. To denounce a
film, such as Sweetback, as exploitative is to suggest that aes-
thetic criteria provide the highest ground of appeal for deciding
definitional questions regarding black cinematic representation,
for the charge presupposes that there is some sense in which to
produce a blaxploitation film is to have compromised black aes-
thetic values. What must be explained, however, is how such
films stand in relation to independently made films that were not
constrained to violate black aesthetic values in this way. Appar-
ently, the term independent does not always mean that a filmma-

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 A No-Teory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema 227
ker has eschewed market concerns. When a blaxploitation film is
independently made by a black filmmaker for a black audience,
however, to whom has the film's aesthetic orientation been com-
promised and, further, to what extent do such compromises
affect a film's status as a black cinematic work?
Recently there has been a major shift towards independently
produced blaxploitation films. This practice makes clear that the
biologically essentialist view of black cinema (those films about
black people, produced by a black filmmaker, for a black audi-
ence) is much too simplistic. One important implication of the
aesthetic critique of blaxploitation is that certain aesthetic quali-
ties of a film can sometimes count as much against its being
inducted into the canon of black films as the filmmaker's race or
the film's intended audience. While the insights derived from the
aesthetic critique of black filmmaking practices are undoubtedly
healthy signs of sophistication in black film commentary, we
must not overlook the fact that these critiques also give rise to
many difficulties connected with the problem of how film criti-
cism should relate to a plurality of standards by which black
films are evaluated.8
One such difficulty that must be faced by aesthetic-based theo-
ries of black cinema arises from the fact that, since the mid-
1980s, there has been a growing interest in black-oriented
cinema, especially black comedy, by white audiences. The suc-
cess of black television sitcoms, as well as Arsenio Hall's nightly
talk show, provides some indication that white audiences are
more willing to indulge not so completely assimilated black peo-
ple than network executives had previously supposed. Spike
Lee's humorous social commentary has opened the door for
other, similarly inclined, black filmmakers and television produc-
ers. All of this comic relief in the television and movie industry
has been spearheaded, of course, by the mass appeal of Richard
Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Bill Cosby. Given their influence on
the present context for black filmmaking, it seems that a theory
of contemporary black cinema cannot postulate the black audi-
ence as a necessary ingredient.
A related difficulty that carries greater significance for our un-
derstanding of the influence of the crossover audience on the
aesthetics of certain films about black people arises from the
manner in which Eddie Murphy's attempt to signify on black
minstrelsy has simply replaced the old-fashioned minstrel show.
Murphy's success in Hollywood was quickly followed by that of
his "black pack" cohort Robert Townsend, whose humorous criti-
cism of Hollywood in his very popular film was largely reduced to

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228 Tommy L. Lott
a shuffle with a critique of itself.9 As though the hegemony of the
Hollywood industry were not enough to contend with, more polit-
ically astute filmmakers working in the realm of comedy, such as
Spike Lee, are now challenged with finding ways to distinguish
themselves from such neo-minstrelsy. Indeed, some filmmakers
formerly aligned with the counter-hegemonic practices of the
post-sixties black independent movement seem to have allowed
the white audience for black-oriented humor to so influence their
filmmaking that we now have a new generation of blaxploitation
cinema. This influence is displayed in the Hudlin brothers' film
House Party, which seems rigorously to avoid dealing with cer-
tain very pressing issues raised in the film (e.g., police brutality)
in order not to offend the potential white audience. Unlike Spike
Lee's probing satire, which engages in a black-oriented humor
that sometimes seems intended to offend white audiences, House
Party is closer to mindless slapstick. 'O
Although some film commentators have attempted to acknowl-
edge the disparity between the aesthetic values of black audi-
ences and the aesthetic values of filmmakers and critics, film
criticism generally tends to adhere to a top-down view of aesthet-
ics, as though audiences have no role to play in the determina-
tion of aesthetic values. What the black audience appeal of
blaxploitation films (old and new) indicates, against the wishes of
many film critics, is that it is misguided to suppose that a filmic
work of art, or entertainment, has black audience appeal simply
because it aims for a black audience by promoting certain black
aesthetic values. In the case of the black independent cinema
movement of the seventies in America, as well as the eighties
black workshop movement in Britain, the attempt to reclaim and
reconstruct a black film aesthetics that would somehow counter-
act the influence of Hollywood's blaxploitation filmmaking has,
by and large, not been well-received by black audiences, al-
though many of these films have been frequently presented at
international festivals, in art museums, and in college courses
devoted to film study.11 How can we best understand the fact
that films which aim to present a more authentic black aesthetic
are largely ignored by and unknown to black audiences, while
being extremely well-received in elite white film circles? Despite
their admirable political orientation, such films seem to have
achieved the status of art-for-art's sake, with mainly an all-white
audience appeal.
This lack-of-a-black-audience problem shows the need to resist
the tendency of aesthetic-based theories of black cinema to posi-
tion the aesthetic values of the black artist above those of the

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 A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema 229
black audience. In order for black film commentary to acknowl-
edge more pluralistic criteria by which to assess the artistic
value of cinematic works, some weight must be given to the
viewpoint of black audiences, inasmuch as it is imprudent at
best continually to posit a black aesthetic which very few black
audiences share.
Some of these considerations regarding the audience crossover
phenomenon in contemporary black cinema argue against the
cultural essentialist attempt to define black cinema in terms of
aesthetics. As the divisions between independent and Hollywood-
produced films about black people begin to dissolve, as a result
of the mainstream market for both, it has become extremely
difficult to maintain that either a black filmmaker or a black
audience is required for a film with a black orientation. To see
this, we need only consider the fact that, in addition to his
crossover status in the record industry, Prince is virtually neck-
and-neck with Spike Lee as a filmmaker, each having four major
releases. There is no reason to suppose that, despite a preference
among commentators for Spike Lee's version of the black aes-
thetic, the aesthetic in Prince's movies has any less box office
appeal to much of the same audience. 12
The need for an essentialist theory diminishes, along with the
idea of a monolithic black film aesthetic, once we realize that
there is no monolithic black audience. There certainly are black-
oriented films, some of which are much better than others, but
not all of those approved by critics manage to touch base with
black audiences (e.g., To Sleep with Anger) and many of those
condemned by critics have become black audience classics (e.g.,
Superfly). These facts may be difficult to accept, but to advocate
a "better" cinema which is significantly different requires a politi-
cal argument. I will now turn to consider the argument I think is
presently most viable in a politically confused era dominated by
neo-conservative ideology.

Black Identity and Black Cinema

Before I take up the question of how politics and aesthetics can
be situated into a theory of black cinema, I would like to insert a
word of clarification regarding the prevailing use of the term
cinema to refer to films as such; i.e., movies that were made to
be shown in theaters. I believe that this restrictive usage is
unfortunate, since some fairly good films about black people
have been made for television. 13 The misconception that under-
lies this narrow focus on box office movies is exacerbated by the

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230 Tommy L. Lott

fact that some of the most innovative black filrmnaking is pres-

ently occurring in music videos. Indeed, the dominant influence
of television on black popular culture has some rather interest-
ing implications for black film practices which no theory of black
cinema can afford to overlook. Because black urban youth cul-
ture has been visually promulgated primarily through television,
this segment of the black movie audience has been heavily influ-
enced by black images presented on television. Added to this
television orientation is a large black youth market for blaxploi-
tation films on video cassettes. These influences are displayed
quite regularly in what Nelson George refers to as "blaxploitation
rap"; i.e., rap lyrics that have been heavily influenced by blax-
ploitation films.14 It is, to say the least, perilous for filmmakers
interested in reaching black youth to ignore the single most
important medium of visually representing their cultural values.
In Britain, black filmmaking and television are much more
structurally connected, since the workshops produce their films
for Channel 4 (see Fountain; Pines, "Cultural"). Undoubtedly,
this structural relation between filmmaking and television will
eventually obtain in America once high-definition television is
introduced since, with the advent of this new technology, movies,
as such, seem certain to be superceded by television. For all
these reasons, I think it wise at this point to expand the concept
of cinema to include television.
With regard to politics, there is a very good reason that the
biological version of the essentialist definition of black cinema
will invariably fall short. Any definition which requires films to
be made by black filmmakers in order to be included in the
category of black cinema will simply not match the ambivalence
engendered by having to place biological over cultural criteria in
deciding questions of black identity. This does not mean that,
generally speaking, most of us have no idea of what to count as a
black film. Indeed, the definition of black cinema is a problem by
virtue of the fact that, whether it is based on biological or cul-
tural criteria, its viability can easily be called into question.
The Du Boisian worry about the adequacy of biological criteria
as the ultimate ground of appeal when faced with questions of
black identity poses the greatest difficulty for the essentialist
notion of black cinema. For Du Bois, the problem stems from the
fact that there is no agreement about how best to define a black
person, although there is some sense in which we all operate
with some ideas about what constitutes black identity.'5 We
need only consider the manner in which we must still grapple
with the age-old problem of the "non-black" black person; i.e.,

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 A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema 231
the person who, though biologically black, does not identify with
black culture. Although there can be little doubt that, in the
context of the American system of apartheid, the question of
whether a particular person counts as black is most often de-
cided by skin color and physical appearance, there are numer-
ous instances in which this honor is withheld strictly on cultural
grounds. It is far too common for black people to feel the yoke of
oppression at the hands of a white-identified black person. Con-
sequently, as someone perceived to be disloyal to the group, an
overly assimilated (Eurocentric) black person can sometimes lose
his or her standing in the eyes of other black people. In such
cases we can notice how the tension between biological and
cultural criteria of black identity is resolved in terms of a politi-
cal definition of black people. 16 It is for some reason such as this
that I am motivated to develop the concept of black cinema
within the context of a political theory.

The Concept of Third Cinema Revisited

Without any pretense that I can offer a replacement for the

essentialist definition of black cinema, I want to suggest why I
think the Third Cinema movement of the sixties seems to have
been on the right track, although in America certain mainstream
cooptational factors have basically derailed it. According to vari-
ous conflicting reports, the advocates of Third Cinema have come
under heavy criticism lately for being, of all things, overly nation-
alistic.17 Unfortunately, in an attempt to address this worry,
some commentators tend needlessly to equate nationalism with
the essentialist view.'8 But the concept of Third Cinema should
not be saddled with the myopic vision of essentialists who are
constrained by an overemphasis on biological criteria for resolv-
ing questions of national identity.19 What makes Third Cinema
third (i.e., a viable alternative to Western cinema) is not exclu-
sively the racial make-up of a filmmaker, a film's aesthetic char-
acter, or a film's intended audience, but rather a film's political
orientation within the hegemonic structures of post-colonialism.
When a film contributes ideologically to the advancement of
black people, within a context of systematic denial, the achieve-
ment of this political objective ought to count as a criterion of
evaluation on a par with any essentialist criterion.
The best way to meet the criticism that the concept of Third
Cinema is too vague because it allows under its rubric many
diverse cultural groups is to recognize that this objection mis-
leadingly imputes an uncontested essentialist paradigm.20 The

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232 Tommy L. Lott

Third Cinema movement represents a break with, and resistance

to, the cultural imperialism fostered by the global expansion of
the Hollywood industry. There is an important sense in which it
aims to do what Hollywood has done-namely, to reach beyond
national boundaries. There is no reason to deny that cultural
diversity is a problem among the many ethnically distinct black
people living together in America, much less a problem among
various Third World people from widely different backgrounds in
faraway places. But clearly if Europeans, who for centuries have
waged war against each other, and are still caught up in their
own ethnic rivalries, can construct a concept of themselves as a
globally dominant white group, how can it be so much more
objectionable for non-white people to construct a global counter-
concept by which to defend themselves? The white cultural na-
tionalism of Hollywood's Eurocentric empire requires something
like a Third Cinema movement to help non-white people survive
the oppressive and self-destructive consciousness that empire
seeks to perpetuate.
With regard to black filmmaking practices, the concept of Third
Cinema provides the rudiments of a theory of black cinema that
is most conducive to this political function. As a primarily oppo-
sitional practice engaged in resistance and affirmation, black
cinema need not be presently defined apart from its political
function (see Espinosa). I call this a no-theory theory because I
see no need to resolve, on aesthetic grounds, the dispute over
what counts as blaxploitation. Neither do I see a need to choose
between realist and avant-garde film techniques.2' I am more
interested in understanding how any aesthetic strategy can be
employed to challenge, disrupt, and redirect the pervasive influ-
ence of Hollywood's master narrative. To accomplish this decid-
edly political objective, black filmmaking practices must
continue to be fundamentally concerned with the issues that
presently define the political struggle of black people. Hence, I
want to advance a theory of black cinema that is in keeping with
those filmmaking practices that aim to foster social change,
rather than participate in a process of formulating a definition of
black cinema which allows certain films to be canonized on aes-
thetic grounds so as to occupy a place in the history of cinema.
The theory we need now is a political theory of black cinema that
incorporates a plurality of aesthetic values which are consistent
with the fate and destiny of black people as a group engaged in a
protracted struggle for social equality.

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 A No-Theory Theory of ContemporaryBlack Cinema 233
Notes

lPhyllis Klotman's black filmography prompted Gladstone L. Yearwood to

complain that "to identify a black film as any film with black faces is to
trivialize or nullify a definition of black film" ("Towards"68-69). In his review
of Black Action FYlms, Roland Jefferson takes Parish and Hill to task for
including Rocky I-IVas black films (22).
2Various periodizations have been offered by other commentators. See, for
instance, Snead, "Images";Taylor, "L.A."
3In this sense, Fred Williamson's independently produced films (which
have been continuous since his participation in the early phase of Hollywood
blaxploitation) would count as a perpetuation of this style. Eddie Murphy's
recent Harlem Nights is a throwback to Williamson's Black Caesar and HeU
Up in Harlem. I would also include the recent spate of hip hop movies as a
neo-blaxploitation genre, although, within this genre, we must again distin-
guish "positive-image" films such as Harry Belafonte's Beat Street from more
violence-laden films such as Run DMC's Tougher Than Leather.
4For a discussion of the cooptational use of black heroic characters to
legitimate oppression, see Gladstone Yearwood's 'The Hero." David E. James
provides a wise bit of cautionary reflection on the bildungsroman narrative
of Sweetback as a self-defeating contributor to the film's commodification
into blaxploitation (135-37). And Clyde Taylor ("We Don't Need") takes issue
with the master narrative in all of its various guises.
5For instance, there is a need to examine more fully the transition period
in the late sixties as a precursor to blaxploitation era filmmaking, especially
with regard to independently produced films about black people. Some at-
tention should also be given to the carryover effect of blaxploitation era films
on the image of black people in mass-audience fl~ms and to the intertextual
influences of blaxploitation on television programming.
6Several factors helped shape the movie industry's multifarious output of
blaxploitation era films, but the most outstanding was the market orienta-
tion of each film. Given that some of the larger budgeted productions (e.g.,
100 Riles, The Great White Hope, and The Learning Tree) were intended for a
mainstream audience, whereas low-budget productions (e.g., Superfly,
Blacula, and Coffey Brown) were limited to box office showings in black
communities, it would be a serious oversight to ignore the guerrilla tactics
employed by Melvin Van Peebles to produce Sweetback and Bill Gunn to film
Ganja and Hess. The avant-garde styles mastered by Van Peebles and Gunn
owe much to the clandestine context in which their projects were pursued
and contrast sharply with the more standard approaches displayed in main-
stream productions such as Claudine, A Hero Ain't Nothing But A Sandwich,
The River Niger, Brothers, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, and Gordon's War.
These latter films, nonetheless, were a far cry from the more typical black
action movies of the period.
7See the text of the panel discussion on Sweetback with Melvin Van Pee-
bles, St. Clair Bourne, Halle Gerima, and Pearl Bowser held at a conference
on black independent filmmaking at Ohio State University in 1981 (Year-
wood, "Sweet').
8This point was brought to my attention in a fall 1987 lecture at North-
eastern University, during which Clyde Taylor presented an analysis of the
class differences in audience reactions to Sweetback as a methodological
device by which to interpret the film. See the very interesting discussion of
this issue by Mercer in his "Recoding Narratives," but also see Mercer and
Julien, and Willemen.

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234 Tommy L. Lott
9In a similar vein, Keenan Ivory Wayans's I'm Gonna Git You Sucka and his
television show In Living Color present a black-oriented variety of post-Eddie
Murphy humor that relies heavily on the ridicule of white stereotypes of
black people.
10The social taboo against public statements regarding the media hype of
Larry Bird as the greatest basketball player ever was quite deliberately
violated by Lee in She's Gotta Have It. Lee seemed to rail against the de facto
censorship of what many black people believe about Larry Bird by having his
character Mars Blackmon flaunt anti-Bird jokes in the face of the audience
which had witnessed Isiah Thomas's being coerced on national television to
demeaningly recant his truthful comments regarding the racist commentary
in sports broadcasting.
lIFor a pointed discussion of this dilemma facing black independent
filmmakers, see Taylor, "Black Films"; Gilroy. See also Larry Rohter's discus-
sion of Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger.
12Prince's films remain closer to Hollywood's assimilationist paradigm of
crossover" black cinema, whereas Spike Lee entered the crossover market
with black-oriented films that are closer to the black independent tradition.
13I have in mind here, specifically, films such as The Killing Floor, Minstrel
Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and
The Women of Brewster Place.
14Some rap artists have characterized their cultural practice as 'black
America's TV station" (see Leland 48).
15Du Bois argued for a socially constructed concept of black identity that
black people should "invent" to advance themselves (483-92).
l6Within the unspoken norms of African-American culture, black people
with a caucasian appearance generally bear the burden of proving their
loyalty, given that they have an option to "pass," despite their known biologi-
cal heritage.
l7See the alternative accounts of Kobena Mercer (1Third Cinema"), David
Will, Paul Willemen, and Clyde Taylor ("Eurocentrics").
18Willemen displays this tendency when he attempts to utilize Bakhtin's
thesis regarding socio-historical specificity to reconstruct Gabriel's interna-
tionalist account of Third Cinema practice (see 23ff.).
19While it would be inaccurate to attribute this view to Willemen, some of
his declarations lend themselves to an interpretation along these lines. For
instance, he maintains that "the question of the national cannot be divorced
from the question of Third Cinema" (20) and that those engaged in black film
practices must refuse "to homogenise every non-Euro-American culture into
a globallsed other" (29). But surely Willemen does not mean to deny the
possibility of new social formations, perhaps international in scope, which
stand opposed to neo-colonial structures that are ultimately rationalized on
biological notions of national identities.
20Stuart Hall ("Cultural Identity" and 'New Ethnicities") has advocated an
extreme version of the non-essentialist view of cultural practice.
2lFor a critical discussion of how black films that are modernist in style
have gained a greater currency than those which are steeped in realism, see
Williamson; Fusco. See also Valerie Smith's insightful commentary on what
counts as an "experimental" black film.

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