Claudine
“I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical,…
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Carnival of Souls
Nothing quite agitates an artist like asking to explain their art. Perhaps it is the perceived implication that they didn’t communicate effectively, or that you aren’t willing to fully engage…
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Sapphire
“We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t…
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The Boys in the Band
In June I went to the library to pick up Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, and while walking to the video section, I passed a display table of…
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Take a Giant Step
“The truth is the truth and should be spoken at all times,” proclaims Grandma Martin (Estelle Hemsley), from the top of a stairwell, no less. It’s a bold mandate, especially…
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Klute
Early in Klute, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) returns home from an afternoon appointment with a John, has a bath, lights some candles, pours a glass of wine and sits at…
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Black Girl
“Some boomerang, this story,” an inspector observes, in the novella Black Girl by Ousmane Sembéne, which he adapted for film. I won’t reveal the scene of the crime, but the…
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The Trouble with Angels
I wasn’t sure about writing this review until reading a back issue of Film Comment wherein Joan Rivers listed it as one of her guilty pleasures. Please don’t ask for…
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The Green Pastures
Whiteness in America, Michael Eric Dyson writes, is the result of “breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was…
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Downhill Racer
In junior high, I was given the most fantastic textbook. That might seem an oxymoron to you and maybe I had low standards at the time, but it was an…
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