There are moments within the early stretches of Elvis Mitchell’s documentary “Is That Black Sufficient For You?!?,” a movie a few golden however neglected age of bracing Black cinema, that land as, of all issues, paradoxically banal. In these snippets, Mitchell, the director and a former New York Occasions movie critic who narrates the documentary, together with speaking heads together with stars like Laurence Fishburne and Zendaya, expounds on the essential significance of illustration, of seeing one’s lived realities on the massive display. Does a movie must trot out the virtues of on-screen variety and the destructive impact of racist tropes that so many have always parroted lately?
In a single sense, sure, one should in a movie about Black artistry. But the trite nature of those temporary moments exposes one thing far worse than the truth that not practically sufficient progress has been made in motion pictures over the a long time. Cinema, in reality, has by no means come near reaching the widespread brilliance, the unruly and eclectic daring, of the last decade that the movie examines.
Mitchell’s film, an often static work if additionally an unequivocally essential and gloriously complete one, tracks the years from 1968 by means of 1978, wherein “a procession of assured Black expertise” stuffed the display. Clearly a private mission for Mitchell, “Is That Black Sufficient For You?!?” finds each its best achievement and its largest narrative impediment in its scope. For a lot of the movie, Mitchell goes one-by-one by means of the noteworthy movies from this decade, highlighting their significance with bite-size essayistic dispatches earlier than transferring rapidly to the subsequent.
Within the movie’s breadth, this wealthy period certainly seems like a miracle. And from a movie archivist’s standpoint, the work serves as a outstanding corrective on cinematic reminiscence, paying tribute to the dazzlingly creative and influential works of artists like Melvin Van Peebles or Max Julien, and the tapped and untapped potential of stars like Pam Grier and Cleavon Little (the appearances of elder legends like Harry Belafonte and Billy Dee Williams as speaking heads are nonetheless forcefully awe-inspiring).
However there’s a way that the documentary is each too lengthy and too quick: Mitchell’s commentary about every subsequent movie gestures towards one more microcosm of pressure and rise up in cinema and America. However quickly sufficient we’re off to the subsequent entry; Mitchell’s focus, a lovingly adamant one, is to provide each one among these movies their due, for higher or worse. There’s sufficient historical past and audacious genius for a whole collection to showcase, however as an alternative the stand-alone movie operates as a compendium wherein Mitchell’s concepts can often really feel truncated.
The film, as an illustration, may have carried out extra to interrogate the uneasy dynamic undergirding Blaxploitation movie, a supply of rigorous Black creativity that additionally made cash principally for white shot-callers. Mitchell additionally rushes by means of the downswing of the period (he too neatly factors on the poor field workplace for the musical “The Wiz” because the definitive blow), spending little time on the animating query of why such an electrifying and profitable interval died. Higher, Mitchell appears to say, to bask within the radiance of those works and the truth that they existed to start with.
Is That Black Sufficient for You?!?
Rated R for nudity, some sexual content material, language, violence and drug materials. Working time: 2 hours quarter-hour. Watch on Netflix and in theaters.