Serendipity. For some time, I had been thinking about a season of black films and had approached someone who worked at The Albany. I wanted someone from the black community to curate it. We met a few times and he gave me a list of movies. Around the same time, I had a meeting at Film Hub London about another season – the thrillers that you can see this autumn at Deptford Cinema. I was then asked if I had any more ideas. I showed the woman the list I had in my pocket and bingo: the BFI was planning a Black Stars season and was ready to support cinemas like ours. The original list then needed to be altered as the man at The Albany and I hadn’t started out thinking about actors – the black stars. My new method was to kick off with the 1950’s and think about the performers decade by decade. I just brainstormed, aiming to think about female as well as male stars. Time was short and I ended up doing this in a rush by myself. There are some names that became musts: Sydney Poitier. There are others where I wanted to show work that hadn’t been widely seen – with actors taking a risk e.g. Will Smith playing a gay man in Six Degrees of Separation – or appearing in quality films that hadn’t been widely seen e.g. Denzel Washington in Devil in a Blue Dress. Some films were unavailable, alas: Paul Robson in Showboat; Diana Ross so good in Lady Sings the Blues. When news of the latter came through, I had to think quickly: I wanted a female to replace Ross - but who? I couldn’t face Whoopi Goldberg. I then thought: okay, forget the so-called
big names. Let’s shine a light on a supporting player. Step forward Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life. For me, this is the highlight of the season, the most interesting and in some ways challenging of the films. Please don’t miss it. And next year, I promise you a Douglas Sirk season. If you have never heard of him, google his name and watch this space. It is funny revisiting some of these films. Analyse, for example, In the Heat of the Night: a 1960’s seminal text. Think of all the problems black people are still facing, especially in the USA. Poitier is Miss Marple within the narrative: the smart one who picks up all the clues. Not only that – he is the sophisticated man from the urban north, dressed in a smart suit. The southerners come across appallingly in contrast. And in the Deep South of the 60’s, our cool smart protagonist is constantly at risk of being lynched! It’s deadly accurate and a fascinating - and scary - time and place study of racism. Deptford Cinema badly needs more black programmers. We need to see your choices. Come and take over. Film programming meetings are currently at 3 pm on Sunday. General Meetings are at 4 pm the same day. I hope you enjoy the films. I will be at the cinema to introduce them. Come and say hello. Phil Dale Our big thanks to the BFI for their support.
Intro & Film Texts... Why Do Black Stars Matter?... Cover Image...
Philip Dale Grace Barber-Plentie Sam Taylor
15/10/16
Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
CARMEN JONES Otto Preminger / 1954 / USA / 105 min
Based on an adaptation of the Bizet opera, Carmen Jones stars Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and is the first in our season chronologically. Directed by Otto Preminger, Dandridge’s lover that the time, this all-black musical was a huge box office success in its day. Dandridge’s sultry performance foregrounded and celebrated black female sexuality and her Best Actress nomination at the Oscars in 1954 was a milestone moment. Belafonte was a very successful singer (The Banana Boat Song) and actor in the 1950s who moved to political activism in the 60s, becoming a confidant of Martin Luther King. He later turned his attention to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and worked for UNICEF. It is interesting to note how such black performers (Poitier is another example) graduated from performance to (harsh) reality in their careers. For them, acting wasn’t enough – and this particularly applies to Belafonte – there were more pressing matters in the world beyond the studios. Although both very accomplished singers, neither of the performers could manage the operatic score. Interestingly, Dandridge was dubbed by Lena Horne.
22/10/16
Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
IMITATION OF LIFE Douglas Sirk / 1959 / USA / 125 min
Why has this been included in the BLACK STAR season? The star is pearly white: Lana Turner. The film’s focus initially is all about white female -interestingly, single mother survival / ambition / success. There are other white characters: John Gavin, Sandra Dee. But then, slowly but surely the director Douglas Sirk turns his attention to the subject of race. Juanita Moore’s Oscar nominated appearance as Turner’s friend then helpmate then maid typifies the way that black actors traditionally supported the white stars – and reminds us that even now in places like post-apartheid South Africa, the black maid remains an institution. But Sirk does something radical and the film ends not with us thinking about Lana Turner’s character at all: the spotlight is totally on Juanita Moore and we are compelled to review the entire narrative in the light of this. Moore has a light skinned daughter who passes for white. This movie ends in floods of tears. Anyone who has done a quality Film Studies course knows about Sirk, the director who worked with Brecht in the 1920’s and applied his own brand of alienation technique to 1950’s Hollywood melodrama. Check out All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. For me, Imitation of Life is the best film in our season: subversive, gut-wrenching … unmissable. Book now – we have only 40 seats! Worth seeing just for the title alone.
29/10/16
Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT Norman Jewison / 1967 / USA / 109 min
Sydney Poitier is THE black star of stars – yet he would probably describe himself as an actor, not a star - he was someone who had no time for Hollywood frippery. Like many performers with intelligence and integrity, he chose to spend his later years on more pressing matters than movies, becoming the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. It is fascinating to think that in an era when racial discrimination was rife and in many states institutionalised, Poitier was huge box office, leading to an incredible succession of films. In the Heat of the Night stars Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a detective from Philadelphia who gets involved in a murder investigation whilst visiting a small town in Mississippi. The film is a study in racism and Poitier’s words, demanding respect – ‘They call me MISTER Tibbs’ – are going to sound out loud and clear here in Deptford. Come and see this, and remind yourself of what great acting looks like.
05/11/16 Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
BLUE COLLAR
Paul Schrader / 1978 / USA / 114 min A knock-out film about the world of work: car workers in a Detroit who are sick of being abused by both management and their corrupt union. Richard Pryor is our black star but there is Yaphet Kotto next to him. The third colleague is Harvey Keitel. This was Paul Schrader’s debut as a director and some would say his best work. Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and this film has a similar intensity to those films, underpinned by a thumping score by Jack Nitzsche. This is a neglected classic, a terrific movie that was such a nightmare to make that it caused the director a mental breakdown. The three actors did not get on. Pryor liked to improvise, Keitel didn’t. Pryor physically assaulted Kotto. The movie was made in real auto plants in the middle of a heatwave. And all that anger is up there on the screen. This is a funky punky film about issues that concern us all today. Schrader says that the films’s politics are: ‘The politics of resentment and claustrophobia, the feeling of being manipulated and not in control of your life’. Is that familiar to any of us?
07/11/16
Doors 19:30 Film 20:00
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION Fred Schepisi / 1993 / USA / 112 min
Will Smith is an attractive performer, at ease in front of the camera and with a gift for comedy and more muscular roles, too. Six Degrees of Separation is arguably his most interesting ever film choice. How many black actors have taken on gay roles? Certainly not Denzel Washington, who foolishly advised Smith to avoid actually kissing his male co-actor. Well, the director, Fred Schepisi, found his own way around that hissy fit. Six Degrees … started out as a terrific play – Adrian Lester did a fantastic job of playing the role on the London stage. Here, the play’s original leading actress, Stockard Channing, reprises the role she created in the theatre – and she is wonderful. In the film, Donald Sutherland plays her husband. This drama about a black man who invades a white space is based on a true story and is a meditation on wealth/privilege, identity, fooling ourselves and fooling others. It is gripping and if you haven’t seen it, you’d better book now. Note that this is showing on a Monday (all the other films in the season are Saturday matinees).
19/11/16
Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS Carl Franklin / 1995 / USA / 102 min
Denzel Washington has been starring in films since 1981 and he has made so many of them. Sometimes he works for the sake of it - or for the money, like we all do (e.g. all the films he made with Tony Scott). But earlier in his career he showed greater discernment. I chose this film because I guessed that many members of our audience might not have seen it and it’s well worth catching. Look out for an early appearance from Don Cheadle – some say he steals the show. The film is an adaptation of a novel by Walter Mosley, famous for crime fiction with black protagonists. The film is set in LA in 1948 and the young Washington looks great throughout. The film has a real freshness about it – sexy, sassy, suspenseful - and is directed by Carl Franklin.
03/12/16
Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
JACKIE BROWN
Quentin Tarantino / 1997 / USA / 154 min This film is Tarantino’s fan letter to Pam Grier – and she does an absolutely wonderful job of playing a weary, seen-it-all, middle aged women in this Elmar Leonard crime fiction adaptation. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a strange one, much of it set in a shopping mall. For those who don’t like shopping malls, be warned. However, watching it is not as bad as, say, being locked in Lewisham Centre all night. The cast around Grier is great, especially Robert Forster, who plays her love-interest. There are other performers of note, like Bridget Fonda, Samuel L Jackson and … a really seedy Robert de Niro. But let’s put the spotlight back on Grier. Like Tarantino, I could watch her all day and all night. And the opening, as she glides through an airport to Bobby Womack’s ‘Across 110th Street’, is sheer bliss. Worth paying £5 for that bit alone.
17/12/16 Doors 14:00 Film 14:30
MONSTER’S BALL Marc Foster / 2001 / USA / 111 min
An erratic actress who can make poor choices when selecting roles, Halle Berry hit the top spot in Monster’s Ball – and some of us would say that her performance when collecting her Oscar was even better. The film demands to be seen, not just for Berry, but for excellent work from Billy Bob Thornton and Heath Ledger. Berry plays a poor southern woman who falls for a prison guard after the execution of her husband. Yes, it sounds ludicrous but the film is excellently directed (Marc Forster) and has bold touches like the extended sex scene between Berry and Thornton – as well as great acting all round. And Mos Def is in it! Berry has always had interesting things to say about skin colour and how she was rejected for being either too light or too dark. President Obama also commented on his mixed heritage. Although not foregrounded in the narrative, Berry is testimony to the beauty of biracialism and a celebration of the fact that - as DNA profiling shows again and again -we are all racially mixed.
WHY DO BLACK STARS MATTER? by Grace Barber-Plentie
People have many different methods of self-preservation. For me, one who regularly relies not just on the visual but the aural to keep me going, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly has been one of these very methods. The album, which deals with resistance, activism in the black community also preaches self-love, something that’s apparent from its opener Wesley’s Theory. Sampling an old Brian Gardiner song of the same name Lamar puts forward the assertion that “Every n—r is a star”. Epithets aside, the song and the assertion that not only are black people worth it but hell, we’re stars, has motivated me through the latter years of my three-year film studies degree. Because while I’ve been given motivation through Lamar’s music, film academia has seemingly sought to tell me the very opposite. When star studies was taught for a term at my university, black stardom was left, unsurprisingly, Robesonoff of the curriculum. And that’s without getting into the films that we were shown – while we were lucky enough to fleetingly study Cheryl Dunye and Charles Burnett, attention was drawn to the black auteur, and varying themes in their work, rather than the stars at the centre of these films. Going off these ellipses, it’s easy to believe that maybe this absence is deliberate. Maybe (aside from a chapter on Paul Robeson in Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies, praised as the text when it comes to star studies) academia is seeking to tell us that black stardom is impossible – that there are no black actors with the bravado of Brando or the magic of Marilyn. However the BFI’s latest season, Black Star, looks to shake up the conversation. The season’s name, naturally, is a talking point – what have black stars done exactly that merits deserving their own season? In a world where people are eager to
sanitise with their “All Lives Matter” rhetoric, shouldn’t stardom be a concept that can be applied across the board? And why, exactly is there no White Star season? (Answer: because it’s already got a name – The Academy Awards.) Another question that will, undoubtedly crop up during the season is – “What is a Black Star?” Much harder to answer. In the same way that there is murkiness when it comes to the definition of a “black film”, (some directors, like Gina Prince-Bythewood have been vocal about their dislike of the term, stating: “Hollywood likes to say that any film with people of colour in it is a “black film”, and it’s just a way to marginalise a film and its audience, and give it less – black film is not a genre.) there is a murkiness when it comes to defining a black star. When it comes to film, there seem to be two pools – there are actors, and there are Stars. An actor is, say, John C Reilly or John Turturro. An actor that is reliable and well-liked, but couldn’t launch a film off their name alone. Stars, in comparison, are selling points themselves – you are not going to see a film with George Clooney in, you are going to see The New George Clooney Film. For a Black Star, on the other hand it is not this simple. For a start, how many Black Stars, in the broadest sense of the phrase are there? You might (if, god forbid, you’re willing to take a trip to see Suicide Squad) see The New Will Smith Film, or in coming weeks with the release of The Magnificent Seven, The New Denzel Washington. In the present day, these two men are our two main pillars of black stardom. This, in itself, says a lot about the misogynoir of an industry that can see Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer only just beginning to get their dues after years in the industry, and the one black winner of the Best Actress Academy Award mocked due to her emotional speech and cast off into nondescript bit parts and superhero films. Then there is the fact that with every birth of a new black star – say, Michael B Jordan or John Boyega – there is instantly a rush to see who in the (limited) pantheon of black stardom these newcomers can
be compared to. A new Sidney Poitier? Maybe the new Denzel? Black stars, for some reason, can only be like other black stars. For John Boyega to be compared to say, James Dean is an utter impossibility. With the murkiness of black stardom apparent, it’s miraculous and much appreciated that programmer Ashley Clark has pulled together a rich programme for the season. Clark’s programme seems focused less so on rigid star systems and more on talent and how beloved the stars that he has picked are. The BFI Black Star poll, in which audiences are invited to vote in is wide open and varied – while of course not encompassing every black actor to ever exist, it certainly eschews the usual “high culture” perimeters of the BFI. After all, how often does one see Empire’s Cookie Lyons on a BFI Best of poll? To Clark, to the season, and (hopefully) to audiences, every performance matters. Every performance makes an actor a star, be it Lupita Nyong’o’s slight filmography or the meatier one of Sidney Poitier. And it’s a delight to see that in the season stardom isn’t exclusively based on star image and box office – actors who have mainly worked in independent and foreign cinema such as Alex Descas are also included on the poll. The poll ‘long-list’ was derived from initial votes from key influencers (journalists, actors, directors etc) but if your favourite Black Star isn’t included you can still nominate them.
Grace Barber-Plentie is a writer and one-third of Reel Good Film Club, a film club focused on highlighting the contributions of people of colour through inclusive and non-profit screenings and events. Her passions when it comes to both writing and programming include depictions of women of colour, issues of “high” and “low” culture, and the importance of music videos as a pop culture medium.
DEPTFORD CINEMA The London Borough of Lewisham was one of only two London boroughs with no dedicated cinema. Deptford Cinema is a not for profit, community led project that was designed to rectify this with the building of a new, affordable and accessible venue for film and arts on Deptford Broadway. Deptford Cinema is the oldest operating cinema in Lewisham. The cost of a cinema ticket today can be upwards of £12 and even more when you factor in the travel for Lewisham residents to nearby Greenwich or Southwark, or central London. It is increasingly no longer a viable night out. Cinema should be for everybody and that’s the ethos of Deptford Cinema, providing accesible and interesting cinema, that’s also affordable. Deptford Cinema is being built by the community, for the community. Although our 40 seat cinema is open for business and fully functional, we are all in the process of completing our darkroom, gallery space and a fully licensed cafe/bar. The programming of events and films is open to anybody to show the films they want, and the cinema is a hub for all things film in Lewisham. With our regular programming gaining momentum, there is still a lot of work to do, especially with finishing the internal fit out of the space. If you think you can help out and would like to get involved and become a part of the cinema, it’s easy: come along to one of our Sunday meetings, held each week within the cinema at 4PM or one of our programming meetings (Sundays at 3PM). The organisation has no hierarchy, each volunteer is on equal footing and all decisions are made as a group at these regular meetings.
39 DEPTFORD BROADWAY SE8 4PQ WWW.DEPTFORDCINEMA.ORG /deptfordcinema @deptfordcinema
DEPTFORD CINEMA Sat 15.10.16 14:30
CARMEN JONES (1954) Starring Harry Belafonte & Dorothy Dandridge
Sat 22.10.16 14:30
IMITATION OF LIFE (1959) Starring Juanita Moore
Sat 29.10.16 14:30
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) Starring Sidney Poitier
Sat 05.11.16 14:30
BLUE COLLAR (1978) Starring Richard Pryor
Mon 07.11.16 20:00
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993) Starring Will Smith
Sat 19.11.16 14:30
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1995) Starring Denzel Washington
Sat 03.12.16 14:30
JACKIE BROWN (1997) Starring Pam Grier
Sat 17.10.16 14:30
MONSTER’S BALL (2001) Starring Halle Berry
39 DEPTFORD BROADWAY SE8 4PQ WWW.DEPTFORDCINEMA.ORG /deptfordcinema @deptfordcinema