It's one of Hollywood's most iconic opening moments – the camera sizing up John Travolta as he struts down the sidewalk to the Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever (1977) – and one that was, to hear critic and filmmaker Elvis Mitchell tell it, more or less a brazen steal from the Black cinema of the era.
"Every generation gets its own Elvis, or Eminem," Mitchell quips in his new documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!?, as he cuts between Travolta's prancing Tony Manero and Richard Roundtree's formidable entrance to the 1971 blaxploitation classic Shaft, their propulsive theme songs and sartorial swagger an unmistakable echo of each other.
"An off-white take on Black cool," Mitchell says.
The observation is typical of Mitchell's playfully provocative, historically incisive documentary – co-produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher – a rigorous, richly entertaining, and deeply personal work that surveys the explosive period of creativity in Black filmmaking from 1968 through to 1978.
Ignited by civil rights upheavals and film studios looking to capitalise on audiences in urban markets, it was an unprecedented decade for Black movies, though one that has often been lumped under the catch-all term blaxploitation – an affectionate label that nonetheless lent a veneer of disrepute to films that were socially and politically engaged.
As Mitchell notes, it was "a brand that offered acknowledgement and dismissal simultaneously".
Writing and narrating, the former New York Times and Village Voice critic goes beyond the pimps, hustlers and wah-wah guitar sounds to locate these films in the larger historical context of Black cinema, taking a considered approach to the subject in all of its complexity – one that elevates his documentary above a mere celebratory retrospective.
For Mitchell, who was born in 1958, it's also a personal story — of his own cinematic coming of age, and his love for an art form that has historically failed to reciprocate his affection.
"It's been a lifetime of watching, and thinking, and writing about movies," Mitchell muses at one point, over clips of 20th century blackface, minstrelsy and classical Hollywood's demeaning bit parts for Black performers like Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best. "I keep coming back, despite the waves of disregard they keep hitting me with."
That sense of the personal is burnished by the recollections of featured guests, from those old enough to be rich repositories of cultural history – like the great Harry Belafonte, still equal parts smooth and spiky at 95 – to the actors who also came of age watching these movies (Samuel L Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Laurence Fishburne) and those who've inherited their legacy (Zendaya, a generational outlier here, presumably on hand for, you know, kids).
If it moves at a fast clip, then it's a testament to the sheer amount of work to highlight – no easy task, considering the range and richness of films that include such outside-the-mainstream fare as Bill Gunn's haunting horror parable Ganja & Hess (1973), William Greaves's time-bending Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), or Charles Burnett's working-class masterpiece Killer of Sheep (1978), a once-forgotten film that Mitchell dubs "the crowning achievement of the decade".
Is That Black Enough for You?!? overflows with analysis of these and dozens of other films, including familiar hits like Shaft, Super Fly (1972) and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), whose scores – that Mitchell says "weren't just textures, but detonations of thought and sound" – pioneered the marketing of tie-in soundtracks years before it became de rigueur Hollywood practice.
"It felt like a comet crashing into the earth," Mitchell recalls of seeing a chain-mailed Isaac Hayes perform his Theme from Shaft at the 1972 Oscars, "an alteration of the atmosphere, letting us know things would never be the same".
It wasn't just the films that were redefining the landscape, it was the performers, too – in particular Black women, from the high glamour of Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Mahogany (1975) to Oscar-nominated Cicely Tyson (Sounder, 1972), Diana Sands (Willie Dynamite, 1973), and of course, the indelible Pam Grier, a bona fide box-office star who Mitchell describes, pretty wonderfully, as "an archangel delivering her people from the end of the world".
As the stardom of Grier and others demonstrated, the appeal to Black audiences was in seeing these performers seize the moment; in finding, as Mitchell puts it, "swag in their own beauty, and revelling in being the centre of the frame".
In one of the documentary's funniest moments, Billy Dee Williams – the future Lando Calrissian, and Ross's impossibly suave co-star in Lady Sings the Blues – recalls the moment he first caught a glimpse of himself in the Billie Holiday biopic.
"When I walked down those stairs I fell in love with myself," Williams chuckles. "I said, 'My goodness gracious!' I was smitten."
It was this sort of screen image – of irrepressible style and confidence – that drives the documentary's most compelling thesis, that the Black movies of the period thrilled audiences who were frustrated by the notoriously downbeat antiheroes of films like The Conversation (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976), whose protagonists wore their misery, jokes Mitchell, like "runway accessories".
Black movies, argues Mitchell, redeemed the idea of on-screen heroism, paving the way for Hollywood's reclamation of the mode – in the likes of Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), Superman (1978), and the beefcake action blockbusters of the 80s.
This return of the white Hollywood action hero, together with the waning box-office fortunes of Black movies, heralded the end of the golden age of Black movies, Mitchell suggests.
But the death knell, he says, was sounded by the film that could have reversed the downturn and served as Black movies' mainstream coronation: 1978's expensive musical adaptation The Wiz, a lavish oddity whose commercial underperformance gave the studios the excuse they were looking for to get out of the Black movie business (even as one of its stars, Michael Jackson, went on to define and dominate the music video era of the following decade).
"Black film was left to wither and die," says Mitchell, "but it refused to."
Is That Black Enough for You?!? is streaming on Netflix.
