- Celebrating Black Cinema: Shawn Edwards on the Black Movie Hall of Fame (February 18, 2026)
Deep in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri a dream is slowly being realized in the confines of the city’s historic Boone Theater. It’s the Black Movie Hall of Fame, which, when completed, will aim to tell the vibrant and vast history of Black cinema and moviemaking through the artifacts and stories of the people who lived it.
The Hall of Fame’s founder, Shawn Edwards, along with its co-owner, successful businessman Tucker Lott, are working diligently to finish the project that could almost be described as a lifetime in the making. Edwards, for his part, is a journalist and television/film producer, who, for the last 25 years has served as film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City. He is also a co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) and is serving his second term on the Board of the Critics Choice Association (CCA) where he created and executive produces the “Celebration of Black Cinema and Television” award show.
It should suffice to say that Edwards knows the enormity of the task he has, not just in completing the Hall of Fame—which is already advanced in its construction—but also in trying to tell the story of Black cinema. Thankfully, he is undaunted.
Edwards spoke with RogerEbert.com over Zoom about the Hall of Fame’s timeline, the search for artifacts, and the support it has received so far.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 09: Shawn Edwards poses in the IMDb Exclusive Portrait Studio at the Critics Choice Association 8th Annual Celebration of Black Cinema & Television at Fairmont Century Plaza on December 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Rowe/Getty Images for IMDb)
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the concept for the Black Movie Hall of Fame originate?
Well, everything needs an origin story. This one started back in the early-2000s and it’s been swirling in my head ever since. I’m a fan of Black cinema because I grew up on Black cinema. I was fortunate. I had parents who introduced me to Black cinema at a really young age by physically taking me to the movie theater to see Black movies, like “Super Fly,” “Shaft,” “Black Caesar,” “Claudine,” and “Sounder,” whenever possible. It was just a natural part of my moviegoing experience. Those images are powerful.There’s a reason why movie theaters were created. You go into this dark room and you’re sitting there with all these other people and there’s this big screen and there’s just something very magical about that experience.
Growing up, I knew I was Black. I had parents that instilled that identity in me. My grandparents in Kansas City were very pro-Black. My grandparents in Princeton, New Jersey, where my mother was from, were super pro-black. One of the first novels my grandfather gave me in New Jersey to read was Roots [laughs] before the TV miniseries. So, I’ve always had a connection to Blackness, but I also love movies and the process of filmmaking. That love has stayed with me as my career has evolved as a journalist and then eventually into film criticism.
So, this idea of celebrating Black cinema and teaching other people about Black cinema really stuck with me because I would have conversations with so many people that did not know about the vastness of Black cinema or that Black cinema can be traced all the way back to the early 1900s. So I’m like, man, I’ve got to come up with something that explains and teaches people that Black cinema has always been a thing.
What’s the journey been like to pull together resources to make this dream a reality?
It’s a struggle. There could not possibly be a worse time, probably in the history of modern America as it relates to the United States, to try to bring something online that’s called the Black Movie Hall of Fame. We picked the absolutely, positively worst time ever, particularly as it relates to fundraising [laughs].
There’s actually a bullseye on Blackness right now. We are at a time when there’s this sort of calculated deescalation of Blackness, of Black contributions, and of Black history. So, we’re fighting against that huge tsunami to get this thing done.
Fortunately for us, the renovation part of the project was all funded years ago because we saved a 100-year-old movie theater, the Boone Theater, which is located in the 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District in Kansas City, Missouri. The building sat vacant for decades. The last time there was anything going on in that building was in the mid-70s. It’s been empty since then, which is a nightmare when you’re doing a renovation project in a building where there’s been no life for almost 50 years. But we saved the building and we got the funding for the construction years ago. That part is fine. The struggle has been raising the additional money to breathe life into that building so you can actually see what it’s going to be when it actually becomes the Black Movie Hall of Fame, like the movie theater component and all the other elements that will add further value to the theater. But we fight that fight every day. We are actually in the middle of our fundraising campaign, and although it’s not going as quickly as we would like it to be, it’s still inching forward.
What has the relationship been like between the museum and Kansas City, whether on a municipal level or a local level?
On a local level, there’s a lot of excitement and anticipation because it’s located in an area that’s been starving to become what it should be. The 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District back in the day was the hub of everything Black in Kansas City, and most things that Kansas City is known for nationally and internationally stem from Blackness. A lot of times when people think of Kansas City, they think of jazz, and Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, and Count Basie. I mean, jazz is Black music. Those figures spread the sound of bebop around the world. We also have the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which is about much more than just sports. Another thing that’s associated with Kansas City that’s also rooted in Backness is barbecue. I know people from Texas, North Carolina, and Memphis, Tennessee will argue who has the best barbecue, but Kansas City’s always thrown in the mix when you talk about barbecue.
So, everything that Kansas City’s known for is rooted in Blackness and took place in the 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District. When we said we were bringing the Black Movie Hall of Fame online at the Boone Theater, that we were renovating it, people got excited because a lot of Black cinema is also rooted in Kansas City. Oscar Micheaux traveled through Kansas City; Hattie McDaniel is from right down the street in Wichita; Gordon Parks is from Fort Scott, Kansas; Kevin Wilmont, who just won an Oscar, is from the area; Janelle Monáe and Don Cheadle are also from the area. The community knows that history and they’re fully on board.
And to a certain extent, so is the city when it comes to historical tax credits and those sorts of things that you need in order to preserve as much of the integrity of the building as you possibly can. Though the building fell a little bit behind schedule, we thought it would’ve been completed by now, we didn’t want to waste Black History month this year, so we did a temporary exhibit at the Black Archives of Mid-America to give people a glimpse of what the Black Movie Hall of Fame will look like once everything is completed.
That turned a lot of heads toward a positive direction because people began to get what we were doing. That’s helped out a lot. I think the excitement will swell even more once everything is done and people can walk in and see the exhibits and see the artifacts and the film series that we can do in a building where old Black movies were shown. We just want to get it done and get people excited and to prove those who aren’t on board wrong.
What has the reaction from Hollywood been like, particularly Black creatives? Has there been help on that front as well?
It’s getting there. A lot of people have wanted to know why it’s going to be in Kansas City. [laughs] I mean, a lot of people aren’t that familiar with Kansas City. I understand that as well. I do think Hollywood will come on board in a major way when it’s finished. I just think completion is the goal. Because I think once it’s completed, then you will convert the non-believers and people will buy in even more. And, you know, Hollywood operates with its own language and its own set of rules, especially when it comes to money. I know everybody thinks that every actor and every director is loaded. But it’s not that easy.
What has the process been like for procuring items for curation for the museum?
I have literally turned myself into a door-to-door salesman. That’s where the interaction with Hollywood’s working. I’ve been fortunate enough to build these relationships through the Critics Choice Association and producing the celebration of Black Cinema, and just traveling back and forth and doing interviews or going to film festivals where, over time people start to have some familiarity with you.
So, often, in certain situations, I’ve tried to slip the Hall of Fame into conversations. Blair Underwood and I were having a casual conversation where I was like: Man, one of my all time favorite movies was Crush Groove. I used to love that jacket you were wearing. Whatever happened to that? He’s like: Oh, it’s at home in my closet. I told him that we might need that, not forever, but we might need that. I was with Malcolm Lee, who I was more candid with because I’ve actually talked to him about the project before, and he offered some stuff. And then there are people who are more difficult, like Spike Lee, who’s got a treasure trove of stuff, but he wants to sell everything. It’s funny, man. I could almost write a book about this stuff [laughs]
For instance, when they came out with the movie “Sarah’s Oil,” you know, Sarah Rector’s mansion is still standing. I talked with the film’s director. I told him about the Black Movie Hall of Fame and how it’d be really cool if we could get one of the dresses the actress wore in the movie for display. He told me I had to talk with the costume designer about that.
I talked to the costume designer on the phone and he told me it’s part of his personal collection, which is in storage. But can we have it for maybe like six months? He’s like: I don’t know. I respond: What do you mean you don’t know? It’s in storage. People would love to see that. It’s a movie that’s directly tied to Kansas City about one of the most famous Black women who ever lived in Kansas City. He shot me back with wanting to see the Hall of Fall when it’s finished. But, as you know, if he gave us that dress and we announce we have the dress it would get people excited and it may help with fundraising.
So, it’s a journey. But I think that’s part of it. I’ve never been a salesperson. There’s been nothing in my career where I’ve had any type of job that was remotely close to selling. But now that I’m this door-to-door salesperson, it’s weird because the rejection is fierce.
I’m sure people will be wondering this as they’re reading, but what is the criteria for the Black Movie Hall of Fame?
I’ll be the first to admit, it’s tricky. But basically the main element is that it’s a story about the Black experience, whether it’s in America, the UK, Nigeria, France, Australia, South Africa, Morocco, wherever. Secondly, if it’s a film that’s directed by someone who’s Black. That can get a little tricky because there are a lot of Black directors who don’t necessarily direct movies that are just about the Black experience. But we do want to acknowledge what they do behind the camera too. Thirdly, it has to be a movie that primarily has a Black person or Black persons in the lead. That gets a little tricky too. A movie like “Beverly Hills Cop,” you can debate back and forth. Is “Beverly Hills Cop” a Black movie? If you took Eddie Murphy out of “Beverly Hills Cop” and you went with their original casting choice, Sylvester Stallone, does it still have the same aesthetic? I don’t think so.
When do you expect to have the hall of fame finished by?
The construction of the building, which is actually picking back up, should be finished sometime around April or May of this year. And then realistically, I would like to have everything finished by February 2027 so we can have our inaugural gala where you can walk and see what the Black Movie Hall of Fame is all about, where we have everything in place, functioning, curated, and properly displayed. February 2027 would make me one of the happiest people on the planet.
More information about the Black Movie Hall of Fame can be found here.
- Highlights of Roger Ebert on Black Filmmakers for Black History Month (February 18, 2026)
Roger Ebert was a champion of independent films, and he was never more enthusiastic than discovering a new filmmaker with a fresh perspective. That is most evident in his support for Black filmmakers like Spike Lee, Julie Dash, and John Singleton. In honor of Black History Month, here are some of our favorites from his reviews and features.
“Killer of Sheep“
Ebert was fearless in his aesthetic judgment. He was also fearless about admitting that he was wrong. One of his most insightful reviews is his reconsideration of Charles Burnett’s 1978 film “Killer of Sheep,” which he originally dismissed with what he admitted was a sentence so wrong-headed it cries out to be corrected in his Great Movies essay on the film:
“But instead of making a larger statement about his characters, he chooses to show them engaged in a series of daily routines, in the striving and succeeding and failing that make up a life in which, because of poverty, there is little freedom of choice.” Surely, I should have seen that what Burnett chooses to show is, in fact, a larger statement. In this poetic film about a family in Watts, he observes the quiet nobility of lives lived with values but without opportunities. The lives go nowhere, the movie goes nowhere, and in staying where they are they evoke a sense of sadness and loss….What he captures above all in “Killer of Sheep” is the deadening ennui of hot, empty summer days, the dusty passage of time when windows and screen doors stood open, and the way the breathless day crawls past. And he pays attention to the heroic efforts of this man and wife to make a good home for their children. Poverty in the ghetto is not the guns and drugs we see on TV. It is more often like life in this movie: Good, honest, hard-working people trying to get by, keep up their hopes, love their children and get a little sleep.”
“It’s High Tide for a Black New Wave“
From the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, Ebert wrote about the rise of movies from Black filmmakers that made no effort to pander to white audiences:
“As a film critic who had seen virtually every “black film” of the past 20 years, I felt at once I was seeing something new here: A film not only made by blacks, and about blacks, but for blacks. So many of the other black films seemed to be trying to force themselves into white mainstream categories. As a white viewer, I found [Spike] Lee’s approach incomparably more interesting than those tortured “crossover” films that seemed to be translated into an idiom that didn’t belong anywhere.…[Lee] has moved on beyond the ritual charges of racism, beyond the image of wronged and angry black characters, to a new plateau of sophistication on which there is room for good and bad characters of all races, on which racism is seen not as a knee-jerk response to skin color, but as a failure of empathy–a failure of the ability to imagine the other person’s point of view.”
“Do the Right Thing“
Ebert not only gave Spike Lee’s masterpiece the perfect score of four stars, but he also selected it as one of the “Great Movies” he assembled as his pantheon of undisputed classics. He called it one of the few films that “penetrate one’s soul.”
“Spike Lee was 32 when he made it, assured, confident, in the full joy of his power. He takes this story, which sounds like grim social realism, and tells it with music, humor, color and exuberant invention. A lot of it is just plain fun.”
“Do the Right Thing” was later introduced by Lee at Ebertfest, and Chaz Ebert, along with Barry Jenkins, presented Lee with the Ebert Director Award at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023.
Ebert was also a big fan of Lee’s film of the Tony Award-winning musical “Passing Strange.” Though it was a filmed theatrical musical performance, not a traditional cinematic narrative, he wrote, “This is a superb ensemble, conveying that joy actors feel when they know they’re good in good material. This is not a traditional feature, but it’s one of Spike Lee’s best films.”
“The Inkwell” and “Straight Out of Brooklyn”
Ebert was very enthusiastic about these two films directed by Matty Rich, made on a budget too small even to be considered micro. “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” also written by Rich, was filmed with a $900 camcorder, starting when he was just 17, and released when he was 19. Ebert appreciated its initiative and authenticity. “The edges are rough and the ending is simply a slogan printed on the screen. But the truth is there, and echoes after the film is over.” “The Inkwell” was released when Rich was 22. “Rich is still learning as a filmmaker, and he needs to tell his actors to dial down. But he knows how to tell a story. And he knows how to get big laughs, too.”
“For Love of Ivy“
It’s rare to find a straightforward movie romance with Black characters. His review of the Sidney Poitier/Abby Lincoln film, “For Love of Ivy” which came out so long ago (1968) the actors were referred to as Negro. He liked the movie, which, for the record, was directed by a white man, but the review is about how to review a movie about Black characters with minimal, if any, commentary on the overall Black experience.
“Because the two central characters are black, I found myself asking all kinds of ideological questions: Is the movie “honest”? How does it portray the racial situation in America? Does it sell out? Does it deal in stereotypes? Does Poitier play another impossibly noble character?
This is the mental routine movie critics seem to go through whenever a Poitier movie opens. Since Poitier is an authentic superstar (and possibly today’s top box-office draw), all sorts of moralists try to advise him on whether he’s doing his duty, whatever that is. Usually they decide that Poitier movies ignore the racial crisis and paint an unrealistically rosy picture of black-white relations.
I think this criticism misses the point, and may even be a sort of triple-reverse racism.”
“Daughters of the Dust“
Ebert called Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” “a tone poem of old memories, a family album in which all of the pictures are taken on the same day…. The film doesn’t tell a story in any conventional sense. It tells of feelings. At certain moments we are not sure exactly what is being said or signified, but by the end we understand everything that happened – not in an intellectual way, but in an emotional way.”
Ebert interviewed John Singleton, director of “Boyz N the Hood” when the late director was just 26.
“The main characters are not the smartest ones, I said. They’re all naive. It’s the more ideological people who have given their positions more thought. The skinheads. The black militants. The feminists.
Singleton nodded. This was one late afternoon after a Chicago screening of his film, and we had moved across the street to a Mexican restaurant to talk.
The Fishburne character is fascinating, I said. He’s scrupulously neutral and constitutionally conservative: He tries to be color-blind, values only excellence, believes in hard work and holds the young hero to the same standards. He kind of balances out the black militant student. Is that what you were thinking of?
“Not exactly. He’s kind of conservative, but not militantly conservative. That’s the way I wanted Fish to play him. He believes in not making excuses because of racism, you know, or sex and anything else, and every time Malik comes to him with a complaint, he always refutes it, telling him, `Hey, you can’t blame your problems on that.’ But even he, in the end, has to admit that there’s a system that tries to keep things in check, you know. A certain institutional bias that is slanted against kids like Malik. The professor believes that, to be a good teacher, he can’t allow himself to come too close to his students; they may have problems, they may be victims to some degree, but he can best help them by being the best teacher he can.””
“Eve’s Bayou“
Ebert wrote, “There has been no more assured and powerful film debut this year than “Eve’s Bayou,” the first film by Kasi Lemmons….[It] resonates in the memory. It called me back for a second and third viewing. If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.”
He also praised the “visual precision” of the film, also later presented by the director at Ebertfest.
“Down in the Delta“
The legendary Maya Angelou directed “Down in the Delta,” and Ebert respected her unintrusive approach, letting the actors carry the story.
“Angelou’s first-time direction stays out of its own way; she doesn’t call attention to herself with unnecessary visual touches, but focuses on the business at hand. She and Goble are interested in what might happen in a situation like this, not in how they can manipulate the audience with phony crises. When Annie wanders away from the house, for example, it’s handled in the way it might really be handled, instead of being turned into a set piece.”
Ebert interviewed Robert Townsend after the release of “The Five Heartbeats,” a film about a singing group. He recapped the director’s history, his years with “my mother looking for the back of my head” as an extra, his love for classic films from directors like Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, and his low budget satire of the Hollywood treatment of Black performers, “Hollywood Shuffle,” which Ebert described as “a ragged film, no masterpiece, but it had spirit.”
“[Heartbeats is] not simply a showbiz movie, though, I said. There’s a lot of drama about families in it, and about how some of the guys grow up faster than the others, and one wanders off into drugs.
“Yeah. I wanted it to have more body, to go a little bit deeper. A lot of movies don’t have real values anymore. They’re disposable, geared toward one weekend. They just throw a lot of noise and action at you. They don’t care. You look at the shape of the country, and the crime statistics, and then you look at the movies, and a lot of them are catering to that climate of violence, helping to feed it. I just have different values.””
Finally, in this episode of the Siskel & Ebert series, the critics discuss three Spike Lee films, “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze,” and “Do the Right Thing.”
- Keep on Dreaming: Reverend Jesse Jackson (1941-2026) (February 17, 2026)
In the early hours of Tuesday, February 17, 2026, the Reverend Jesse Jackson left us at the age of 84. No one can claim shock at receiving the news, due to Jackson’s advanced years and the numerous health difficulties that beset him in the last decades of his life. And yet, his taking leave of us has an unusual reverberation. In my lifetime, America has had few spokespersons for progressive values as effective as Rev. Jackson. For those of us born after 1970, he was a vital and singular link to a bygone era. He served as a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement, which feels like a lost Age of Heroes to those of us born after, and the end of the American Century.
The photographs taken just seconds before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel depict King standing between the young Jackson and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Sr. (1926-1990); the mise-en-scène of those photos would prove to be fateful. Jackson was famously one of King’s proteges, while Abernathy (two years older than King) was his trusted lieutenant. King’s assassination rudely ended his apprenticeship as a civil rights activist. Jackson, who was soon after ordained a Baptist minister, was the national director of Operation Breadbasket, an organization dedicated to economic empowerment of Black families, which was part of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
King’s death meant Rev. Abernathy was now in charge of the SCLC, and Jackson and Abernathy clashed. By the end of 1971, the Shakespearean power struggle between the ascendant Jackson and the waning Abernathy came to a head. Jackson left to start his own organization, Operation PUSH. And the stage was set for the young minister to come into his own.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns (18 years old when she gave birth) and Noah Robinson (he was Burns’ married neighbor, aged 33 when their child was born), Jackson took the name of his stepfather, Charles Jackson, who married Burns one year after she gave birth and adopted her child. There’s some evidence Jackson was teased by other kids regarding his parentage, but he later remarked that he felt he had a surplus of fathers, not a deficit, as he developed a relationship with his biological father.
Jackson was a child of the Jim Crow South who nevertheless became a formidable presence in his segregated schools. By high school, he was a popular athlete, earned good grades, and was elected student body president. And then came the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, which served as a call to arms for many young people across the country. A new day had begun.
Taking a football scholarship at the University of Illinois after graduating from high school in 1959, Jackson returned home to Greenville and found himself unable to use the public library for a school project. So he enlisted the help of seven high school students and launched a sit-in, or “read-in,” strike in July of 1960. By September, the library was successfully desegregated. That fall, Jackson left the University of Illinois and transferred to North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university in Greensboro, North Carolina. He played football there, but unlike at Illinois, he also played quarterback, was elected student body president, and was involved in many local desegregation campaigns.
He earned a B.S. in Sociology in 1964, and then enrolled in the Chicago Theological Seminary, beginning his long relationship with the city, one that would last the rest of his life. He left the seminary in 1966, just a few credits shy of his Master of Divinity, to focus full-time on his activism. By then, he was in King’s orbit, having participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches.
After his relatively brief time at King’s side came to a close and he struck out on his own, Jackson attempted to fill the void created by King’s absence. But as a younger man, he knew he could appeal to the younger generation King had largely lost before his death. He grew out his hair into an impressive afro, and his signature oratory became omnipresent.
Jackson makes an appearance in two of the seminal documentaries of the early seventies: William Greaves’ “Nationtime” (1972), and Mel Stuart’s “Wattstax” (1973). In the latter film, Jackson’s inimitable voice provides the film’s coda. Stuart uses audio of Jackson’s signature “I Am Somebody” speech as we see the faces of all the Black folks who have offered commentary throughout the film about the state of the race. It shows the primacy Jackson occupied at this critical time.
“I Am Somebody” was a key turning point in the rhetoric of the time. Building on his predecessors’ important work, Jackson understood that hard-won opportunities in the workplace or academia would be hollow victories if the internalized racism of white supremacy wasn’t attacked head-on. He wanted Black people to know that degrees and good jobs wouldn’t make them important; he wanted them to know they were already important. When he said those words, millions believed him.
Throughout the 1970s, Operation PUSH racked up a string of wins through nationwide boycotts due to the racist policies of certain brands. Even the mere word that Jackson’s organization was scrutinizing a company could prompt preemptive changes. When the ’80s arrived, and the Reagan Revolution began to roll back many of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, Jackson began to focus on coalition politics, making inroads into feminist causes and the Gay Rights movement at a time when few cishet Black male activists did.
1983 set the stage for the first of his two historic Democratic presidential campaigns. Harold Washington’s April victory to become the first Black mayor of Chicago no doubt stoked Jackson’s own ambitions. And in a move widely mocked when he first announced it, Jackson took it upon himself to negotiate with the Syrian government for the release of an African-American U.S. Navy pilot, Lt. Robert O. Goodman, who had been captured when he was shot down over Lebanon. Jackson secured his release and brought Goodman home to a White House welcome from President Reagan. Jackson’s critics were stunned into silence.
With his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, Jackson endured patronizing dismissal from much of the national media. And he did not get the backing of Coretta Scott King and much of the Civil Rights Movement Old Guard, who preferred tried-and-true candidates. But Jackson’s eloquence and his progressive vision were incredibly effective in the Reagan Era, when the very word “liberal” had become a pejorative.
Jackson’s campaign platform called for ratification of the ERA, a single-payer health care system, sanctions against South Africa, the creation of a Palestinian state, the end of corporate tax cuts, and a return to New Deal era spending. Senator Bernie Sanders has many times cited Jackson’s campaigns as being important and influential in helping him visualize the kind of presidential campaigns he would launch.
Neither of Jackson’s bids was successful in terms of securing the nomination, but the difference between 1984 (when he was perpetually in third place behind Sen. Gary Hart and former VP Walter Mondale, who would go on to be crushed by Reagan) and 1988 (when he gave Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis a run for his money as a close second) spoke volumes. Jackson’s vision spoke to many Americans, and the Democratic Party would ignore his ideas at its peril.
He made his missteps, to be sure. There was the time Jackson used an antisemitic slur to describe Jews and New York City in a conversation he thought was off-the-record. There were multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment brought by female staffers and journalists. And in 2008, a hot mic caught him suggesting that then-candidate Senator Barack Obama should be castrated for chastising Black men for neglecting their fatherly duties. Months later, Jackson was seen at the Hyde Park celebration of Obama’s victory, weeping with a small American flag in the hand that framed his face. It became an iconic image on a historic night.
The 2000s and 2010s saw Jackson on the wane. Reverend Al Sharpton had emerged as a fleet-footed competitor in the national arena as a spokesman for progressive politics. The younger man outstripped the elder, as often happens. Jackson no doubt counted himself lucky to live to see the first African-American President of the United States, and he has been widely and justly cited as an important forefather to that moment. Jackson’s critics from the old guard he came up under often were wary of his rapacious ambition. History will have the last say on that.
Reverend Jackson ends his long life in the public eye with very few ideological missteps to apologize for. He was on the right side of so many issues, even when being on the right side publicly was a risky proposition.
It is sadly ironic to lose him during Black History Month, during a dark time when so much he tried to stop is currently flourishing, but Jackson prepared us for this moment. If you go back and listen to his lauded 1988 Democratic National Convention speech, known for its refrain of “keep hope alive,” it is stirring and evergreen:
“You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes, but don’t stop with the way things are. Dream of things as they ought to be. Dream. Face pain, but love, hope, faith, and dreams will help you rise above the pain. Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress, but you keep on dreaming, young America. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age, and unwinnable.”
- Book Excerpt: The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films by Ashley Clark (February 17, 2026)
There are often projects whose complexity and importance I find difficult to fathom. How does one, for instance, distill the history of Black film into 100 titles? How does one define “Black” separately and in conjunction with “film”? Should a movie be helmed by a Black director to be considered a Black work? What about movies with majority Black casts but whose protagonist is white? What if the film hails from a part of the diaspora that doesn’t view itself as Black? With his latest book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, programmer and author Ashley Clark has given himself the challenging task of answering those questions in a comprehensive, lovingly crafted survey that celebrates and illuminates the multifaceted rhythms, voices, and stories cinematically derived from Black life.
Clark’s book, designed by Alexander Boxill Design and published via the London-based Laurence King, is an aesthetically attractive work. The bright green cover, which features a black and white image of Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Ousmane Sembène’s landmark film “Black Girl” (1966) teases the temporal and geographic possibilities of an overview that begins with the American silent “Lime Kiln Field Day,” which was filmed 53 years before Sembène’s film in 1913, and concludes with the British period piece “Blitz,” which was released 58 years after “Black Girl” in 2024. The other works in between these trio of films inspire further narratives to be gleaned regarding the rare surviving examples of early Black filmmaking, the rise of Black stories out of Africa, and the seeming deluge, at least compared with cinema’s pre-classical era, of contemporary Black moviemaking.
These narratives sprout organically and cohesively due to Clark’s impressive expertise as a programmer, researcher, and writer. Born in South London, Clark has curated film seasons at London’s BFI Southbank, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox. He also served as the director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where his distinguished series Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema re-introduced a bevy of underseen of Black films from around the world. He has also previously published the monograph Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.
Clark is currently the Curatorial Director at the Criterion Collection. The latter’s library of films, which was once critiqued for lacking Black filmmakers, has, under Clark, expanded to include works ranging from festival favorites like “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” to Blaxploitation classics like “Buck and the Peacher” to rediscoveries, such as “Compensation” and “Drylongso.”
Those experiences are on incredible display here, particularly in how he chose what to highlight and why. As he writes in the book’s introduction, giving the project some rules was necessary. The author opted to restrict himself to a single entry per filmmaker, and included selections from films that center the Black experience but are by non-Black directors. He also doesn’t limit his project to feature films either, spotlighting shorts, hybrid movies, and even a web series to sit alongside narrative features and documentaries.
Moreover, Clark makes the daring decision to include works that are only available in archives. That last choice might strike some as odd: Why write about movies no one can see? Clark does so, one would guess, because to not write about them would constitute an erasure in itself, resulting in a grave subtraction from one’s understanding of the evolution of Black film. Also, oftentimes, writing about films allows them to be seen. Not just in a contemporary sense of recognition, but as well as putting them on a radar for future restoration, which could open the door for possible programming.
The reason all of these disparate films work as a larger fabric within this book is because of Clark’s relaxed yet detailed writing, which attends to “Nothing But a Man” and “Madea Goes to Jail” with equal thoughtfulness. His reflective words are matched with a vibrant array of stills, making each page turn feel like a sacred meeting between the reader and a crucial truth.
The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films was released in UK on February 12 and the US on February 17.
We thank Ashley Clark and copyright holder Laurence King for permission to print this excerpt.
- The Eye of a Camera: Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026) (February 17, 2026)
The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman lived 96 years, long enough to watch the world remake itself many times over. Most of his movies were studies of communities, subcultures, and pursuits, and were titled after the institutions, locations or jobs they depicted: “Hospital,” “Basic Training,” “Juvenile Court,” “Primate” (about animal testing”, “Canal Zone,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué,” “Central Park,” “Boxing Gym,” “Jackson Heights” and “City Hall.” Wiseman’s filmography as a director kicked off with 1967’s “Titicut Follies,” about a state-run mental institution in Bridgeport, Massachusetts, and continued through 2023’s “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,” about the day-to-day operations of three family-owned restaurants in France. His work would be considered essential even if it did nothing more than capture specific places and people at specific points in history. But it’s much more than that. Taken as a whole, Wiseman’s features exemplify nonfiction filmmaking at peak originality and exactness.
Wiseman directed nearly 50 movies. All were made in accordance with rules and conditions devised by Wiseman, and were as uniquely specific as any in cinema history. First, Wiseman would get permission to film somewhere that didn’t normally tolerate film crews, at such length (anywhere from four weeks to three months) that the people who passed through his viewfinder forgot they were on camera and gave him material that seemed as close to authentic and natural as anybody could get. Wiseman would live in those spaces, often amassing hundreds of hours’ worth of material showing people and communities caught in the act of existing. Then he and his assistants would sift through the material, pick the most fascinating or informative bits, and assemble them into narrative mosaics of then-contemporary life.
The results were mesmerizing in their placid focus, despite or maybe because of how they ignored received wisdom about how to make a proper documentary. Wiseman had no interest in moving things along to prevent the audience from getting bored. Where most documentaries keep their running time between 90 and 105 minutes so they’ll fit in a two-hour time slot on TV, Wiseman’s routinely ran three to six hours with intermissions. There were no narrators or formal interviews. He didn’t use onscreen graphics or narration. He didn’t begin a film with a brisk summary of the work you were about to watch, or end it with a summation, or even a parting thought. His editing was precise and deliberate in its choices, but it was executed with such subtlety that you couldn’t be sure if Wiseman was consciously drawing connections between outwardly disparate people, facts, or events, or if you’d done that on your own.
Wiseman was a Boston lawyer who switched to filmmaking after producing 1963’s “The Cool World,” a low-budget drama about a Harlem youth gang directed by Shirley Clarke, a rare Black female filmmaker. In 1966, Wiseman shot his debut “Titicut Follies,” after taking his law students there on a field trip. The movie’s images of inmates being neglected, taunted, improperly medicated, force-fed, and stripped naked were so horrifying that the state sought a court injunction to prevent it from premiering at the 1967 New York Film Festival on grounds that it violated inmates’ privacy. This was the opening salvo in an ongoing legal battle that seemed to end with a federal appeals court deciding that “Titicut Follies” could only be shown to people in jobs related to medicine and its institutions. (The US Supreme Court could have heard the case one more time, but declined.)
Then, two decades later, the families of seven inmates who had died at Bridgewater between 1967 and 1987 sued the state of Massachusetts. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that if “Titicut Follies” had been given a proper release, the public would have been appalled enough to demand reforms that would have saved those inmates’ lives. In 1991, a Superior Court judge concluded that the movie was no longer a privacy violation because most of the inmates in the movie had died by then, and that the First Amendment right to free expression was more important anyway. The ruling allowed “Titicut Follies” to be shown publicly for the first time, 25 years after its completion. (It was unveiled on PBS, which would go on to become Wiseman’s most important patrons.)
Wiseman came up during the formative years of Direct Cinema, a movement originated by documentary filmmaker Robert Drew. Drew’s movies about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, “Primary” and “Crisis,” were works of exceptional frankness, made with the enthusiastic cooperation of the president, who agreed with Drew’s mission to record history as it happened, in an intimate, quietly observational style. Drew’s approach was only possible because of a recently invented advance in the nonfiction filmmaking toolkit: a battery-powered, handheld, shoulder-mounted 16mm film camera, outfitted with a shotgun microphone that could capture dialogue on the other side of a room or across a noisy street. The sound was recorded directly to the same spools of film unreeling within the camera, rather than being recorded separately by a boom operator and a sound engineer and merged in postproduction.
All of a sudden, work that once required separate picture and sound crews, lighting kits, and 35mm cameras too heavy to carry for hours on end could be done by one or two people. It could also enable what would later be called “fly on the wall” filmmaking, renamed “cinema verite” by French New Wave filmmakers who adopted it for fiction and added many innovative, energetic, low-budget films to the canon, including ”The 400 Blows” and “Breathless.” Documentaries made this way tended to adhere to a minimalistic, truth-oriented code. Events could be observed by the filmmakers, but not initiated or manipulated on location or through montage editing. Sound could not be dubbed after the fact, nor could events be shown out-of-sequence to make the movie more superficially dramatic or simplify a complicated chain of events.
An impressive group of US filmmakers emerged from this movement, including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the sibling duo of Albert and David Maysles, and their editor Charlotte Zwerin, who later segued into directing. But none practiced their trade with the monklike zeal of Wiseman. In a 2000 Star-Ledger interview to promote his two part, four hour, PBS-funded epic “Belfast, Maine,” about life in the eponymous fishing village, Wiseman told me he didn’t appreciate being lumped in with other filmmakers in the Direct Cinema movement because to one degree or another, all but Wiseman routinely broke the same rules they’d set for themselves, allowing themselves a bit of post-production dialogue replacement or a pop music-scored montage as a treat.
Which isn’t to say Wiseman saw himself as a heroic avatar of non-intervention. He often told interviewers that the location shoots for his movies were conducted under a non-interventionist policy, but that in the editing process, he’d avail himself of editing’s liberating powers, and create a work that was more of a subjective personal take than something in the vein of a reference book. Accepting an 2016 honorary Oscar for his unique contributions to cinema, Wiseman was self-deprecating about his process, which could seem to the uninitiated like no process. “I usually know nothing about the subject before I start, and I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it’s finished,” he told the audience.
In interviews with publications that cared about aesthetics, Wiseman admitted he was working mainly from instinct, on location as well as in the editing room, and did not consider any of his films to be definitive statements on their chosen topics, but glimpses of moments in time that accumulated power and suggested meanings when laid end-to-end on an editing timeline.
Wiseman’s movies recapture the original impulse that drove early cinema: to show things that viewers might not experience otherwise, be it a bare-knuckle boxing match, a train pulling into a French railway station, or the construction of the Panama Canal. And yet, in their meditative, hands-off way, these proto-documentaries were aesthetically radical, because they rejected every supposed norm of motion picture storytelling, including ones that had been explored by his colleagues in the Direct Cinema movement.
The way he talked about them sometimes made it sound like as much a record of a roving mind as Kenneth Anger’s experimental films, Jean Luc-Godard’s essay movies, and David Lynch’s phantasmagoric explorations of his dreams and nightmares. In a 1994 interview with CINEASTE, Wiseman said, “This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure. The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material, by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.”
Wiseman’s films are as recognizably Wiseman’s as all the films of Hollywood directors routinely name-checked as masters of auteurist filmmaking. Once you’ve seen a couple of his movies, you can identify the rest from watching a couple of minutes of a scene on somebody else’s phone. His stated approach to capturing reality evoked the opening lines of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” But the reality was something else. The passivity ended once the editing began.
“I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material,” he told The Paris Review in a 2018 interview. “Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material.”
