The format of The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films is deceptively simple. It’s an easily digestible guide that summarizes films alongside stills and movie posters. The difference between this book and so many other film guides is its author, Ashley Clark: The London-born writer is curatorial director at the Criterion Collection and once worked as director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His incredibly insightful declarations go down easy because they’re tucked inside the framework of individual film summaries. Take, for example, this line from the blurb about Lena Horne’s involvement in the 1978 Sidney Lumet film The Wiz: “One of the key characteristics of Black stardom in America is persistence in the face of prejudice and scant opportunity.” The blurb for 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess includes this gem: “The Blaxploitation boom sparked an increase in visibility and opportunity for Black performers and filmmakers in America, but some of the era’s most subversive and unorthodox work fell by the wayside.”
Speaking of subversive, unorthodox work, The World of Black Film will certainly introduce even the best-read cinephiles to works they hadn’t before heard of, if only due to Clark’s expertise in a subject that is unexpectedly diverse. The Invisible People is a Swedish made-for-TV documentary by filmmaker Madubuko Diakité that explores the struggles of African immigrants in Europe, and Kirikou and the Sorceress is a 1998 animated French adventure film that was a box-office hit in France and won multiple awards at international festivals. (The only reason it wasn’t picked up by major U.S. and U.K. distributors, Clark explains, is “its frequent yet completely nonsexualized nudity, a reflection of traditional African cultural norms.”) The under-the-radar films are numerous, but there are also ruminations on films that have become part of the cultural history, from the 1934 Josephine Baker classic Zouzou to the 2018 Marvel superhero blockbuster Black Panther.
For me, though, the real gift of The World of Black Film is its scholarship of lesser-known films. For as long as “Black” has been considered a subgenre of film, works of art that fall under that umbrella have been marginalized. The widened access made possible by streaming and digital circulation has begun to expose how artificial—and unnecessary—that marginalization always was.