The “Black Man's Vision of the World”: Rediscovering Black Arts Filmmaking and the Struggle for a Black Cinematic Aesthetic

Abstract

This essay recovers filmmaking efforts within the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely the films created by Larry Neal, one of the movement's key theorists, in collaboration with artists like Amiri Baraka, Edward Spriggs, and James Hinton, discovered in the Harvard Film Archive. It focuses on three finished films and one film that almost got made: the documentary films Moving On Up and The New Ark, a fictional story set in Harlem called Holy Days, and Revolution in Black America, which was an early documentary film project that, according to the archival record, was never completed. These films have so far not received any critical attention. In fact, scholars of the movement have assumed that Black Arts activists rejected popular media in favor of literary and theoretical output. Conversely, the Black Arts Movement plays only a minor role in the historiography of black cinema, even though film historians acknowledge the critique of mainstream cinema within the movement and black filmmakers inspired by Black Arts ideas. Analyzing these film texts and the circumstances of their production, this essay attempts to write the Black Arts Movement into the history of black cinema and reopen the question of a black cinematic aesthetic, connecting the concept to the black freedom struggle that simultaneously generated the early black film criticism to which scholarship of black film remains indebted. Bridging the movement and film history, in turn, also allows a rethinking of the Black Arts Movement and its involvement with mass popular culture.

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