‘Is That Black Enough for You?!?’ Review: Elvis Mitchell’s Meticulous Class on Black Film History

The culture critic analyzes a crucial decade in American cinema, crafting an argument about how Black filmmakers reinvigorated the medium through both formal and narrative experimentation.

Laurence Fishburne in Is That Black Enough For You?!?. Courtesy of Netflix

It happens every few decades, each time more reverentially than the last: declarations of Black art’s existence. There are whispers of a renaissance, talk of watershed moments. Certain demographics rush to celebrate its arrival, and those allergic to trends (or with a memory longer than a decade) dutifully remind that it’s always been here. Chatter about representation, necessity, meaning and craft is run through until it fizzles. And then we do it again.

Elvis Mitchell’s Is That Black Enough for You?!?, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and lands on Netflix Nov. 11, is the kind of work that tries to free us from this purgatory of intellectual relitigation. The documentary — dense and considered — examines the impact and legacy of Black films released during the late 1960s to late 1970s, a decade remembered for the proliferation of Blaxploitation flicks.

Is That Black Enough for You?!?

The Bottom Line Ambitious in scope, rich in substance.

Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight)Release date: Tuesday, Nov. 11 (Netflix)Director: Elvis MitchellRated R, 2 hours 15 minutes

Mitchell uses his film essay, which interweaves personal experiences with cultural criticism, to counter conventional thinking about that period. He engages with a horde of films — from William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man to Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly — to craft an argument about how Black directors, performers, writers and musicians reinvigorated cinema through both formal and narrative experimentation.

Is That Black Enough for You?!?‘s ambition is an achievement, but such a voluminous study needs the right medium. Sitting through the film, which covers an impressive amount of ground in its more than two-hour runtime, I bristled at publishers’ rejections of Mitchell’s book proposal. (According to press notes, Mitchell shopped Is That Black Enough for You?!? around to different publishing houses, all of which turned him down.) The material he presents — rich, varied and incisive — is perfect fodder for a written text or, dare I say, a longer series. An expository feature-length documentary works, but bits of substance inevitably get lost to the cuts, edits and elisions required of the form.

Mitchell’s doc functions best as an educational primer, a (long) tasting menu that will not only expand your palette but leave you hungry for more. For audiences quick to dismiss, or asleep to, the contributions of Black filmmakers, this is required viewing; for those who think they know about this decade of cinematic history, I suggest you run don’t walk to turn on Netflix when it drops.

The personal sets the tone for this documentary, which shares structural and tonal similarities to the cinema studies embedded in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. Mitchell, an influential film critic, channels Baldwinian analysis throughout Is That Black Enough for You?!?, which he wrote, directed and narrates. He anchors his probing film criticism with anecdotes charting his own complicated relationship to movies. Interspersed throughout are interviews from an eclectic mix of Black cinema figures, from Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg and Zendaya to Harry Belafonte and Suzanne de Passe. Their commentary stretches Mitchell’s work, threading his thoughts into the vast quilt of Black cinema history. But they also offer a welcome reprieve, a pause from the steady drum of information.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? opens with a broad observation about American cinema, its rejection of Black audiences and how Mitchell’s grandmother regulated his consumption of moving images. He could not, for example, watch The Andy Griffith Show because there were no Black people in it. “What do you think happened to them?” his grandmother would ask. These kinds of questions, which Mitchell poses throughout the film, preview the mental acrobatics Black people engage in when watching “classic” moving images. Their exclusion is not always a sign of ignorance on the part of the creators, but rather a testament to, and reflection of, the undercurrent of racist violence that keeps some American locales white.

Mitchell methodically organizes and presents his thoughts. There’s a poetry to the narration, too, a demonstrable comfort with the audio format (Mitchell hosts KCRW’s radio show The Treatment). An overview of the American film landscape — including the myopic mission of studios to shape, instead of respond to, the culture — segues into more specific analysis. Like a jeweler examining precious stones, Mitchell looks at these features from all angles — an encyclopedic approach that can make it harder to follow the film’s broader purpose and essence. He supplies brief plot summaries before teasing out the movies’ most interesting qualities, from narrative strides to innovations in craft and genre. He considers these works alongside the sociopolitical battles brewing in the background: World War II; the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers; and the ghastly lynching of Emmett Till. His enthusiasm, even in the face of challenging subject matter, is infectious; you leave the doc wanting to love anything as much as Mitchell loves movies.

Viewers who are familiar with existing discourse about Black cinema will find affirmation in Is That Black Enough for You?!?, which doesn’t shirk from criticizing American cinema’s conservatism and exclusivity. Studios are engines of national mythmaking, helping to conjure and sustain fictive visions of the United States. Belafonte, who is interviewed extensively here, is positioned as an icon for an increasingly rare kind of artistic integrity, frequently declining roles that did not take his talent seriously or tried to turn him into a caricature.

One of the most interesting parts of Mitchell’s doc is his detailed examination of film scores and soundtracks, a topic that particularly piqued my interest and I wish he’d lingered on longer. Here, Mitchell is at an analytical peak, describing Curtis Mayfield’s voice and music as a “honeyed falsetto” rendering the struggle of black Americans. He offers a theory, which he briefly attributes to a conversation with a studio executive, that Super Fly popularized a trend of releasing soundtracks before a film’s premiere to lure audiences in. (This, Mitchell says, was a Van Peebles technique). The connection pushes us to think about the aesthetic and commercial relationship between images and sound, how music activates and sharpens the imaginative worlds constructed in films.

Just as we settle into that subject, though, Is That Black Enough for You?!? moves on to its next film and mode of analysis. There’s a dizzying quality to the project, which continually leaps from one consideration to the next: the aesthetics of Black films, the legacy of specific opening sequences, the function of music, the economics of independent filmmaking versus studio-backed ventures. Rare is the reflection on Black cinema that even tries to address all these critical points. Still, it makes digestion, especially on the first watch, overwhelming. Is That Black Enough for You?!? is layered and informative but, like a scholarly thesis, requires a bit of work to unpack. It’s a challenge worth accepting.