Programmed by Graham Cumberbatch
Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of Black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of Black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial “genre” that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value.