Dr Edson Burton on BFI Black Star

BFI Black Star is an ambitious nationwide two month event billed as “the UK’s biggest ever season of film and television dedicated to celebrating the range, versatility and power of black actors”. Bristol’s contribution has been curated by local black programming collective Come the Revolution in close collaboration with the Watershed.

It launches on Friday, October 21 with a screening of Dreamgirls, followed by the Soul Sister No.1 after-party. This also kicks off a season of black music biopics. Another strand, entitled Stars Under the Radar, draws attention to great performances that have been overlooked.

There are also two nights of comedy at the Trinity Centre in early December, with screenings of I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Coming to America. And the centrepiece of Black Star in Bristol is a screening of Prince’s Purple Rain at the Colston Hall on Nov 13. The Hall will be transformed into an immersive Prince-themed parlour with pre-screening performances and followed by the ‘Jam of the Year’ with Norman Jay MBE.

We grabbed Come the Revolution’s Dr Edson Burton for a chinwag about Black Star, the state of black film and anxieties about ‘cultural appropriation’.

How would you describe the significance of what the BFI are doing with Black Star?

Well, I think it’s a watershed moment in terms of pulling together what has been a tradition of transatlantic black film and black acting talent. We’ve had a recognition of individual films, individual performances, and there have been debates around diversity within the film industry. I don’t see this as necessarily a response to those debates, but it’s certainly timely. It pulls together a growing awareness that there is a canon of black film. Especially as more black British actors make their way into mainstream Hollywood films and onto the world of Netflix, it seems that the time is right.

I don’t think there’s ever been anything of this kind before – and a particularly unique aspect of it is that this is a celebration of black stars within the mainstream as opposed to ‘world cinema’. It is talking about people who have proven, bankable box office clout; people who have had long careers but are in many ways invisible. We know them for their performances, but outside that they are not celebrities. Also, it throws the spotlight on the broader interest in black cultural production, because some of the films we look at explore movement between music and film. Clearly, with music there are a number of household names, icons, whose lives have been celebrated. Sometimes in very pioneering ways, they’ve broken the narrow concepts of what black music is about and used that as a transition to the big screen, or the screen has seen the lives of these musicians as something that the broader public would be interested in.

What are the highlights of the programme for you? I was struck, for example, by the event celebrating the Nicholas brothers. I was aware of them, but didn’t know that one of the brothers had taught Michael Jackson to dance.

Yeah, we talk about diversity in the arts but ironically the infrastructure for dance in Bristol is quite poor while the diversity, in terms of participation, is huge. One of the things that strikes me is that the influence of the Nicholas brothers is there in terms of jazz dance, this being very prominent in the ’80s and ’90s with the afro-jazz revival and, in Bristol, the Floor Technicians, who won awards for jazz dance. They were massively influenced by the Nicholas brothers. So it’s something that I’m personally looking forward to, but I’m aware that for others it will be a completely new discovery. I watched the Nicholas brothers when I was a kid and I could never work out why I was watching black and white movies. It was just the elegance and the effortlessness with which they danced that really struck me.

I’m a Prince fan, so the Jam of the Year and the Prince screening is going to be a big one for me. To see In the Heat of the Night on the big screen again is going to be a powerful moment. With the Black Lives Matter discussions at the moment and the awareness of black-on-black violence in the States, it makes the remastered Boyz N the Hood a very timely film. Looking at where hip-hop is at the moment, it’s great that that film is being revisited, because for me it problematised what was becoming the glamorisation of gangsta rap. It was an unmistakably ugly film at points, deliberately so. So I think it’s as relevant now.

Speaking of Boyz N the Hood, which you rightly identify as a key film of the era, here’s something that’s always puzzled me. Back in the early ’90s, it seemed as though there was an enormous flourishing of black filmmaking talent in the US. Practically every week a new film would come along, from the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society to Ernest Dickerson’s Juice. They weren’t all good, by any means. Some were bloody awful. But they pulled audiences and it felt as though we were on the cusp of some kind of revolution that would lead to new stories being told. But then it all fizzled out. Last time I checked, Dickerson was directing episodes of The Walking Dead, which is great, but I can’t help feeling he should be making features. Do you have a take on this, or is my analysis incorrect?

Hmm. I have a hesitant take. Some people kept going, but the new stories weren’t actually being told. I think that Boyz N the Hood broke the mould of telling the urban gangster story, and subsequent to that other films came along. But they weren’t really saying anything different. It was almost the same problem that happened with Sweet Sweetback [that’s Melvin van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, to give the film its full title] and the blaxploitation films that followed afterwards. I think Sweet Sweetback was a pioneering film. It wasn’t trying to create a blaxploitation genre at all. It was trying to create a different aesthetic for filmmaking. But then what people saw was the potential for a genre and created a formula. So I think there were lots of formulaic urban films that followed, and they have a particular kind of box office appeal. In Britain, we’ve got Kidulthood and Brotherhood following on from that. But with Ava DuVernay’s work and Amma Asante’s work, I think there is now a revival and a new generation of filmmakers telling broader stories about black life. It’s kind of a shame, because I think the urban genre – which I guess wasn’t even a genre at the time – still has some substance to it. Filmmakers like Spike Lee and Charles Burnett tried to depict black working class life without falling into a crime narrative or an obvious caricatured ghetto narrative. So there are still stories to be told.

How about omissions from the programme? Clearly, you’re constrained by the availability of prints, but I wondered whether you regretted having to leave out anyone who deserved more of a focus. You mentioned Charles Burnett, for example, and one actor who springs to mind is Danny Glover, who starred in Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger and Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem at the same time as enjoying a successful Hollywood career in the Lethal Weapon franchise.

Absolutely. It’s not exhaustive. We had to make choices about films we liked. I think what we’ll try to do is pick up some of those actors whose films we’d like to have shown in editorial, where we can at least flag up that this is not anywhere near an exhaustive list. And with Stars Under the Radar, there are so many stars that fall in and out of popular awareness. Danny Glover could easily have been in there. Forest Whitaker is quite similar in terms of the quality of his work over time, and to demonstrate the breadth of his work we’ll be screening Bird and Ghost Dog. They both do what actors are meant to do, which is that they’re chameleons. Also with Danny Glover, you have the element that Harry Belafonte had – the activist who will fund niche projects, like Honeydripper, through doing mainstream films.

It’s very encouraging that you’ve also got these big comedy nights at the Trinity, which helps avoid the risk of solemnity and worthiness. Often when you see, for example, those lists of the 100 greatest movies ever made, they’re stuffed with European arthouse bum-numbers and exclude any mention of films that make us laugh.

Yeah, comedy has always been an easier access point for black performers. But I think it’s also allowed people to talk about race and send up the foibles and problems within one’s own community. There’s nothing as serious as comedy. For me, these films are among my funniest memories growing up, especially I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

You wrote a very interesting blog post on the Watershed’s web site in which you highlighted the universal nature of many of the performances, talked about experiences that transcend race, and argued persuasively that black and white cinema are intimately intertwined. In light of this, and playing devil’s advocate for a moment, could it not be argued that focusing on black cinema might be counter-productive?

I would say that our end goal is for that to happen. But we’re not at that historical time yet. We’re trying to counter the invisibility and thinking that we’ve arrived at a point that we haven’t yet arrived at. It would be great to think that if we were going to do the top 20 films of recent years in 10 years time, then it would be a given that there would be black stars and stars from other backgrounds who would be part of that discussion.

The other thing you touched on in your blog post was the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’. Given that this is such a live issue at the moment, could you expand on your views?

The issues of cultural appropriation, I guess, are around people voyeuristically borrowing elements of a culture which isn’t their own and then not respecting that culture or its symbols and playing with them – robbing them of their substance, meaning and context. For me personally, I think one has to be quite careful with those arguments and really think through what it is that we’re anxious about or struggling with, and what it is that we think is permissible and healthy. Musicians, artists and creators of all kinds borrow work and are inspired across the board. Black music borrows from what it can find. It’s a post-modernist gloop. And in many ways, black culture – for want of a better word – has  been a pioneer of post-modernist borrowing – especially if we’re thinking of hip-hop, for example. Jazz is an art form that originates as an African-American rubric but very quickly is also defined and shaped by other ethnic groups. At the very point of the origination of cultural forms, we have a communication and a dialogue with other cultures. So the danger is to put us back into some unreal space, which can be quite fascistic.

In saying that, I think there is a concern, which is quite justifiable, around some things which do have a particular meaning in a particular context. It’s not that one can’t borrow, but it’s thinking about what that context is, what that meaning is, being aware of its point of cultural origination. There’s also a distinction to be made, I think, between people who create culture and how culture is consumed – and also the brokers, the producers, those who see one face as more marketable than another. They may decide that it’s easier to sell a young white girl singing r’n’b than it is to sell another black performer. However, I think it’s quite problematic then to suggest that the young white girl performer is culturally appropriating. I think people are just inspired. So concerns about cultural appropriation need to focus much more clearly on what it is we’re concerned with. The reason why I mentioned it is that it’s going to make people wary of whether or not they’re appropriating or disrespecting the culture of others and how they can enjoy or comment on it, and I think that sort of wariness isn’t helpful to anyone.

You’re being very polite and diplomatic. Shouldn’t the bottom line be that we should be strive to avoid imposing any creative restrictions on artists?

Yes. But we should also be clear whether it’s the artists we have the issue with or whether it’s the media or the producers. The ideas of bankability and commodification are real concerns.

But it’s still OK to chuckle at white kids with dreadlocks, isn’t it?

He he. Erm, I personally don’t lose sleep over white kids with dreadlocks. I’ve heard this discussion quite a lot. The sad irony for me is that the baseline of Celtic dreads/Rasta dreads, whatever they are, is a fundamental idea of an alternative life. If white kids having dreads is really helping them to think and question the space that’s given to us – you’ve got to think like this, you’ve got to look like that, these are the values that are salient in society and other values don’t exist – then I say good on ya!

Read more: Prince plays the Colston Hall (kind of)