28 Days, 28 Films
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February 16th, 2018 saw the release of Black Panther, the first Marvel superhero movie with a black director, Ryan Coogler. One month later, Selma director Ava DuVernay's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time became the first live-action, $100 million budget film directed by a woman of color. At the 90th Academy Awards, Jordan Peele, became the fifth African-American to receive a Best Director nomination and won the Best Original Screenplay for Get Out. One year prior to this Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In observance of Black History Month, in 2018, top New York Times film critics complied a list of films that highlight the overall history of Black Americans in cinema. While looking to the future, 28 Days, 28 Films celebrates the journey so far. Explore these celebrated films, available via the Film & Video Collection, below.
28 Films to explore during Black History Month
Black and Tan; St. Louis BluesBlack and Tan (1929) -- Film debut of Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra performing as a jazz band.
St. Louis Blues (1929) -- Features some of the only known footage of "Empress of the Blues" Bessie Smith.
Cotton Comes to HarlemPublication Date: 1970St. Jacques is Coffin Ed Johnson and Cambridge is Gravedigger Jones, black cops who suspect preacher Lockhart's back-to-Africa campaign is a swindle. Neatly combines action and comedy.
Daughters of the DustPublication Date: 1991Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk ways were maintained well into the twentieth century and was one of the last bastions of these mores in America.
The Defiant OnesPublication Date: 1958Two convicts escaping from a Southern work gang discover that they are bound together by an unbreakable iron chain and separated by a hatred for each other. In order to elude capture they must overcome their hostility.
Devil in a Blue DressPublication Date: 1995Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a decorated war hero who returns home to work as a private eye. His job of finding a missing socialite puts him between the white power elite and the vibrant black community of Central Avenue. As soon as Easy and his trigger-happy friend Mouse find Daphne Monet, trouble follows.
Dirty Gertie from Harlem, USAPublication Date: 1946After cheating on her boyfriend, Gertie, a seductive dancer, leaves Harlem and finds works at a Caribbean resort -- but serious trouble is brewing in paradise.
Ganja & HessPublication Date: 1973An archaeologist is stabbed with an ancient dagger that gives him immortality and an insatiable thirst for blood, which he then shares with his assistant's wife, and the two of them form a troubled partnership.
Hell-Bound TrainPublication Date: 1930Divided into vignettes, this film turns on the Devil — a masked figure with horns and a cape — driving a train teeming with wickedness with each train car revealing another sin.
House PartyPublication Date: 1990Written and directed by Reginald Hudlin and based on his award-winning Harvard University student film, this cult classic features 80s hip-hop duo Kid 'N Play planning the house party to end all house parties.
I am SomebodyPublication Date: 1970Live film coverage of a successful hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1969. Shows the crucial help of Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Coretta Scott King in organizing demonstrations in support of the workers, mostly black women.
Imitation of LifePublication Date: 1934Two single mothers join together to form a successful business, but find that material success does nothing to stabilize their personal lives.
Intruder in the DustPublication Date: 1949In a small Mississippi town, only a young boy and an old woman stand between an innocent black man and a lynch mob.
The Jackie Robinson StoryPublication Date: 1950In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play modern Major League Baseball. Three years later, he played himself in this biographical drama.
Killer of SheepPublication Date: 1977An African-American slaughterhouse worker searches for tiny moments of beauty in his predominantly bleak life.
The Learning TreePublication Date: 1969Set in 1920s Kansas, the film traces one year in the life of young Newt, in which he learns about love, fear, racial injustice, and his own capacity for honor.
Losing GroundPublication Date: 1982The story of a marriage of two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives. Sara, a black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest to understand 'ecstasy' just as her painter husband Victor sets off on a more earthly exploration of joy.
Malcolm XPublication Date: 1992Imagines the life of Malcolm X, who through his religious conversion to Islam, found the strength to rise up from a criminal past to become an influential civil rights leader.
ShadowsPublication Date: 1959The relationship between Leila, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia's darker-skinned brother, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.
She's Gotta Have ItPublication Date: 1986A statuesque and charismatic woman is trying to figure out what she wants in life. She has a good job as a commercial artist and designer, a spacious Brooklyn apartment, and three boyfriends. Each of them is far from her ideal man, but each fulfills a different need for her.
Show BoatPublication Date: 1936Based on the 1927 Kern and Hammerstein musical, this is the story of Magnolia, a showboat star, who falls for Gaylord, a charming riverboat gambler.
Stormy WeatherPublication Date: 1943Bill, a struggling performer, meets a beautiful vocalist and promises her that they will be together after he becomes a success. After they both skyrocket to fame and lose contact, Bill gets one more chance to woo her at a huge musical stage show. Popular entertainers of the 1940s, including Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, perform as themselves in the film.
Stir CrazyPublication Date: 1980Two zany drifters are mistakenly sent to prison for a robbery they didn't commit. They must rely on their wits in order to survive a sadistic warden, a hulking mass-murderer and worst of all, the inter-prison rodeo.
The Story of a Three Day PassPublication Date: 1968The story of an African-American soldier stationed in Europe and the racism he encounters from his fellow soldiers following his idyllic three-day affair with a young white woman.
SymbiopsychotaxiplasmPublication Date: 1968Director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. This wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.
Tongues UntiedPublication Date: 1989In an experimental amalgam of rap music, street poetry, documentary film, and dance, a gay African-American man expresses what it is like to be gay and black in the United States.
The Watermelon WomanPublication Date: 1996Cheryl, a young black woman in a video store, is making a documentary about an obscure black actress from the 1930's. When she discovers that the actress (known as "the Watermelon Woman") had a white lesbian lover, Cheryl just happens to fall in love with a very cute white woman herself.
Within Our GatesPublication Date: 1920In this early silent film from pioneering director Oscar Micheaux, kindly Sylvia Landry takes a fundraising trip to Boston to keep a Southern school for impoverished black children open to the public. When she returns to the South with her new beau, Sylvia's shocking, tragic past is exposed.
Zora Neale Hurston: Footwork FootagePublication Date: 1928In the 1920s, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston began incorporating film into her ethnographic fieldwork, shooting more than a dozen reels in the South.
