There are often projects whose complexity and importance I find difficult to fathom. How does one, for instance, distill the history of Black film into 100 titles? How does one define “Black” separately and in conjunction with “film”? Should a movie be helmed by a Black director to be considered a Black work? What about movies with majority Black casts but whose protagonist is white? What if the film hails from a part of the diaspora that doesn’t view itself as Black? With his latest book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, programmer and author Ashley Clark has given himself the challenging task of answering those questions in a comprehensive, lovingly crafted survey that celebrates and illuminates the multifaceted rhythms, voices, and stories cinematically derived from Black life.
Clark’s book, designed by Alexander Boxill Design and published via the London-based Laurence King, is an aesthetically attractive work. The bright green cover, which features a black and white image of Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Ousmane Sembène’s landmark film “Black Girl” (1966) teases the temporal and geographic possibilities of an overview that begins with the American silent “Lime Kiln Field Day,” which was filmed 53 years before Sembène’s film in 1913, and concludes with the British period piece “Blitz,” which was released 58 years after “Black Girl” in 2024. The other works in between these trio of films inspire further narratives to be gleaned regarding the rare surviving examples of early Black filmmaking, the rise of Black stories out of Africa, and the seeming deluge, at least compared with cinema’s pre-classical era, of contemporary Black moviemaking.
These narratives sprout organically and cohesively due to Clark’s impressive expertise as a programmer, researcher, and writer. Born in South London, Clark has curated film seasons at London’s BFI Southbank, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox. He also served as the director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where his distinguished series Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema re-introduced a bevy of underseen of Black films from around the world. He has also previously published the monograph Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.
Clark is currently the Curatorial Director at the Criterion Collection. The latter’s library of films, which was once critiqued for lacking Black filmmakers, has, under Clark, expanded to include works ranging from festival favorites like “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” to Blaxploitation classics like “Buck and the Peacher” to rediscoveries, such as “Compensation” and “Drylongso.”
Those experiences are on incredible display here, particularly in how he chose what to highlight and why. As he writes in the book’s introduction, giving the project some rules was necessary. The author opted to restrict himself to a single entry per filmmaker, and included selections from films that center the Black experience but are by non-Black directors. He also doesn’t limit his project to feature films either, spotlighting shorts, hybrid movies, and even a web series to sit alongside narrative features and documentaries.
Moreover, Clark makes the daring decision to include works that are only available in archives. That last choice might strike some as odd: Why write about movies no one can see? Clark does so, one would guess, because to not write about them would constitute an erasure in itself, resulting in a grave subtraction from one’s understanding of the evolution of Black film. Also, oftentimes, writing about films allows them to be seen. Not just in a contemporary sense of recognition, but as well as putting them on a radar for future restoration, which could open the door for possible programming.
The reason all of these disparate films work as a larger fabric within this book is because of Clark’s relaxed yet detailed writing, which attends to “Nothing But a Man” and “Madea Goes to Jail” with equal thoughtfulness. His reflective words are matched with a vibrant array of stills, making each page turn feel like a sacred meeting between the reader and a crucial truth.
The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films was released in UK on February 12 and the US on February 17.
We thank Ashley Clark and copyright holder Laurence King for permission to print this excerpt.
