Black is Not a Genre

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series hosted by Graham Cumberbatch highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre.

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Episodes

Black Is Not A Genre: Horror

There’s hardly any film genre more intrinsically allegorical than horror. If social borders, both conscious and unconscious, along acceptance and exclusion, empathy and revulsion, good and evil, are dictated by the mass projection of society’s fears onto whomever threatens its norms, then horror is the exaggerated projection of its basest, most grotesque imaginations around those boundaries onto the silver screen. While the human rights analogy of the Living Dead series and the Cold War nihilism...

Aug 31, 2020•1 hr 57 min•Season 1Ep. 4

Black Is Not A Genre: Musicals

This week we look at musicals with Jazmyne Moreno, programmer of the Lates series at Austin Film Society. Much of what we think of as the aesthetic of the modern musical evolved from a long history of co-opting Black musical and performative styles and gentrifying them for white audiences. In that context, Spike Lee’s second feature film School Daze (1988) is transgressive on two frons. For one, it wrested creative control back from genre tradition that had largely erased the influence of Blackn...

Aug 23, 2020•2 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 3

Black Is Not a Genre: Magical Realism

Kathleen Collins said, “No one is going to mythologize my life. No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences, neither outside nor inside.” — For Week 6 of Black Is Not A Genre, we’re talking magical realism with another landmark double-dip, featuring Kathleen Collins’ ethereal Black intellectual relationship drama Losing Ground (1982) and Kasi Lemmons’ dark, ancestral mystery, Eve’s Bayou (1997). Featured guest: Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich is the wr...

Aug 16, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 2

Black is Not a Genre: Coming-of-Age Films

We’re kicking off August with the coming-of-age classic The Wood (1999). Directed by Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, Dope, The Mandalorian) and starring a who’s-who of young Black It girls and boys of the late ’90s and early aughts, The Wood was the seventh film produced by MTV Films and part of a barnstorming spate of four movies released by the newly formed studio that year alone. Black coming-of-age films, outside of the so-called “homeboy” canon, were sparse before this era and seem to have rece...

Aug 08, 2020•2 hr 12 min•Season 2Ep. 1

Black Is Not a Genre: Thrillers

When it comes to filmmaking, there’s modesty and then there’s Carl Franklin. The Bay-Area-bred actor cum director, screenwriter, and producer, who once said of thrillers, “that’s not my forté,” is one of the genre’s most eloquent, if reluctant savants. Featuring star turns from the likes of Denzel, Don Cheadle, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bill Paxton, Franklin’s films are as criminally under-seen as they are brimming with craft. For Week 4 of Black Is Not A Genre, we’ll be celebrating a double featu...

Jul 31, 2020•2 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 4

Black Is Not a Genre: Rom-Coms

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 the Black films into a commercial monol...

Jul 24, 2020•1 hr 58 min•Season 1Ep. 3

Black Is Not a Genre: Sci-Fi

Jul 17, 2020•2 hr•Season 1Ep. 2

Black Is Not a Genre: Camp

Jul 10, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 1

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