Killers Of The
Flower Moon;
Steven Yeun in
Beef;
1915’s
The Birth Of
ANation; The Jazz
Singer;
Directors Ava DuVernay and
Jonathan Glazer.
SELF-CONFIDENCE IS not a quality that the movie biz typically lacks. From bombastic trailers to back-slapping award ceremonies, movie people —God love ’em —are the kind who never think too small, nor underestimate their own ability to save the world. Yet when it comes to one particular humanity-threatening crisis —racism —thinking too small is exactly what’s gone wrong.
I started writing Screen Deep, a book about anti-racism and screen storytelling, during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, and it became clear that race has never been far from the screen’s surface. It’s there in such brilliant-but-quite-racist-actually milestones as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of ANation and The Jazz Singer. Racial anxieties are present in your dad’s favourite old sitcoms —Till Death Us Do Part, Fawlty Towers —but also in yours: 30 Rock and Peep Show have both featured blackface. Yet it wasn’t until #OscarsSoWhite started trending in 2015 that the industry’s self-reflection began in earnest.