Jeff Wray’s must-see film list digs deeper into nuances of African American life

There’s a downside to the growing list of “Black film lists” popping up in the spring and summer of 2020.

“A lot of it is serving the white audience, saying, ‘This is the Black perspective. This is what you need to look out for,’” film scholar Jeff Wray said. “I totally reject that.”

When he sits down to watch a movie, what grabs Wray, a professor of African-American literature and culture at MSU, is the same thing that motivates him as a writer and filmmaker.

“I’m interested in just presenting Black life, without necessarily thinking in terms of white audiences,” he said.

Wray’s list of “films to see” rockets beyond the polar opposites of noble Sidney Poitier characters from the ’50s and ’60s and low-down Blaxploitation images from the ’70s.

To mold a film, or draw up a list of films to see, based on the “image” of Black life it presents to white people is, for Wray, an artistic dead end.

His own 2014 film, “The Evolution of Bert,” nominated for an Ebert Award at the Chicago International Film Festival, follows a Black college student’s everyday travails, from breaking up with his girlfriend to wrangling with a professor over grades

Near the top of Wray’s list of great Black films is Charles Burnett’s 1978 “Killer of Sheep,” a non-narrative mosaic of working-class life in Watts, Los Angeles, shot for $10,000 over two years’ worth of weekends. The film has drawn comparisons to Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes and Italian neo-realists like De Sica and Rosselini, but Burnett’s dream-like vision is completely his own.

“It’s the most beautiful film about life, struggles, relationships,” he said. “It’s a film that ain’t trying to explain nothing to you in terms of Black life. It’s about life.”

Another of Wray’s all-time favorites is a stunning 1990 film by Michigan filmmaker Wendell Harris Jr., “Chameleon Street,” available on Amazon Prime. It’s the true story of a Detroit con man and high school dropout, William Douglas Street, Jr., who breaks out of his dead-end life by pretending to be a reporter, a lawyer and even a surgeon. The scene where Street performs a hysterectomy after consulting a medical book in a bathroom stall is a queasy mix of comedy and horror.

Street is funny, charming and intellectually superior to everyone around him, but his boredom with life corrodes his emotional life and clouds his moral sense.

“This character is flawed and we go on this journey with him,” Wray said.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, film scholar Racquel Gates of the City University of New York cautioned that the recent spate of “Black films to see” lists are “performative nods to blackness” packed with films that “deliver Black pain for white consumption.” (Wray tweeted Gates, thanking her for writing the essay.)

What is more, the delivery is not always welcome. Many white film lovers, whether they admit it or not, watch the films on these lists out of a sense of duty or guilt. Lost in the middle is the pure joy of finding brilliant, original movies that delve into life on the creator’s singular terms.

Wray echoed Toni Morrison’s lament in her 1975 speech, “A Humanist’s View,” that racism “keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

“She said that Russian literature is not great because it’s trying to explain Russian life to Americans, or to black folks,” Wray said. “She loves the specificity of it, and out of that, she can grab this broadly human thing.”

Another “very underrated” indie gem on Wray’s must-see list is “Night Catches Us,” a 2010 film directed by Tanya Hamilton, starring Anthony Mackie.

Via flashback, the story peels back layers of generational change and racial politics to portray the emotional lives of ’60s Black Panther activists. Hamilton said in interviews about the film that she wanted to “add to the conversation about people of color” by making a film “about Black people just being people.”

“Night Catches Us” would make a strong double feature with another of Wray’s favorites, “Black Power Mixtape,” available on Amazon Prime. Rather than a sensationalistic documentary full of activists brandishing weapons and shaking fists, the 2011 film is a compilation of 16mm film clips of Black Power movement leaders caught in intimate and unguarded moments by a visiting Swedish film crew.

Wray also includes films by white film-makers in his MSU film course, most notably “The Landlord,” by Hal Ashby, director of “Harold and Maude,” “Being There” and other offbeat classics.

“The Landlord” features Beau Bridges as a privileged, clueless white landlord who has no idea what kind of life his Black tenants lead.

Wray said that in films like “The Landlord” and Norman Jewison’s “A Soldier’s Story,” white directors do a creditable job depicting the “Black male psyche.”

“When I show ‘A Soldier’s Story,’ that’s the kind of discussion we have in class,” Wray said. “I don’t want to make my students comfortable by saying that only Black people should be making this stuff.”

Other films on Wray’s must-see list are the culty, experimental 1973 vampire film “Ganja & Hess,” available on YouTube; the 1972 drama “Sounder,” which Wray called “quiet and almost perfect;” and the gritty 1964 Harlem gang drama “The Cool World,” directed by Shirley Clarke (no relation to the Ralph Bakshi animated film).

Wray also has a soft spot for the 1934 “weepie” melodrama “Imitation of Life,” about a young Black woman's attempt to "pass" for white.

With its dated language and references to race and gender, “Imitation of Life” needs, as the scholars like to put it, “contextualization” in 2020, but Wray is happy to provide it.

“Students think, ‘I don’t know if this is appropriate,’” Wray said. “It presented itself as progressive in the 1930s, but it’s a beautiful, emotional mess and we always have strong discussions around it.”

Wray knows all too well that making a movie, unlike writing a short story or a poem, costs money, and that leads to commercial pressures. He is applying for a $2 million grant from Sundance for his next project, "Eclipse," about a teenage boy coming of age in a small Ohio town amid local tragedy and national unrest. He's resisting what he calls "the white man on my shoulder."

“As strong creatively and artistically as I may think I am, I find that creeping into my head,” he said. “Will the white audience get it? No. Just tell your story and put it out there.”