On demand: "Is That Black Enough for You?!?"

Subtitled How One Decade Forever Changed the Movies (and Me), Is That Black Enough for You?!? is the eminent US film critic Elvis Mitchell's cine-memoir of growing up in parallel with the blaxsploitation movies of the 1970s. The films under observation were cheap, trashy, often nasty - they weren't always there to make nice, and some even divided Black audiences - but as Mitchell drily observes, they were also energised, far more in touch with wider social trends and shifts than much of the era's studio product, a liberation of some haphazard kind from what had come before. An early montage deals briskly with that backstory: decades of flatly racist stereotypes, white writer-director-producer-stars (of whom Olivier and Orson Welles were merely the most prominent) who thought it perfectly natural to don blackface, Black careers that went mishandled, obscured, obliterated. In its place, Mitchell offers a vibrant parade of Black faces and bodies, seen in everything from glitzy, hyper-expensive mainstream musicals to obscure, quasi-experimental, YouTube-sourced curios. To bolster his thesis, he adds interviews with contemporary Black talent - from the overlooked Charles Burnett to the never more visible Zendaya - who benefitted from these sudden eruptions or redirections of creative energy; these esteemed and illustrious talking heads chattily and candidly address what they themselves have been looking for on screen all these years, and some explain why they haven't quite found it yet. The title, which comes from the theme song to 1970's prime blaxsploitationer Cotton Comes to Harlem, becomes the mantra Mitchell applies to the hundred or so titles that fall under his gaze and ours, another way of asking "does it do us justice?" (In a way the old studio takes on Black life more often than not didn't.)

The editorial approach isn't dissimilar to Mark Cousins' recent compendium films: first person, close-to-the-mic narration, with idiosyncratic turns of phrase that reveal the author's own interests and biases. (My impression was that Mitchell is more of a Sweet Sweetback than a Shaft guy, possibly as the former demands careful critical handling - but he also sees how both films were instrumental in the repositioning and reshaping of the Black screen protagonist.) The clips, which speak to a lifetime of wide-ranging viewing, run the gamut and should in themselves be enough to pull any cinephile in: 1940s zombie movies, where the role of the Black comic support was to roll their eyes and run screaming offscreen; recently rediscovered countercultural artefacts (1968's Uptight and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One); even Robert Downey Jr.'s ironised blackface in 2008's Tropic Thunder. It is, granted, somewhat ironic in itself to be watching Mitchell's film on Netflix, whose library of pre-2000 titles is patchy at best. Wouldn't it be great to double-bill Is That Black Enough for You?!? with 1973's Cleopatra Jones, or 1974's Uptown Saturday Night? Still, the arguments being made hold: the leads in 1964's Nothing But a Man should have enjoyed longer and vastly more successful careers, and something was very definitely going on in the Black cinema of the 1970s, even if it had to creep into view from the movies' indier fringes (1968's Night of the Living Dead) and got sent back there once Rocky Balboa replaced Muhammad Ali as America's favourite fighter and the Bee Gees repurposed the essentially Black sound of disco. After the Seventies, American movies got whiter again, and it took several more decades to course-correct.

Formally, Mitchell's film is rather foursquare, almost exactly how you'd convert a textbook or reference guide into images: it proceeds year by year, almost month by month, highlighting notable titles with a few minutes of commentary from either the director or his guest stars. If it's sometimes a little clipped in itself, that's surely because its maker was hustling to get in as much as he possibly could, but generally there's a nice, jazzy flow to these 135 minutes, and those films that did make the final cut are grabby, diverting and largely unfamiliar because undercirculated: the legacy problems of 1974 are also those of 2024. The aim appears no greater and no lesser than assembling a canon, but it's a far more extensive canon than you might have guessed from the handful of scratchy Super Fly knock-offs, and Mitchell addends those useful sidebars and footnotes that are the mark of the best critical endeavours. (Call them areas for further research.) I had no idea that The Wire's Glynn Turman, a graduate of blaxsploitation (via 1975's Cooley High) showed up in a Bergman movie around the same time (1977's The Serpent's Egg), and whatever your shade, it's hard not to be stirred by the sight of Harry Belafonte, in one of his final screen appearances before his death last year, recalling his defiant response to one of the corporate film business's drearier ultimatums: "Fuck it, I'm going to Paris." That's the spirit.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? is currently streaming on Netflix.