The indelible Duane Jones! Tonight @ BAM. NotLD was on just about a week ago and we had just seen Jones in Losing Ground where he is so debonair, funny and charming. The recorded interview below suggests resonances to his performance as a distinguished but under-recognized, gentleman actor--rather down at heel--the type (Am I being typecast?) that John Barrymore made his specialty later in his Hollywood career.
Hopefully Ganja & Hess will screen somewhere soon...soon...
via Backstage/Matt Doyle
On a Facebook troll/scroll I saw this sweet, short film on the Atlantic.com website. Michael K. Williams wonders aloud:
"Am I being typecast?" For actors of color “typecasting” tends to suggest stereotypical rather than archetypal characters. The effects that performing mis- or problematic representations have on the career choices, training, talent and inner lives of the actor (and of the people they work to enact as characters) underlie and animate movie-making comedies like Hollywood Shuffle (1987), the humorous UCB skit: Be Blacker, so many of Key and Peele’s code-switching sketches, as well as more incendiary media critiques like Spike Lee's Bamboozled. Films such as The Help, in this light, are complicated boils that need to be lanced.
Williams(and I’m looking for the production credits), thoughtfully untangles these complex questions with subtlety, self-deprecation and warm regard for his "peeps".
By Film Comment on February 26, 2016
Throughout the ongoing discussion of diversity at the Oscars and in Hollywood at large—the types of films that get made, and who gets to make them—a longer historical view is often absent, or limited in its scope. In the hopes of fostering a deeper and broader appreciation of performances, and honoring those who have come before, FILM COMMENT arranged a discussion about overlooked and underappreciated black actors. In early February, Digital Editor Violet Lucca was joined by Ashley Clark, film critic and author of the book Facing Blackness (and this fine FC article on James Baldwin); and Ina Archer, co-chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund for New York Film and Television, longtime FILM COMMENT contributor, and video artist, to tackle this topic. Over the course of an hour, questions of what could’ve been—and how old and layered this problem is—repeatedly crop up. The transcript of their conversation is linked above.
I was pleased to write a feature article on Fences for
Excerpt:
The minimal use of cinematic space and time exemplifies the layered metaphors of Fences, the gradual building of which organizes the action of the play, keeping the family members in and others out. But at key moments, especially in a bit of magic realism near the end, the POV soars beyond the home. The camera elegantly frames the actors as they declaim, becoming an unseen third player in their scenes, assisted by the exceptional sound recording and editing. The extras (local residents in period costumes) that populate the street scenes could have stepped out of the home movies and pictures of Charles "Teenie" Harris, the African American Hill District photographer whose work comprises a rare archive of images of the social world of Pittsburgh’s black communities. The art direction overall features layered surfaces, hues and textures of peeling paint, brick walls, leaves and brush and crisscrossed lines of hanging laundry that evokes the artwork of another Pittsburger, the painter and collagist Romare Bearden, who was a seminal influence on Wilson. (continued below)
After seeing a book of Bearden's works (The Prevalence of Ritual, 1977), Wilson felt that he was “looking at himself.” He wrote: “What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exulted its presence. It was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience… In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and sought and still aspire to make my plays the equal of his canvases.” The critic Joan Fishman has compared Wilson’s improvisatory sounding dialogue to Bearden’s assemblaged images: “one hears . . . the repartee of jazz in the carefully orchestrated quick dialogue exchanges.”
You talkin to me??
Yes I am! And you can read more in the January/February issue of
Film Comment on sale now!