Brilliance Is All We Have: Black Filmmakers and the Fight for the Soul of America
The project:
Brilliance Is All We Have is a narrative history of Black filmmakers and Black self-definition in American cinema. Through deep reportage and research, it weaves together intimate, character-driven accounts of the construction of Black-American identity and the American idea in film after emancipation, from Oscar Micheaux in the era the medium was born, through the journeys of groundbreaking 21st century filmmakers including Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele.
From Brilliance Is All We Have:
The smell of bacon greeted Barry Jenkins at the Laxton house in San Francisco. He had moved from the makeshift bed under their stairs to a sublet in the Mission but still had the key. A two-bedroom apartment in the basement, recently vacated by James Laxton’s younger brother, served as official lodging for the crew of Medicine for Melancholy. When Jenkins could get the morning off from Banana Republic, he biked over to the Laxtons’ to plan the day’s shoot and fuel up on free breakfast and coffee. Laxton’s parents were movie people—his mother, Aggie Rodgers, was a costume designer who worked on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beetlejuice, and The Color Purple, for which she received an Academy Award nomination—and understood the particular poverty of a self-funded film shoot.
It was early November and the final stretch of shooting. Only a handful of tricky scenes remained. He hoped to have the film in the can by December 1st—the submissions deadline for the South by Southwest film festival. SXSW had recently distinguished itself as the epicenter of Mumblecore, an emerging American independent film movement championed by an online community of bloggers and critics. Like similar movements, Mumblecore had no formal definition or membership criteria but loosely described a number of aesthetically related films produced in roughly the same time period. The Mumblecore aesthetic was defined as much by what it wasn’t as what it was: understated, not spectacular; incidental rather than plot-driven; handcrafted rather than mass-produced. These were low-stakes dramas and comedies of manners, about pursuing a crush, as in Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, or going on a road trip, as in Mark and Jay Duplass’s The Puffy Chair, or intimacy in the internet age, as in Joe Swanberg’s LOL. Their protagonists—typically young, middle-class white people—were at a point in life that made them susceptible to what the writer Dennis Lim described in The New York Times as “quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight.” The performers, often first-time actors or friends of the filmmaker, seemed to be playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Critics often described the movies as the antithesis of the superhero pics and franchise byproducts that dominated at the box office: microbudget, gently bent films whose charm lay in their recognizable humanity.
Jenkins had read about Mumblecore with envy. He thought the name had it backwards—as with his beloved French New Wave, what had made these films successful was the clarity of the author’s voice. It energized him to see his generational peers making personal art and finding an audience. He wanted to join their ranks, and to speak for those he could see being written out of the narrative. White people didn’t have a monopoly on ennui. At Florida State, Jenkins had wondered whether people like him could make art films. At South by Southwest, he would prove they belonged at their center.
Reggie Ugwu is a culture reporter on staff for The New York Times whose work has been selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club Awards and anthologized in Best American Travel Writing. He earned a degree in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. Originally from Houston, TX, he lives in Brooklyn.
The grant jury: Reggie Ugwu’s Brilliance Is All We Have dramatizes the story of Black filmmaking and shows how it is also the story of race in America, with its progress and reversals. Ugwu makes an important historical intervention by connecting the early history of Black filmmaking to more recent developments, celebrating exceptional achievement, and mapping Black networks in the industry. Richly detailed narrative outstrips limitations of the profile form by contextualizing notable figures’ struggles and triumphs, all delivered in Ugwu’s snazzy prose. A long overdue book, both vital and necessary.