Introduction

Bradford Young’s work seeks a visual aesthetics of black care. He is very conscious of working in a medium that has not been historically amicable to black subjects both in theory and in practice, and is committed to breaking this careless cycle. If as a cinematographer, what you see through the viewfinder is a stereotype, he has said, then change the lens.  Decolonizing the lens worked to restore the exonerated five’s dignity and create intimate moments of palpable empathy.

Consistently, his visual art of black care is an intentional articulation of values and concerns that express his sensibility and specific location in relation to filmmaking as an artform and an industry. Among them, there is the practice of strategically under-exposing black skin so that it can resonate with its own shine –a practice that builds on the legacy of studies in sensitometry began with Clark, Caldwell, Jafa and Dash, among others– or a distinct comfort with “playing in the dark” he learned from Roy DeCarava, one of the still photographers he admires the most.

liquid blackness in Conversation with Bradford Young

Research

Our approach to studying Young and his work, focused on artistic lineages as a form of black care. Studying at Howard University under Haile Gerima, the acclaimed director of both experimental and militant films such as Bush Mama (1975), Ashes and Embers (1982), and Sankofa (1993), Bradford Young is a critical contemporary voice in a lineage of artists and filmmakers such as Ernest Dickerson, Arthur Jafa , and Malik Sayeed, who are similarly invested in producing if not a black aesthetics, at least what Young calls a “black intentionality,” i.e. an image-making practice that is always explicit about coming from, expressing, and leading back to blackness.

Similarly to many of the visual artists he claims as part of this lineage –not only those who were directly trained by Gerima but also those with whom Gerima worked and experimented with at UCLA such as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Ben Caldwell and Julie Dash among others—he too holds black music, and jazz in particular, as the pinnacle of black artistic achievement as well as a model of art-making that is at the same time a way of practicing new forms of sociality.

Lineage

Haile Gerima

Bradford Young describes Haile Gerima as not only a critical and influential figure in the formation of his own style and ethos, but as central to the last forty years of black film aesthetics, having trained some of Spike Lee’s seminal cinematographers, such Ernest Dickerson and Malik Hassan Sayeed, experimental filmmaker Arthur Jafa, and contemporary black filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay and Andrew Dosnumu. As one of the key filmmakers in the group of UCLA graduates that was later described as the L.A. Rebellion , Gerima understood his filmmaking as part of a process of mental decolonization; in other words, filmmaking form and style are, in his view, always tools towards the pursuit of freer forms of seeing and being in the world. Having come to study in the US from Ethiopia, brought an African diasporic sensibility to bear on Gerima’s political investments and visual language in producing foundational works such as Bush Mama, Ashes and Embers, and Sankofa.

Beginning in 1975, Haile Gerima became a professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University, the only historically black college with a graduate film program. Gerima brought together the work of African diaspora filmmakers, such as Ousmane Sembene, and his fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmakers Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, and Ben Caldwell, making a claim to a black filmic tradition and one in tension if not explicitly at odds with the mainstream film industry. As Gerima says in an interview with the Washington Post, which reflects on the legacy of his pedagogy, “We try to prepare them and keep talking about the disconnects, especially in motion pictures and on top of that being African Americans, so that when they go out into the world, at least they won’t shortchange themselves in the way they should perform the tasks they happen to be in.”

Gerima cultivated and trained a group of cinematographers and directors that have defined black film aesthetics since the 1980s. Dickerson’s floating, flowing camera became a hallmkark of Spike Lee’s visual style since their early collaboration in She’s Gotta Have It (1986) through Malcolm X (1992). Sayeed is responsible for the distinctive cinematography of Clockers (1995), Girl 6 (1996), and He Got Game (1998). And Arthur Jafa, who worked with Spike Lee on Crooklyn (1994) and Julie Dash on Daughters of the Dust (1991) to create an early attempt at his concept of “black visual intonation,” continued the lineage of the L.A. Rebellion in producing new aesthetic forms that would more adequately respond to the exigencies and specificities of black lives.

Haile Gerima Filmography

Teza (2008)
Adwa (1999)
Imperfect Journey (1994)
Sankofa (1993)
After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985)
Ashes and Embers (1982)
Wilmington 10 — U.S.A. 10,000 (1979)
Bush Mama (1979)
Harvest: 3,000 (1976)
Child of Resistance (1973), short film
Hour Glass (1971), short film

For more on Haile Gerima, see the Winter 2013 Spring issue of Black Camera, volume 4, no. 2, Close-up: TEZA

In particular Greg Thomas’s, “Close-Up: On Teza, Cinema, and American Empire: An Interview with Haile Gerima,” where Gerima states:

One of the most amazing things about Charlie Burnett is how much he would resurrect inner-city kids’ talent through his movies. That’s like Paulo Freire innovation! The sister who did the sound for Bush Mama, Beneva Jackson, he trained her! She was fourteen or fifteen years old! The talent of Black people, the actors, et cetera, who gave us so much energy, with- out them our films wouldn’t exist. The cinematographer for Bush Mama, Roderick Young—America was not ready to take him. He shot Passing Through with Larry Clark, too. Charlie shot some of Bush Mama, but the majority is Roderick Young, whom they disillusioned because in Hollywood he had no opportunity. He was a brilliant cinematographer, an energetic and firebrand cinematographer. When you talk about Ernie Dickerson, A. J. [Arthur Jafa], Malik [Hassan Sayeed], and Spike Lee, I traced them all back to Roderick Young because they saw all of these early Black films he shot. (102)

See also:

Belachew, T. “Close-Up: The Genius of an African Storyteller: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of Work on and by Haile Gerima.” Black Camera, vol. 4 no. 2, 2013, pp. 144-162. 

Field, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. La Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Univ of California Press, 2015.

Malik Hassan Sayeed

Lemonade (2016), dir. Beyonce Knowles Carter, Kahili Joseph, Todd Tourso
The Reflektor Tapes (2015), dir. Kahlil Joseph
Dreams are Colder than Death (2014), dir. Arthur Jafa
Belly (1998), dir. Hype Williams
He Got Game (1998), dir. Spike Lee
Girl 6 (1996), dir. Spike Lee
Clockers (1995), dir. Spike Lee
See also here

Ernest Dickerson

Double Play (2017)
The Wire (2003-2008), six episodes
Our America (2000)
Juice (1992)
Malcolm X (1992), dir. Spike Lee
Jungle Fever (1991), dir. Spike Lee
Mo’ Better Blues (1990), dir. Spike Lee
Do the Right Thing (1989), dir. Spike Lee
School Daze (1988), dir. Spike Lee
She’s Gotta Have It (1986), dir. Spike Lee

Also see Arthur Jafa