LBCC Black History Month Speaker Examines Black Cinema

“You tell the story of the man, not just what happened to him,” Linn-Benton instructor Jasmine LaRue said of Black cinema.

During Black History Month, weekly seminars are held in the LBCC Equity Center. The seminars feature Black instructors discussing, educating and celebrating this history with students and staff alike. On Feb. 11, LaRue took the spotlight on a panel to discuss the history and significance of the Black film industry.

LaRue, who teaches writing and film studies at LBCC, worked in the film industry advertising for and working on films for two-and-a-half decades on a number of high-profile films. The ideological point of conjuncture at the end of the seminar was LaRue’s mentality of ancestral struggles (from those that endured the unthinkable in any stage of American slavery to those in the early Black film industry) being the biggest motivation to push onward.

“They had to believe hook, line and sinker in what they were doing, having everyone tell them they couldn’t do it and they shouldn’t do it, ‘That’s not the way the world works,’ ” LaRue said, “It’s an everlasting endeavor, if you’re going to be in a place of giving up, well my ancestors never gave up.” 

The history of the Black film industry is one of resilience, beginning from miles behind the starting line – early depictions of African American people in motion pictures were white actors portraying negative caricatures in blackface. Slowly but surely film became one of the many tools used to rebel and, in the words of LaRue, "redefine.”   

“Storytelling is not only vital, but it is required. Throughout history there has been the ‘defined’ and the ‘definer,’ ” LaRue said. “Black cinema is a group of people stepping out of the definition put on them.”

In the middle of the 20th century, filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux and William Alexander made independent films that portrayed Black Americans more realistically, setting the stage for what could be possible.

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s “blaxploitation allowed Black men to step into the leading, hero roles in movies,” according to LaRue. 

Throughout the late ’80s and ’90s, the commonly accepted most popular wave of Black cinema came, movies such as “Boyz ’n’ the Hood,” “Menace II Society,” “Juice” and more are "quintessential because they depict the end of the Black experience, when the oppressor sees what the oppressed culture is becoming,” LaRue said. “These movies were coming out at the same time as the crack epidemic, then the war on drugs, the three-strike rule, men being taken out of communities.”

LaRue explained that nowadays it is exceedingly convenient for any individual to produce films, but that Black cinema remains overlooked and underfunded. 

Although there are many Black producers making award-winning films centered around African-American or African stories, Ryan Coogler being today’s biggest example, the professor stated almost all of the studios producing major movies are owned by rich white men, which studies fully support. A 2020 UCLA study on diversity in Hollywood showed that leadership at 11 of the biggest studios were 82% male and 91% white.

Such a fact is exactly what makes the successes, especially recently, all the more impressive. 

Cinema tells stories, and the films produced and starred in by African-Americans throughout our nation's history tell the story of overcoming and enduring. 

“Black cinema has built a culture away from white gaze, if you worry what others are thinking of you, you won’t be your full authentic self,” LaRue said.