“You can probably get a sense of which films in this book I really love by the use of language,” Ashley Clark, Curatorial Director at Criterion, says of The World of Black Film, the expansive book he’s written about films and filmmakers from across the Black diaspora, which hits bookshelves this week via Hachette.
Clark isn’t wrong. His passion for the medium and its great artists illuminates this volume, which is shaped around a list of 100 Black films contextualized in a series of critical short essays by Clark, providing a lively and robust history of global Black filmmaking.
Films featured in the collection include David Schickele’s Bush Man (1971), Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins, Haile Germia’s Sankofa (1993), Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail (2009), and Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) — an eclectic mix of titles that cover the breadth of filmmaking styles with a similar robustness as Clark’s now popular work as a curator.
Born in South London, Clark is a writer, broadcaster, and film programmer. He’s now based in the U.S. and is perhaps best known for his four-year run as director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), during which he programmed highly influential series such as Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema, which reinvigorated discussion around many underseen world cinema gems that are now considered part of the canon.
Clark is now Curatorial Director at the Criterion Collection, where he has worked since 2020. He is the author of Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2015) and has organized film seasons at numerous international venues, including the BFI Southbank in London, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox. For the launch of The World of Black Film, Clark has also programmed a series at the BFI Southbank. Films set for the series include Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Med Hondo’s West Indies.
Below, Clark speaks with us at length about The World of Black Film and why he decided to pen the book, as well as his time at BAM, and his current work as Curatorial Director at Criterion.
The World of Black Film A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films is released on February 12.
DEADLINE: Ashley, I was surprised to read in your introductory essay that you’d never thought about writing a book.
ASHLEY CLARK: I’d never thought about writing a book about this specific subject. Producing one sweeping survey of Black film is a huge and somewhat intimidating task. So it was really a question of setting the guardrails, defining the scope, and taking a very specific approach. This project began in response to the pitch I received from the publisher, which came out of the blue. They asked whether I would be interested in writing a book about Black film. It was at that point that I decided it was time to refine the approach.
My thinking ultimately derived from my response to Slate and NPR’s new Black film canon project, which was an authoritative list of 50 films. It was increased in a second edition to the 75 greatest films by Black directors. It was a great list. And anything for me that amplifies and helps contextualize Black film is just a net positive. But the little thing that rankled with me was how American-focused it was. As someone of Black British and Caribbean heritage who has worked on several Black films from around the world, here at Criterion and at BAM, it felt like a good opportunity to make some links and present things with context and a flow.
DEADLINE: John Akomfrah’s foreword is wonderful. He writes so beautifully about his encounters with many of the filmmakers named in this collection. Why did you ask John to write the foreword, and did you give him a brief on what to write?
CLARK: John is someone I admire greatly. I’ve always found him to be extremely kind and thoughtful whenever I’ve interviewed him. He’s an extremely intelligent and erudite man. His personal history, coming from Ghana to the UK, is in line with the Pan-African spirit of the book. And then there’s all the work he’s done with the Black Audio Film Collective and beyond. He’s made films about Malcolm X and London. He’s made films about Afrofuturism and the African diaspora. Thematically, John felt like the right person to set the stage.
I did not give him a brief. I asked him if he would consider writing a foreword. It could be as long or as short as he wanted. And when this beautiful personal essay landed in my inbox, I was so stunned. It was so beautiful, and it set the stage so effectively. But it was also emotional, personal, and reflective. I could not be more grateful to John, and I could not have asked for a better foreword for the book.
DEADLINE: In the foreword, John makes a great point about how surprising it is to see the links between many of the films listed. I would never have thought Daughters of the Dust and Boyz n the Hood arrived in the same year. Did anything else surprise you during this process?
CLARK: Seeing the whole project laid out and discovering just how much African decolonization movements in the ’60s and beyond brought to the fore African filmmakers and filmmakers around the diaspora who were really stepping behind the camera for the first time and telling their stories. In a way, the book has some phases. It’s quite a spotted history to start with because there’s not much to work from. You have a lot of the history of race movies in the US. A lot of those films are unavailable, and you’re picking one or two crucial ones. You have Hollywood musicals and films that deal with race. But then it seems to kick into gear in the 60s, because you have filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène, Moustapha Alassane, and Djibril Diop Mambéty making incredible films about the postcolonial condition. And then you really see it kick on. That was really exciting for me.
DEADLINE: In the book, between 2018 and 2022, many of the films listed will probably be unfamiliar to most readers. Was that a conscious decision?
CLARK: I was grateful to have basically zero editorial pressure. There was no one whispering in my ear, asking me to include anything. They really left me to my own devices. So, in a way, I almost had to talk myself into staying true and not overstuffing it with recognizable films. There are significant films in there that anchor things, like Black Panther, Get Out, and Moonlight. But this was also an opportunity to bring many of these underseen films to the fore and put them in conversation with more well-known films. That was really exciting to me. And as I say in the book, many films have received restorations in the last few years. Films like Compensation have re-entered the conversation. Bushman is another one that goes a bit further back, but I’m lucky these are films that I’ve seen in recent years. In the spirit of sharing, I just want more people to know them.
DEADLINE: We’ve been lucky to witness many films re-emerge in recent years. And you’ve played a significant role in that effort. It’s safe to say we may have never returned to films like Compensation without the work you’ve done at Criterion and before that, BAM. When you first started doing the work you’ve been doing, what was structurally wrong? It had to be more than just a few people who were a bit racist.
CLARK: I’ve benefited from the belief that certain people have shown in me, like Gina Duncan, who hired me at BAM when I began in 2017. Gina had a very clear vision. She wanted to prioritize work that was underseen and underappreciated. She gave me a platform to go ahead and enact that with the programming. It was a beautiful moment because we weren’t just talking about diversity or having in-house workshops and training about our programming. We were just doing it. I feel very lucky to have benefited from being in a position where I’ve been allowed to get on with things.
It’s been the same at Criterion, where I’ve worked since 2020. I feel very grateful to have had a platform to shape the curatorial vision here. Again, the driving force for me has always been about supporting the artists. That was one of the first lessons I learned as a curator and programmer: It’s about serving the artist’s vision and making them feel valued. A lot of Black filmmakers and marginalized filmmakers have been through a system that has made them feel not worth as much as others. So a huge part of the work is to counteract that. There have also been all sorts of social and structural changes in the last few years. Those have been spoken about a lot. Those broader social and political changes have certainly played into what institutions have prioritized. But on a personal level, it’s always been about a drive to serve the artist and convince people that just because they haven’t heard of the work doesn’t mean that it’s not extremely valuable.
DEADLINE: The accompanying text in the book is very interesting. Robust collections like this usually just have a synopsis or something small as the text. But this is conversational and wide-ranging. Like in the Madea entry, you have the history behind Tyler Perry and Spike Lee’s back-and-forth. Why’d you take that approach?
CLARK: The first decision I made when planning this book was that it would not be the 100 greatest Black films of all time. I wasn’t going to impose any valuation because who am I to say this is my personal canon? I actually remember reading, in my teens, Barry Norman’s 100 Best Films of the Century. Barry Norman was a very prominent film critic in the UK. He was a good critic and a very smart guy. But the closest thing to a Black film in his book was Pulp Fiction. I’ve always been thoughtful about the role of authoritative-seeming canons, because if you read those at an impressionable age, you might take them as the truth. You might actually think to yourself, Oh, hang on, Barry Norman’s 100 greatest films, and there are no Black films involved in that. So, tonally, and in terms of the affect, I never wanted it to feel like a statement of absolute fact.
In terms of how I approached each entry, another early decision I made was to take out the synopsis, because I knew that if I integrated the synopsis into the main text, the temptation would have been to pad it out. Instead, I took each film and asked myself what I thought was significant about the film in the context of the wider book. And how, in some cases, they connect with other films in the book. For example, the Moonlight entry isn’t really about Moonlight, which I love. I think it’s a terrific film. But the film also offered the opportunity to do a mini op-ed about the history of Black film and the Academy. In each case, I was looking for an angle and a way in. Sometimes that presented itself more readily than other times, and some entries were more of a struggle. It was really about writing each one with an eye to the wider concept of the book, and to make it feel like a unified whole.
DEADLINE: Talking about Tyler Perry, the Madea entry is my favorite in the book. I remember being in the States as a kid and seeing Daddy’s Little Girls (2007) for the first time, and even then, I was somewhat confused by the film.
CLARK: His films are jaw-dropping because they don’t subscribe to anything we’ve been told about narrative logic and character development. They throw it completely out the window. In many ways, it’s experimental. I confess, writing this book was the first time I’d ever watched Medea Goes To Jail. And during the film, I was looking at my watch and thinking, hang on, when is she going to jail? I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved. He’s created extraordinarily high levels of opportunity for employment for others. But the work itself is in a certain special category that I’m not sure I have the smarts to fully get my head around. I think he’s outsmarted me.
DEADLINE: And with the BFI season you’ve programmed for the book, is this the first time many of these films have been seen in the U.K.?
CLARK: No, I need to give a shoutout to a few people here. It’s really important to mention African Odysseys, a monthly presentation of films by and about the African diaspora programmed at the BFI. While I was working at the BFI in 2009, I got involved in the African Odysseys steering group. That was the first time I heard of filmmakers like Raoul Peck and Med Hondo.
I saw West Indies at the BFI for the first time in 2010 or 2011, and it blew me away then. The film has just been restored, so it felt like a perfect opportunity to include it in this series. I also saw Jemima + Johnny at the BFI, maybe in 2009 or 2010. Curatorially, it felt like a nice pairing with Black Girl because they’re from the same year. They’re both also dealing with ideas of immigration and social cohesion. And Lionel Ngakane, who directed Jemima + Johnny, was an associate of Ousmane Sembène, so it felt like a good pair. In the films I picked, I wanted to have a stylistically, artistically, and internationally diverse spread. And also have films that people would come out and see.
DEADLINE: While reading this book, I often thought that it would lend nicely to adaptation. A documentary or docuseries. Is that something you’re working on next?
CLARK: It’s an interesting idea that could have potential. But again, I see this book as an introductory survey. There’s room for more development of the idea. It’s just so important for me to call out people like June Giovanni and the Pan African Film Archive. The work she has done, and also contemporary curators like Yasmina Price, who has really been pushing the envelope in terms of how people think about what Black film is and means. There’s Abiba Coulibaly, who does the Brixton community cinema. I think she’s fantastic. There’s a lineage of people who’ve done this work and who are doing it now, which is so exciting to me. This book is just a contribution to that. I hope people get something thought-provoking out of it. And if there is a next step, that would be nice.
English (US) ·