Black History Month: 28 Days, 28 Films

For Black History Month, The New York Times has selected 28 essential films from the 20th century pertaining to African-American experiences. These aren’t the 28 essential black-themed films but a calendar of suggested viewing. The Times imposed a chronological cutoff in an effort to look back at where we were and how we got to here.

We begin in the 1920s with Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), a novelist and bold, prolific independent filmmaker. Micheaux along with black directors like Spencer Williams made “race movies,” low-budget films with all-black casts for black audiences (some from white producers). During the Jim Crow era, the color line ran through movies, including into segregated theaters, and most Hollywood films depicting black life were produced by whites, including musicals, like “Cabin in the Sky,” with all-black casts of well-known singers, dancers and musicians. From the early 1930s to the late ‘50s, the mainstream industry’s Production Code specifically banned representations of sexual relations between black and white people.

When African-Americans in Hollywood were not singing or dancing, they were often cast as maids, butlers, porters or other servile, peripheral figures. There are exceptions, including “Imitation of Life,” a 1930s melodrama with a storyline about a black character who “passes” for white, as well as “Intruder in the Dust,” a 1940s parable of white conscience. Both are worth viewing because of the power and integrity of their featured black actors — Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington and Juano Hernandez — who with the humanity of their performances challenge and movingly subvert the mainstream industry’s racism.

Race movies disappeared shortly after World War II, and soon the mainstream industry turned toward social issues. Yet even as the civil rights movement gathered force, black characters and their experiences were seen through a white lens, often myopically. Consider this sobering fact: Between 1948 (when Micheaux’s last film appeared) and 1969 (when Gordon Parks’ “The Learning Tree” arrived on the big screen), almost no movies directed by African-Americans were released commercially in the United States.

The selections for subsequent decades are exclusively the work of black directors. For the later 20th century, the Times has chosen titles that represent waves and countercurrents: blaxploitation, the independent film scenes in Los Angeles and New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the flowering of commercial and independent movies in the ‘90s. There are comedies and crime stories, historical epics and slices of ordinary life. Taken together, they do not offer a unified theory of African-Americans in cinema but a great multiplicity.

‘Within Our Gates’ (1920, directed by Oscar Micheaux) This stunning rejoinder to white supremacy, both on screen and off, was also written and produced by Micheaux, a pioneering director of race movies. “Within Our Gates” sets its sharp, unsentimental tone with its first intertitle: “We find our characters in the North, where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist — though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro.” The film soon narrows its focus on a courageous, peripatetic young woman who, as she travels between the South and the North fleeing unfair circumstances and raising money for a school, becomes an embodiment of historical struggle. Through both his story and his storytelling — including his brilliant use of flashbacks — Micheaux insistently underscores how the past shapes the present but need not define it. (Where to watch: YouTube, Netflix, Kanopy, Kino Lorber’s “Pioneers of African-American Cinema” box set)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage’ (1928) In the 1920s, extraordinary author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston — whose titles include the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” — began incorporating film into her ethnographic fieldwork, shooting more than a dozen reels in the South. Although she had a brief, tantalizingly ambiguous Hollywood adventure in the early 1940s as a story consultant for Paramount Pictures, it is Hurston’s look at ordinary black Southerners that remains her indelible contribution to the art. (Where to watch: YouTube, Kino Lorber’s “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.” The box set also includes an excerpt from Hurston’s “Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort, South Carolina, May 1940,” amazing footage that documents the religious practices of the Gullah people in Beaufort.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Black and Tan’ and‘St. Louis Blues’ (both from 1929, directed by Dudley Murphy) These two shorts from the earliest days of sound seem to prophesy the rise of music videos. Each one is built around a performance of the title number by one of the great artists of the era: Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith. And both films embed their flights of musical and dance genius within stories that blend melodrama, comedy and realism, paying tribute to the glories of African-American art and acknowledging the hard circumstances in which it took root and flowered. (Where to watch “Black and Tan”: YouTube. Where to watch “St. Louis Blues”: YouTube, “Hollywood Rhythm Vol. 01 — The Best of Jazz & Blues” DVD.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Hell-Bound Train’ (1930, directed by James and Eloyce Gist) This jaw-dropping specialty item was one of the films that the Gists, married evangelists, made as part of their ministry. Divided into vignettes punctuated by intertitles, it turns on the Devil — a masked figure with horns and a cape — driving a train teeming with wickedness. Each train car reveals another sin and increasingly takes the story into the greater world. Drinkers dance and carouse in one car; elsewhere a jazz lover risks her soul. “It may bring happiness to you through life,” the film cautions. “But at the point of death.” Produced for a pittance, the film is a fascinating example of DIY resourcefulness that’s especially memorable for how it balances heavy-handed moralism with homespun surrealism and quotidian life. Nearly everyone here may be headed straight to hell, but most look as if they’re having a swell time getting there. The restoration of “Hell-Bound Train” by S. Torriano Berry is part of a larger effort to restore black film history in its fullness. (Where to watch: Netflix, Kanopy, “Pioneers of African-American Cinema” box set)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Imitation of Life’ (1934, directed by John M. Stahl) The nominal star of this classic weepie is Claudette Colbert. She portrays a single mother who becomes an entrepreneur through the pancake recipe and beatifically smiling face of her maid, played by Louise Beavers. Its enduring power, though, rests with the delicate and devastating relationship that Beavers’ character has with her daughter — portrayed as an adult by dazzling black actress Fredi Washington — a restlessly unhappy soul who decides to pass as white. The movie is decidedly and at times uncomfortably a product of its segregated moment — the women’s lives are separate and narratively unequal — although it is worth noting that the commissars at the Production Code deemed the film, with its overt intimations of race mixing, “fraught with grave danger to the industry.” Washington, who was at once too light and too dark for Hollywood at the time, movingly transcends stereotype even as she — and Beavers — break your heart. (Where to watch: Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and DVD.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Show Boat’ (1936, directed by James Whale) Adapted from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway hit from the 1920s (which was based on a novel by Edna Ferber), “Show Boat” would be remade (and sanitized) by MGM in the 1950s. This version is notable for the frankness of its subplot about passing (an element that resonates with many contemporaneous race films) and for the galvanic presence of Paul Robeson. Arguably the first black movie star, Robeson was also an activist, a recording artist and a world-class athlete. He may be best remembered for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” for which he later rewrote the original lyrics, transforming a half-ironic hymn to servility into an anthem of dignified resistance. (Where to watch: Warner Bros. DVD)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Stormy Weather’ (1943, directed by Andrew L. Stone) This anthology of great performances is a trip down memory lane inspired by a special issue in a trade magazine celebrating 25 years of the “colored” contribution to U.S. entertainment. Bill Robinson, aka Bojangles, and Lena Horne play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, as do Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers, and other celebrated dancers, comedians and musicians. Cab Calloway, a big-screen presence from the first days of sound, needs no such disguise. He is the straw that stirs this intoxicating cocktail and perhaps its most potent spirit, too. (Where to watch: Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, Amazon Video and DVD.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Dirty Gertie From Harlem USA’ (1946, directed by Spencer Williams) If Francine Everett — the charming and vivacious star of this all-black drama — had been born decades later, she might have been a name everyone remembers. Here, she plays Gertie La Rue, who arrives on a Caribbean island to sing, dance, flirt and give life to the stereotypical role of the dangerously free woman. Gertie has man troubles, a cliché that is soon eclipsed by this low-budget film’s virtues, including its behind-the-scenes show-people realism and sympathetic portrait of a woman at ease with herself and her desires. Director Spencer Williams (who drops in as a “voodoo woman”) later became famous for playing Andy in the TV show “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” but “Gertie” — a rough gem that transcends its flaws — is part of his greater legacy. (Where to watch: Netflix, Kanopy, Kino Lorber’s “Pioneers of African-American Cinema” box set, YouTube.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Intruder in the Dust’ (1949, directed by Clarence Brown) Adapted from William Faulkner’s novel and shot mostly in Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, this is in many ways an earnest exercise in Hollywood liberalism. The ordeal of a black farmer falsely accused of murder — and in danger of being lynched — becomes a test for the consciences of the town’s decent white people (all three of them). But the movie counts as essential because of the ways it pushes against the limits of its own didacticism. An early glimpse of the would-be lynch mob is shot through the eyes of its potential victim, Lucas Beauchamp, who is played with unforgettable poetry and poise by Juano Hernandez. Partly because of the “human quality” of Hernandez’s performance, novelist Ralph Ellison called “Intruder in the Dust” the only film of its era “that could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter.” (Where to watch: YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘The Jackie Robinson Story’ (1950, directed by Alfred E. Green) In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black American to play modern Major League baseball (for the Brooklyn Dodgers, of course!). Three years later, he proved that he could also hold the big screen when he starred in this biographical drama. Made on the cheap, “The Jackie Robinson Story” was independently produced because — as one of the screenwriters, Lawrence Taylor, later explained — Hollywood was only interested in bankrolling another savior story about a white man helping a black man. Instead, the filmmakers stuck to the truth (more or less), and in doing so made a mockery of the mainstream industry’s screen segregation. The result is a creaky, corny, irresistible charmer in which Robinson warms the screen, Ruby Dee lights it up as his wife, and a black man gets to be the hero of his own story. (Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘The Defiant Ones’ (1958, directed by Stanley Kramer) In “The Devil Finds Work,” his matchless meditation on the racial pathologies and peculiarities of U.S. movies, James Baldwin mercilessly skewers the well-meaning pieties and delusions of this foundational interracial buddy picture. Two convicts, played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, escape from a chain gang, shackled together. Despite their mutual hatred, they rely on each other to survive a journey across the rural South. Baldwin was not wrong: There is plenty to roll your eyes at in the canned epiphanies of brotherhood that the movie offers as tokens of social concern. But there is also Poitier, the ascendant, incandescent African-American star of the moment, whose wit and charisma not only transcend the material but also render it believable. (Where to watch: Vudu, DVD)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Shadows’ (1959, directed by John Cassavetes) Shot wild in the streets of a now-lost New York, Cassavetes’ electric debut feature is a landmark independent film about three black siblings of varying skin tones — Hugh, Ben and their younger sister, Lelia — shacked up in gritty, glorious bohemian splendor. Only Hugh was played by a black actor, Hugh Hurd, a casting decision that speaks to the time and is impossible to imagine now. (“We did not mean it to be a film about race,” Cassavetes later said.) The film originated in a drama workshop that Cassavetes helped run and mostly involves the siblings hanging out, laboring, being. A story of sorts emerges when Lelia’s new white lover assumes that she too is white, a misperception that opens up a fissure in the world that the siblings have created for themselves, letting prejudice seep in and swirl. “Who do you belong to?” the white lover asks Lelia soon after they meet. “Well, I belong to me,” she says, giving voice to the film’s great truth. (Where to watch: iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Kanopy and available on DVD through the Criterion Collection.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One’ (1968, directed by William Greaves) A director and his crew are shooting a film in Central Park, a series of savage breakup scenes that might have been scripted by Edward Albee. The crew, meanwhile, becomes increasingly frustrated by the director’s erratic behavior and, in a series of heavy group-therapy-like meetings, inches toward mutiny. All but forgotten until the early 2000s, this unclassifiable hybrid of documentary, backstage comedy and avant-garde prank feels at once like a vital artifact of its time and like an uncanny premonition of our own. It’s gleefully “meta” (before that term was in general use), and without being in any overt sense “about race,” it is mischievously eloquent on the struggles of the black artist in a supposedly liberal society. (Where to watch: FilmStruck, Netflix DVD, Kanopy.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass’ (1968, directed by Melvin Van Peebles) Van Peebles’ best-known film is “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” widely seen as the movie that started the blaxploitation movement. But his disarmingly romantic debut feature deserves a place in the canon, too. Based on a novel he wrote in French, “La Permission” (as it’s also known) filters the elliptical storytelling, the black-and-white cinematography and the existential moods of the French New Wave through the director’s free-spirited, politically astute sensibility. An African-American soldier (Harry Baird) stationed in France has an affair with a young Frenchwoman (Nicole Berger) during a short leave, and their story becomes a prism for a quintessential 1960s theme: the longing for liberation in the face of deeply entrenched, absurd impediments to its achievement. (Where to watch: Brown Sugar, Fandor, DVD.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘The Learning Tree’ (1969, directed by Gordon Parks) The moment that Parks — the photographer, novelist and filmmaker — called “action” on “The Learning Tree,” he broke decades of Hollywood apartheid. With this delicate memory film (and the backing of Warner Bros.), Parks became the first African-American director of a major studio production. Based on Parks’ novel of the same title, it tracks the coming of age of his adolescent surrogate, Newt Winger, in a rural 1920s Kansas that is by turns paradisiacal and terrifying. Filled with lilting visual beauty and spiked with instances of abrupt barbarism — a white sheriff shoots two black men in the back and faces no consequences — the film paints a bittersweet, richly textured and plangent picture of a young man whose life is irrevocably defined if never circumscribed by the color line. (Where to watch: YouTube, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Cotton Comes to Harlem’ (1970, directed by Ossie Davis) If Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweetback” gave blaxploitation its revolutionary swagger, this movie, adapted from a novel by Chester Himes, supplied its literary and Hollywood pedigree. Lovingly shot on the streets of Harlem, Davis’ film combines glimpses of daily life with elements of high satire and outright surrealism, all of it swirled into a detective story involving jaded cops, small-time crooks and wildly dishonest community leaders. The volatile, often contradictory politics that would galvanize later films like “Shaft,” “Dolemite” and “Trouble Man” — their critiques of white power and some prominent forms of black resistance — are especially pointed here. The images are semiotic Molotov cocktails tossed into the free-fire zones of America’s racial unconscious. (Where to watch: Brown Sugar, Google Play, Amazon Video.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘I Am Somebody’ (1970, directed by Madeline Anderson) The subject of this galvanizing 30-minute documentary is a 1969 strike by hundreds of primarily female workers against a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina. Subjected to discriminatory practices, insults and lower pay than that earned by their white counterparts, these workers sought to unionize, but their campaign was met with police violence and mass arrests. (“The ghost of Martin Luther King marches the picket lines outside two hospitals in Charleston, S.C.,” The New York Times announced in an editorial.) With tangible intimacy and political sweep, Anderson — who produced, directed and edited “I Am Somebody” — lets the striking women speak for themselves, a choice that puts their fight for self-determination into stirring cinematic terms. Both Ralph Abernathy and Coretta Scott King (wearing a paper union cap) appear on screen, but this movie is for the workers. (Where to watch: Internet Archive; also starting Feb. 20 available on Amazon Video and DVD from Icarus Films.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Ganja & Hess’ (1973, directed by Bill Gunn) An actor, playwright and filmmaker, Gunn, who died at 54 in 1989, was a fixture of the New York black independent film movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. The second of three features he directed, reverently remade by Spike Lee (as “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus” in 2014), is about vampires, but it’s less a horror film than a sensual, scholarly, magic-realist exploration of black history and black desire. (Where to watch: Brown Sugar, Amazon Video, Netflix DVD, Kanopy, YouTube.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Killer of Sheep’ (1977, directed by Charles Burnett) One of the essential films of U.S. cinema, “Killer of Sheep” sings a song of love, family, brutalizing despair and ineffable, persistent human dignity. Set in Watts, a part of Los Angeles rarely seen in mainstream movies, it centers on Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a father and slaughterhouse worker whose existential burden weighs heavily on his family as well as his every word and gesture. Burnett is often associated with the LA Rebellion, a group of black Los Angeles filmmakers working outside the white vanguard of independent cinema. That’s one reason that it took critics and audiences so long to catch up to this masterpiece, which is as radical in its form and content as it is indelibly affecting. (Where to watch: DVD and Blu-ray from Milestone Films.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Stir Crazy’ (1980, directed Sidney Poitier) For movie fans who came of age in the late 1970s, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor were an unparalleled interracial buddy act. In this follow-up to “Silver Streak,” Skip (Wilder), a would-be playwright, and Harry (Pryor), a struggling actor, leave New York for sunnier climes and wind up incarcerated for a bank robbery they are far too sweet and inept to have committed. A steady crescendo of ridiculousness leads to — what else? — a prison rodeo. Poitier, who also directed three buddy comedies starring himself and Bill Cosby, shows a silly side behind the camera that he rarely indulged in front of it. (Where to watch: Amazon Video, Google Play, Netflix DVD, Vudu, YouTube.)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Losing Ground’ (1982, directed by Kathleen Collins) “I want magic,” Sara declares. “Real magic.” A philosopher professor, Sara (Seret Scott), lives with her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), in a loft dominated by his large canvases. Soon after the movie opens, Victor shares that one of his paintings has been bought by a museum. “I’m a genuine success,” he enthuses. “Your husband is a genuine black success!” Identity — aesthetic, racial, sexual — is among the themes that wend through this film, which follows Sara as she sets off to intellectually understand ecstasy while contending with her husband’s restlessness (and ego), seeking a space of her own and appearing in a student movie that riffs on “Frankie and Johnny.” Collins — a playwright, a professor and one of the first black U.S. women to direct a feature-length movie — was only 46 when she died in 1988 from cancer. Her death deprived U.S. cinema of a singular and exciting independent voice, one that has re-emerged with the posthumous theatrical release of “Losing Ground” and with the publication of her well-received short-story collection, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” (Where to watch: FilmStruck, Milestone Films DVD.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘She’s Gotta Have It’ (1986, directed by Spike Lee) The sexual politics may look a little problematic in hindsight, but Spike Lee’s debut feature, a shoestring production that helped to ignite both the indie boom and the African-American new wave of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, remains a loving, lovely portrait of black bohemia. And also, specifically, of an independent woman, Nola Darling, and her three lovers. Partly because its influence has been so widely absorbed — through the black romantic comedies of the early 2000s to more recent television series like “Being Mary Jane” and “Insecure” — its revolutionary impact can perhaps be taken for granted. (Lee’s Netflix series last year both updated and paid tribute to the innovations of the original.) Here was a film that treated its characters not as symbols, clowns or symptoms of societal distress but as people engaged in complicated and idiosyncratic pursuits of happiness. (Where to watch: Netflix)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Tongues Untied’ (1989, directed by Marlon Riggs) Made for PBS and a culture-war flash point in its time, this passionate, angry mix of documentary, memoir and poetry is a milestone in both New Black and New Queer cinema. The pain it articulates — the racism of white society, homophobia among some blacks, AIDS, invisibility — is overwhelming, but Riggs turns grief and hurt into defiance and beauty and finds new ways to fuse the personal, the political and the aesthetic. (Where to watch: Kanopy, Internet Archive)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘House Party’ (1990, directed by Reginald Hudlin) The careers of Reginald and Warrington Hudlin took off with this exuberant teenage comedy, starring rap duo Kid ‘n Play (Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin). The loose, hectic plot includes rap battles, dance competitions, romantic rivalries and run-ins with the authorities — most notably the weary, hardworking dad played by the great Robin Harris. Pop’s favorite movie is the blaxploitation classic “Dolemite,” a reference that is consistent with the film’s mix of rebellious mischief and respect for elders. (Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Video, YouTube)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991, directed by Julie Dash) Beyoncé's visual album, “Lemonade,” sparked the latest revival of interest in this masterpiece, a ravishingly beautiful work of historical reconstruction and feminist imagination. Set on the Sea Islands off the southeastern United States in the early 20th century, the film is a multigenerational matriarchal epic about the preservation of memory and the necessity of change. Comparisons to the novels of Toni Morrison are warranted — “Daughters” blends fact and folklore with poetic authority and arresting moral grace — but mostly because, like Morrison, Dash is a true U.S. original who dared to fill an empty space in the national imagination. (Netflix, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Video)

— A.O. SCOTT

‘Malcolm X’ (1992, directed by Spike Lee) Denzel Washington dominates almost every frame of this electrifying epic, which traces the arc of 20th-century America through a single extraordinary life. Washington brings bone-deep feeling and enormous charisma to the story of one Malcolm Little, a street hustler whose prison conversion to Islam finds him walking back into the world a free, profoundly changed man named Malcolm X — religious leader, political seer, U.S. martyr. Exquisitely acted, with a gorgeous, expressionistic Terence Blanchard score, this is one of Lee’s most enduring films. Long before it opened, a lot of the discussion surrounding “Malcolm X” involved the personalities and legacies of both its subject and its director, but in the end this is a film that should be seen for what it is: great cinema. (Where to watch: Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, Google Play and Vudu.)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1995, directed by Carl Franklin) Based on the Walter Mosley novel of the same title, this picture-perfect detective story finds Denzel Washington again commanding the screen, this time as Easy Rawlins. Set in Los Angeles in 1948, it opens soon after Easy is laid off from his machinist job. (“I got home from the war in Europe with $300 in my pocket and the GI Bill.”) With a mortgage to pay, Easy takes a dodgy job that turns him into an accidental shamus, and he is soon chasing down a mysterious beauty (Jennifer Beals) while crossing paths with very bad men. As he traverses both black and white Los Angeles, the film offers up a rich vision of African-American life — with its sun-drenched neighborhoods and smoky nightclubs — almost entirely absent from Hollywood’s fantasies past (and often present). The genre beats may seem familiar but race changes everything, and now, guided by Franklin’s sure hand, it is Washington walking down cinema’s mean streets not Humphrey Bogart. (Where to watch: Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, iTunes)

— MANOHLA DARGIS

‘The Watermelon Woman’ (1996, directed by Cheryl Dunye) The moral of this movie is that “sometimes you have to invent your own history.” That idea — that the true stories people need can’t always be found in the recorded past — is both heartbreaking and inspiring. Dunye plays a version of herself: a Philadelphia filmmaker working at a video store and dealing with friendship, interracial love and the day-to-day pleasures and challenges of modern black lesbian life. She becomes fascinated by an old-time movie actress named Fae Richards, better known as the Watermelon Woman, whose biography captures the hidden history of race and sexuality in mid-20th-century America. Dunye’s film is a reminder that the impulse to tell new stories is often entwined with the longing to honor lost or neglected traditions. (Where to watch: Kanopy, Google Play, Netflix DVD, Fandor, Vudu)

Black Panther breaks records

— A.O. SCOTT

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.