Αδελφός ακόμα: Μέσα στη μαύρη μεσαία τάξη

derrick4.0

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Brandon Wilson4.5

A must watch for anyone with any connection to the Black middle class. Two things struck me: how far America has fallen economically looking back at what “middle class” meant 60 years ago; and also the rather breathtaking candor that many of the folks interviewed display. I simply cannot imagine today’s Black middle class folks admitting to certain things regarding their relationship to their class and their race. It makes you think about how performative we have all had to become. This week marks the centennial birthday of the late great director William Greaves. And I suspect this film will make a very strong double feature with Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The parlor debates of Black folks about what is to be done are, in the right hands, every bit as cinematic as a chase sequence.

Doug Dibbern4.0

Ostensibly a straightforward documentary about the experiences of "middle-class Negroes" made for some educational film foundation (with an old-fashioned voice-of-God narration by the impeccable Ossie Davis), given the time of its making (1968, people!), the movie inevitably explores the impending radicalization of black America in the 1970s -- and in a sense, serves as an aesthetic amuse-bouche for Greaves's much-more stylistically audacious SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE released just three years later. It was a strange experience. In so many ways it seemed dated, and yet, now almost fifty years later, one couldn't help but feel that very little has changed. More movies like this, please.