Customer Reviews

Black American Experience: Famous Writers

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These are two separate documentaries placed on one disc. Those interested in showing it to students could show either one or the other, though the whole disc takes up less than one class period.
I know extremely little about these authors, so this was informative to me. I would argue that Ellison is more famous than Himes, so it was suprising that the Ellison discussion was so much shorter than the other.
Himes' facts reminded me much of Malcolm X. He had a light-skinned mother who had issues about skin complexion (but in the opposite direction of Mrs. Little). He spent time in prison and was transformed or productive there, like X. I wonder if he was an influence on Iceberg Slim and some rap artists. Too many documentaries are gushy toward their subjects. This work admits that Himes was not a strong student. It says he could be conniving too.
The Ellison segment said the author was named after Emerson. He had a good relationship with Richard Wright unlike the tense one between Wright and Baldwin. The work said a second Ellison manuscript was burned in a house fire. Still, I wish it had meditated on why such a famous author made such an incredibly small body of work.
I hate the cheesy reenactments in many recent documentaries. However, those recreations make images move and make time go by faster. This work was almost entirely still photos and old pictures. In both segments, only one person is interviewed. The works are just a bit dull. I am worried that high school students may doze off viewing this. The creators of this work obviously didn't have a lot of financial resources.
There's all this talk nowadays about whether the US is "post-racial." Of course, I find that idea risible. But the work shows how clearly that question never could have been raised decades ago. In both segments, American prejudice and how it harmed or limited these artists is detailed.