Tag: black artists
Michael R. Jackson’s Subversive Vision of the American Musical
In the summer of 2020, the playwright Michael R. Jackson received an unusual message from a fan of A Strange Loop, his musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness through the process of writing a musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness. “Can I buy you a bulletproof vest?” the fan inquired over Instagram.
Jackson, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for A Strange Loop and lived on a perfectly safe
Ousmane Sembène May Be Revered, but His Films Are Still Underappreciated
One of my seminal movie experiences was a college class taught by Gilberto Perez, around 1977, in political cinema, focussing on John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Sergei Eisenstein. At nearly fifty years’ remove, I’d add a fourth name to that list of essential political filmmakers: Ousmane Sembène, who was then in the middle of his career, having just made the fifth feature of the nine that he completed by the time of his death, in 2007, at the age of