“They think I’m Jewish,” he says. “I’m in the Jewish book of famous
people. But as far as, you know, on the professional level, I think
it’s pretty common knowledge that I’m half black or whatever. I was
never really fazed by the, sort of, the color barrier, you know?” Slash, the former lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses,
is talking. The son of a black mother and a white father, he is the
first among the 23 renowned people who muse, confess and tell stories
in “The Black List: Volume 1,” a 90-minute documentary scheduled to
have its television premiere on HBO
on Monday night. A collaboration between the portrait photographer
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who directed it, and the film critic Elvis
Mitchell, who did the interviews, it consists of a series of portraits
capturing the range of what is often called the black experience. The subjects include Sean Combs, Lou Gossett Jr., Vernon Jordan, Toni Morrison, Bill T. Jones, Serena Williams, Chris Rock, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Colin L. Powell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Suzan-Lori Parks and Keenen Ivory Wayans. Not everyone is as well known to the general public. Zane, a
best-selling author of erotic fiction, gets a turn here, as does Mahlon
Duckett, a former Negro league baseball player. Thelma Golden, the
director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem,
says: “One of the funniest experiences I had when I began working in
the art world is that people always assumed I worked for Thelma Golden,
not that I was Thelma Golden. The kind of dismissal that comes from
just people’s sense that they don’t imagine you are who you are
actually has been one of the most powerful and liberating things for me
in my work.”A minimalist film, without narration and with
very little on the screen except people talking, “The Black List”
(which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival
earlier this year) derives its considerable energy and elegance from
its subjects. Mr. Mitchell, the host of the new TCM interview series
“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” and a former film critic for The
New York Times, is never on screen. Rather, Mr. Mitchell said, he and
Mr. Greenfield-Sanders played their hands behind the scenes.The
title “The Black List” is a play on words, meant to overturn the
negative connotations of the term “blacklist.” This month the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, began an exhibition by Mr. Greenfield-Sanders of
his “Black List” series of photographic portraits. Mr.
Greenfield-Sanders, widely known for his portraits of artists and
celebrities, which often appear in Vanity Fair, also photographed the
wounded Iraq veterans featured in the HBO documentary “Alive Day
Memories: Home From Iraq.” The “Black List” portraits will eventually be shown in 10 cities around the country, with a stop at the Brooklyn Museum
in November. Next month the 25 portraits, along with first-person
essays by their subjects, will be brought together in a book, “The
Black List,” to be published by Atria, a division of Simon &
Schuster. SOURCE:NYT.COM