A Documentary Lets the Stories of Black Luminaries Speak for Themselves

“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