To Film Black Skin is an immersive journey
The lighting and coloring of Black people in film is a problem that can be seen throughout the history of cinema. Black faces not lit properly, the skin blending into the darkness, how they are presented in the movie as a whole. Barry Jenkins, though, has been able to adjust how Black skin is viewed by viewers on the big screen. Moonlight, the film that won him Best Picture at the Oscars in 2016, and If Beale Street Could Talk showed the world of cinema how beautiful Black skin could look on the big screen. His cinematography has pushed forth what Black people can look like and what emotions they can exuberate if handled properly.
Jenkins, a Liberty City, Miami native, came from a single parent household with an absent father and a crack cocaine addicted mother. He went to Florida State and learned there was a film school and “stumbled” his way into it. He did not know anything about film and eventually took a year off to improve his craft and understand the art of filmmaking. He decided to watch films that everyone else was not watching such as Asian and French films and read film criticism. While at film school Jenkins met his now longtime cinematographer James Laxton at Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts. In interviews both have reiterated their goal of making a film an “immersive experience” for the audience watching it in a theater. Jenkins like many Black filmmakers knew who he wanted to focus on in his movies:
“I could say, very simply, that I make movies for black people about black people,” Jenkins said, considering the scope of his public. “But that’s not the mission statement, because the filmmakers who have moved me the most — Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wai, Jean-Luc Godard — were not making movies for me, Barry Jenkins.”
Jenkins was introduced to another Miami native, Tarell Alvin McCraney, who also was from Liberty City with a drug addicted mother, by a mutual friend. Jenkins received Mccraney’s script for the unreleased play he wrote called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. An autobiographical play that is an emotional and existential examination of how patriarchy and the world shapes the lives of Black boys which spoke truth and saw parallels in Jenkins' own life. He decided to adapt the play and turn it into Moonlight while in his latest film, If Beale Street Could Talk, he adapts a James Baldwin’s novel of the same name. The story revolves around a romantic relationship between Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (Kiki Layne) whose love is tested when Fonny is arrested for allegeldy raping a Latina woman in 1970s Harlem. Another story of Black people’s struggle to find love in the face of racism and oppression.
Moonlight, separated into three parts, begins with “Little” or when Chiron is still a young child. He is chased by neighborhood boys as he weaves through fences and their slurs, “Get that faggot!” While finding refuge in an abandoned house the darkness swallows Chiron, the banging of rocks rattle the house which the neighborhood boys are throwing, and a glint of light peeks through the open board up windows. The camera is nearly touching Chiron, his hands covering his ears, and body trembling and convulsing with every rock thrown. The juxtaposition of darkness and light never takes away from the dark skin of Chiron, it is not just confusion but chaos, the audience is immersed in the fear. The boys leave and Chiron observes the area around him, he picks up a crack pipe and holds it up against the small light peeking out of the boarded up window. The darkness surrounding Chiron is him being confined to something he is not, afraid of the freedom he does not possess with himself.
Jenkins continues to use the darkness as a story device in If Beale Street Could Talk. Fonny reconnects with his childhood friend Daniel as they reflect on lost times. Daniel, played by Brian Tyree Henry, reveals he was in prison these last few years. The room is dark, shadow engulfs their faces, while a subtle and low trumpet plays in the background. “The white man has got to be the devil,” Daniel says in a low tone to Fonny while the camera slowly pans over to Fonny. “Some of the things I seen, be dreaming about until the day I die.” Fonny’s face, intense and focused, digesting the information his friend is giving him. Jenkins cinematography lies in the tension between these two Black men. They are in the shadows, comfortable to be vulnerable with each other, intimacy where others will not judge them.
Jenkins doesn’t only concentrate on darkness but uses bright colors as another vehicle to tell his stories. He cleverly uses a scene where Chiron is being helped to swim by Juan, a local drug dealer who found Chiron in the abandoned house days earlier. Juan is based on a real person in Tarell McCraney’s life named Blue who was the father of his young brother. Blue, a local drug dealer, would defend, feed, clothe, and prevent McCraney from getting beaten by his mother. Blue was eventually killed when McCraney was 6 and it devastated him and his mother who overdose on drugs. Stories like Blue for Jenkins and McCraney wanted to flesh out these Black men that the world has already vilified. Their intention is to tell a different side of Black men where:
“What could men like Blue be, if they were born into different circumstances?”
As we see in the beach scene, Juan tells Chiron about moving his feet and hands in the water. Jenkins and Laxton hold the camera where the waves of the water are against the camera, the audience is struggling to see and handle the water just like Chiron. The sun pounding on their backs and the blue sky paralleling the blue ocean water. Juan holds Chiron between the depths of the water and the air around them. Juan soothing Chiron, “Let your head rest on my hand, relax” he assures Chiron. “I got you, I promise you. I’m not gonna let you go.” The score, “The Middle of the World” by Nicholas Brittel plays simultaneously which matches the turbulence of the water crashing, splashing, matching the struggle of Chiron and even the audience trying to stay afloat. Chiron is in the middle of the world, between trusting himself and others, between loving himself and allowing others to love him. “I’m not gonna let you go” are words maybe Chiron has never heard before, someone willing to be there for him unlike his own parents.
The scene is Juan is teaching Chiron vulnerability, to understand he does not have to be living a different life, to hide himself from others, to conceal the love he wants from others. An exchange where the teachings of love, with oneself and others, is scarce among the curious minds of Black boys. Jenkins captures this important scene with the color blue, a motif, to drive the point of love being inescapable but we must find a way to allow it to be a part of our lives. The scene resonates with even Jenkins whose mother’s addiction left him in the care of others, leaving him with brokenness and the inability to trust which lingers today.
In the second act, Chiron, a teenager now, goes to the beach to settle his nerves his friend Kevin shows up. While conversing eventually the boys kiss and Kevin puts his hand in Chiron’s pants and stimulates him. The grunts and moan from Chiron and the slight clench of the fist grabbing the sand like he will never let it go. The blue cloak on them, the vulnerability and tranquility, they can finally seek with another is there. If someone catches them, their family, friends, schoolmates then their “secret” is out. At this moment though, after they are finished, Chiron, embarrassed but fulfilled, could only utter “I’m sorry” as Kevin obviously answers back “What you got to be sorry for?”
In Beale Street, Jenkins continues to use blue as his tool to describe a moment. When Fonny and Tish go to secure a spot to live in and afterwards are walking down a street with the sun setting. There is a blue cloak that covers the background and shapes itself onto the characters. Hands clenched, smiles covering their faces, and in such ecstasy they forget they are in the middle of a road. Fonny yells as loud as he can and Tish follows suit. Nicholas Brittle’s “Agape” plays, agape is a Greek word meaning unconditional love, the euphoria one feels when there is no future or past but the moment is the only thing that matters. This moment is more than a house bought but a promising future. “You ready for this?,” Fonny asks Tish, to which she replies, “I have never been more ready than anything in my whole life.” The screen is focused on the both of them as their faces are close and eyes are fixated on each other. Blueish light settles on their faces and as the camera pans downwards their hands locked on to each other like someone will come rip them apart.
Blue, a motif Jenkins uses throughout his films, makes his scenes work as it is more than an aesthetic but a tool. Like Moonlight, the palette of coloring is crucial and the faint color blue is touched into the scene. Colors can be interpreted in different ways based on situations and context but as Barry Jenkins has shown blue to him is love. Love between two lovers like Fonny and Tish or Chiron and Kevin.
Jenkins demonstrates in his films that his goal is for Black people to see themselves in ways they have not seen before. The palette of colors, from the color blue meaning love, and darkness is not Black characters being shadows of themselves but confronting their most intimate and private troubles. If other filmmakers took notice of what Black skin can become then maybe Blackness can find itself outside of violence and in consent of what it means to just exist.