Two Good Films: "Black At Yale" and "Street Corner Stories"
Celebrate MLK Jr. Day with two groundbreaking documentaries by Warrington Hudlin.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one two reasonably under-the-radar movies from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, two early documentaries by Warrington Hudlin, who went on to produce films directed by his brother Reginald Hudlin (“House Party,” 1990; “Boomerang,” 1992), among other initiatives. 1974’s hour-long “Black at Yale: A Film Diary” damningly and movingly testifies to isolation and institutional racism at Hudlin’s alma mater (in case you were thinking that all that DEI business is overblown). “Street Corner Stories” (1979) is some kind of slice-of-life masterpiece about Black men and the art of raconteurship at a New Haven coffeeshop. Heavy slang, local accents, and a rough sound mix make the tales, tall and otherwise, sometimes hard to understand (to these lily-white ears, anyway), but if “Black At Yale” is a document of exclusion, “Stories” is its opposite — a warm, tough, funny portrait of a community and a culture sustained in resistance by anecdote. (Both films have been restored and archived by Yale and are available on YouTube; thanks to Maya Cade’s invaluable Black Film Archive for the heads up.)
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