The Underground Railroad is a reminder of what makes Barry Jenkins' voice different from other Black filmmakers

The history of Black film culture harks back to the race films of the 1900s, made for Black audiences by Black directors, and grew into the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, subsequently co-opted by mainstream Hollywood producers who realised its economic potential.

Spike Lee became the undisputed tsar of urban Black experience in the '80s with She’s Gotta Have It (including a snazzy Netflix series remake, exploring millennial Black female sexuality), and movies spanning four decades investigating everything from romance, comedy, racial, and sexual themes. 

While Spike Lee’s work is replete with chaotic energy, Ava DuVernay’s seething with righteous anger, Jordan Peele’s brimming with portrayals of racial tensions through a sinister lens, perhaps no other black filmmaker’s work is as personal as Barry Jenkins, who chooses to look inward, turning difficult themes into powerful imagery, filling his work with hope for humanity.

Jenkins’ work is often informed by lived experiences derived from his own life. The personal becomes instantly universal when his Wong Kar-wai-esque aesthetics collide with his masterful articulation of deeply felt personal affiliations to his subjects. Drawing parallels to Wong Kar-wai’s work, he had this to say: “I'm watching this movie about these men, you know, in Asia who are in love. And this is so far removed from any experience I've ever had. And yet I feel things. Just as an example, right away, I thought, this is one of the most powerful things I've ever experienced in my life.”

He infuses thoughtful vignettes of Black lives into his work so it is little wonder the union between him and the indisputable master of Black lived experience, James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk became a match made in heaven. The queer growing-up tale Moonlight’s Paula, played by Naomi Harris, was inspired by his own mother who dealt with addiction issues. 

There is no better proof about Jenkins’ confessional nature of his work than when he delivered his would-have-been Oscar acceptance speech after the gaffe at the 2017 Oscars that led announcers Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty to present the Best Picture award to La La Land. Jenkins delivered his Oscar speech at another event later, in which he said, “Tarell (Alvin McCraney, his Moonlight co-writer) and I are Chiron,” referring to the protagonist of Moonlight. “We are that boy.”

What attracted Jenkins to The Underground Railroad is the hope and humanity, and breadcrumbs of redemption he saw in Colson Whitehead’s work despite its difficult subject matter. There was also the need to emphasise the collective humanity of African Americans during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras and to prevent erasure of their faces. 

Accompanying The Underground Railroad, Jenkins released a gloriously empathetic 50-minute montage short called The Gaze that turns the tables on the topic of white gaze. The subjects stare directly into the camera as it cradles towards them and retreats from them. Watching The Gaze is a meditative experience, and it aligns well with Jenkins’ desire to “re-contextualise how we view my ancestors,” as he referred to his aim for The Underground Railroad, in an interview to The Associated Press.

He wrote on Twitter, “In all my years of doing press, I've been repeatedly asked about the white gaze. Rarely have I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled. This is an answer to a question rarely asked. An act of seeing. Of seeing THEM.” 

Filmmakers like Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave) and Ava DuVernay (When They See Us) gather their viewers by the scruff and rub their noses on the hard-to-stomach, lived realities of Black lives in America. Whereas Jenkins’ approach is to lead his viewers by their hands and help them step into the world of the hitherto unforeseen imagery of othering of Black folks in America, and commiserate with them.

In an interview with NPR, Whitehead revealed he could not finish watching 12 Years A Slave because it was too hard to stomach. “…during the writing of The Underground Railroad, “While I was able to put all the stuff on the page, seeing the movie 12 Years A Slave made me really upset. And I could only get through half of it. It was one thing to put my characters through the reality of slavery, and something different to see actual humans, actors, go through some of the things I was writing about.” 

The same fate may have befallen The Underground Railroad, a Pulitzer winner with distressingly cruel imagery of slavery, replete with systemic destruction, brutal lynching, and pike burning. A monumental task, yet, Jenkins trains his lens on the humanity of the enslaved and examines in their lives, moments of redemption and hope in the face of ruthless oppression. 

Hence, Cora becomes more than a slave running for her life. “It's not about her trying to vanquish slavery. It's about her trying to reconcile this hole in her heart that she feels by this sense of abandonment from her mother,” Jenkins told NPR recently. In taking a sweeping story about escape from slavery and channeling it into the personal journey of a girl’s quest for her freedom and release from abandonment, Jenkins made the suffering empathetic.

On what inspired him to be a filmmaker, Jenkins said that he viewed films as “empathy machines.” “I thought, oh, if I can figure out a way to empathise with these people and make a film, maybe there's a way that I can harness my voice.” 

As Baldwin wrote in Sonny’s Blues, “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.” Perhaps nothing could be closer to the truth when this insight is applied to interpret Jenkins’ work. Only, he takes these personal, private, and vanishing evocations, and translates them into universally felt experiences.

The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.