Tensions rise when trailblazing blues singer Ma Rainey and her band gather at a recording studio in Chicago in 1927
Not strictly a required viewing but one of the films I caught at a screening set up by the lecturers and it left a huge impression on me. I'm hesitant to write my reflections on this film because there's just so much to write about and I don't think I can do it all justice. All the actors delivered such spectacular performances, and of course watching Chadwick Boseman, whom I had enjoyed watching as the stoic T'Challa in Marvel's 2018 film Black Panther play hot-headed teenager Levee in the film was nothing short of astounding. The camera framing of the scenes gives the film an overall intimate feel, as if we were in the studio and basement with the actors, listening in to their conversations and watching them perform, being party to their treatment, victories and obstacles. Production design-wise, the set is used very efficiently and to great effect. Most of the film is set in the recording studio, alternating between a dingy basement room where the band is relegated to most of the film and the much more comfortable main room where the recordings take place. It serves to show the contempt the studio owners have for Ma Rainey and her troupe while simultaneously putting on a magnanimous front in order to quickly get their recordings and monetize their talent.
The film deals with heart-wrenching themes of racial tension and Black excellence in a society that seeks to take advantage of it whilst tearing it down. Through it all, Viola Davies serves a powerful delivery of the indomitable Ma Rainey, alternating between uplifting and nurturing (tenderly promising to buy her lover Dussie Mae a new pair of shoes, insisting that the band record as many takes as they need in order for her nephew to deliver the song's introduction despite his speech impediment), and obstinate in her refusal to back down from or make things easier for a society she knows is pushing for her erasure - a consequence which the more idealistic Levee is confronted with when the original music he painstakingly writes is bought off him for a pittance, told that the studio did not believe they had any value, and subsequently given to a large, all-white band to record. In the wake of racial reckoning we have seen in America, this film paints a poignant and painful picture of the lived experiences of Black Americans at that point in history, and how much they had to fight for even a fraction of the recognition that would have been accorded to them if they had been white.
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