Black Obliteration around the Corner

FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the new genre of “gentrification” films and documentaries that has emerged during the first two decades of the 21st century. Gentrification documentaries, such as Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant’s Flag Wars (2003), tend to highlight not only displacement but the effects arising from class disparities that have become hypervisible with the proximity of new, affluent residents. In fictional films, however, gentrification has been a new iteration of what Paula Massood has characterized as “Black city cinema”—films in which migration and “visual and aural iconography” play a role in defining Black bodies in city spaces. Wanzo argues that the ephemerality and ambivalence arising from the displacement produced by gentrification is perhaps best exhibited by two recent fictional films: The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019) and Residue (Merawi Gerima, 2020). These elegiac works explore how gentrification eliminates spaces for Black men to inhabit

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Art history · Gentrification · Movie theater · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Urban Planning and Governance