Things You Can Tell by Looking

Abstract

FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo jumps into the critical fray generated by Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing (2021). Wanzo notes that much of the scholarly debate on Passing is illustrative of tendentious debates around authenticity, depictions of history and trauma, and cultural ownership, as well as a too common disinterest in aesthetics as a primary way to address questions of blackness in art. She suggests that it is the choice to deploy beauty as a way to explore black suffering that is the most notable part of Hall’s debut. This strategy needs to be understood as belonging to a cinematic genealogy that makes the beautiful essential to the depiction of black oppression and that is just as essential to black film as the racial melodrama: the social issue film. In Passing, Hall foregrounds the beautiful as an aesthetic practice that addresses social issues in order to disrupt normative claims about what any black film should do or be.