The ritual of black films begins in a downtown theater, a soiled, aging movie warehouse built for a different class and a different race. Inside the huge cavern, the empty balcony overhangs and lends a dark, cramped feeling. The gold-leaf baroque friezes are peeling, electrical wires shortout, and trash and gummy substances stick to the soles of shoes. Tonight there is a black film, but last week it could have been skin flicks, and before that, a mix of the two in an all-night, sex-actionviolence triple bill. A new group of moviegoers gather. Saturday night is every night. The dress is eleganza. The lights go out. The screen holds black faces, speaking their own tongue, doing what they and many other blacks want to do. Cat-calls and right-ons and squeals of women's delight combine to make an immediate reality. The streets are only 100 feet behind you. Police cars cruise, prostitutes walk into bars, port bottles share space with hunched men in dim doorways. The history of black filmgoing is short. Before 1971, blacks did not want to see Stepin Fetchit, Amos 'n' Andy or Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? icons. White dream-puff musicals, westerns, and thrillers made even less sense. The reaction against the prevailing dirty, sexy, emotional, violent, child-like black stereotypes led to conservative counter moves. The black community responded in a manner ranging from the authoritarian, politically passive and sternly religious Nation of Islam to plain, hard-working, middle-class Negroes. The reaction against this reaction came but a few long years ago with the Watts rebellions and the Black Panthers. The film artists chronicling these recent experiences have distilled their own self-made stereotypes, most n tably the All-Powerful Black Stud. If their reaction has come full circle to approximate initial white stereotypes, it remains to be seen whether they are used ironically or unwittingly. Nonetheless, as the industry did for poor whites during the depression, black films offer escape from gloom, roaches, and social confusion of center-city colonies. This image warehouse offers a means of reviewing life, exaggerated or absurd as it may be, and directs the audience towards the coolest route out. For generations films and the electric media have shaped collective white perceptions. Yet film is a new influence in shaping or diffusing the black community's perception of itself. As Ralph Ellison and Otis Redding have distilled its essence in word and song, the first steps toward a parallel achievement in film have been made.