Jennifer Holness and Sidney Fassel’s #whileBlack, a documentary about citizen journalism in the digital age, uses the past decade’s narrative of police violence – the killings of black civilians Philando Castle and George Floyd – as a foundation, but turns them into scattered stories about too many different topics. Despite the occasional intriguing formality, it ends up being too simple and unfocused to leave a lasting impression.
Describing what this movie is about gives you a long list of theoretically related ideas. These range from state violence to the ownership of digital footage, the emotional ripples that several writers and experts have called acts of black witnessing on screen, or the use of social media to document injustice. But the film’s graphic construction results in a lack of energy and dramatic momentum whenever “#whileBlack” jumps back and forth between these topics. The result is a reductive development that organizes each as a bullet point that must be touched through obligation rather than related knots and fissures in the larger social structure.
Featured subjects include Darnella Frazier, who as a teenager filmed and uploaded the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which led to worldwide protests, and Diamond Reynolds, who livestreamed the aftermath of the shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castille in a nearby St. Paul suburb in 2016. The film begins with an audio-visual delight, transporting viewers into a heightened and unsettling space through tense music and snappy montages of protests, even employing a haunting use of space to overlay audio from Frasier footage over the current location where Floyd was killed. But despite repeated references to the harassment and PTSD endured by Frasier in the aftermath, echoes of traumatic memories emerge only once or twice.
These well-crafted initial scenes quickly give way to far less sophisticated productions, with many speakers opining with emotional distance about facts and figures and even academic concepts, mostly surrounding who gets to see the social media footprint and advertising revenue from footage of Black people dying. These are just a few of the rich subjects covered in the film, which also includes snippets of various activist groups, civil liberties lawyers, and local politicians, but all of these subjects are crammed into a short 84-minute running time, and very little of it gets the attention it deserves.
The filmmakers have made the deliberate decision to avoid actually sharing footage of Black deaths and anti-Black police violence on screen to avoid straying into morbid spectacle, an admirable ethical choice that most non-Black filmmakers would not have made. Videos are something the average person can find if they want. But the result is that “#whileBlack” gains traction. The fact that these images are not used to elicit sadness or righteous anger is not the problem in itself. Rather, the problem is that they have not been replaced by worthy alternatives that stir people’s souls or provide moral guidance. Sure, just discussing police killing unarmed civilians should fill audiences with anger, but the film takes an approach that’s too sanitary and too academic to allow viewers the space to harbor these feelings.
Ideas such as restorative journalism and subsurveillance (the antonym of surveillance, which monitors observers of power reversals) are sometimes mentioned briefly, but are never the focus of actual investigation. The interviews themselves are informative but unremarkable, and the intimate footage of Frasier and Reynolds’ personal lives paints a broader picture of their situation, but their mood in the aftermath of the ill-fated digital breakthrough remains almost at arm’s length.
Cinematically speaking, their reminiscences in such dry rhythms are an opportunity for filmmakers to explore why they express themselves the way they do, in order to truly unlock the notion of the film’s deep psychological impact. But instead of giving their interviews a sense of audiovisual contrast, Holness and Fassel seem to eschew emphasis and documentary exclamations, and instead match the casualness of the tone in which their subjects speak, even when they use music that might help dig out what they’re trying to express beneath the surface.
Interviews reiterate the importance of images as a means of reclaiming power, but the images produced by #whileBlack and those reconstructed from existing sources lack the vitality that makes this feel inherently true. It seems like everyone under the sun is paying attention to the story of these two black women and the black men they photographed, but we as a society have to understand that it’s already extremely important. However, the movie itself does little to reveal why or expand on the story, as most people with an internet connection already understand.
