Contemporary African American film directors, now more firmly in control of the medium's production apparatus, are articulating a new black film aesthetics on their own terms. This newly advanced aesthetics addresses and revises a legacy of severely biased and impaired representations in Hollywood rooted in vaudeville minstrelsy and practices of Jim Crow racial segregation. This essay will limit its analysis of this broad topic and focus in particular on the close-up of the face. A shot that traditionally mediates narrative agency, the close-up expresses empathy through the micro-physiognomy of facial reactions, and overall identification with the lead protagonist, usually defined by receiving a majority of the film's close-ups. The latter allows the spectator to experience the diegetic world directly through the hero/ine's eyes. Pascal Bonitzer posits the close-up as crucial for establishing the psychology of a character in the history of cinema, communicating a new complexity of desire and perversion: ‘Once the body had been rendered immobile and attention had become focused upon the face or the gaze, the law, desire and perversion made their entrance into the cinema.’ Our question here is to understand how recent black film directors attempt to communicate this complexity of the gaze, the total effect of the close-up and its affiliated expressive spectrum of desire and perversion, in new ways that accommodate a black perspective, one actively depicting that black faces matter on screen and in everyday life.

My discussion will explore the innovative cinematic aesthetics of the close-up in three films: Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014), Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station (2013) and Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016). It will do so with a consideration of the contributions of the film's respective cinematographers Bradford Young, Rachel Morrison and James Laxton, who alongside the entire production team, helped realise the directors’ unique visions on screen. All three films depart from traditional genre conventions such as the African American history melodrama (Selma) or the inner-city ghetto or hood genre (Fruitvale Station; Moonlight) that define audience expectations usually in terms of clichés of singular heroic action to overcome systemic oppression or pervasive milieus of criminality that entrap its inhabitants.