#simondavis

Being a Charter Subscriber of The Criterion Channel has been a wonderfully beneficial experience as a film lover.  The catalog may be intimidatingly large, but the good people at The Criterion Channel do a great job of helping people discover films and curate tastes via their themed collections, social media presence and direct e-mail campaigns.  It was through an e-mail, in fact, that I learned about Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, and it hit me in the feels like a dart hitting a bullseye to win a match.  I will be telling any and everyone willing to listen about this film moving forward, as I cannot fathom it not speaking to them in the same way it spoke to me.

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama feels like a creative spark too grand, ambitious and deeply personal for relegation to a single medium.  Born from the mind of Topaz Jones, directing duo rubberband and a number of other collaborators, Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama takes place over the span of an album and a New York Times Op-Doc selected short film full of home video footage, interviews, music video vignettes and short narrative slices of life.  All of this film footage is centered around the concept of The Black ABC’s, a flashcard-based initiative created in the 1970s by a group of Chicago educators, which is updated to fit a modern day sensibility and aesthetic while still feeling deeply aware of the cultural and historical contexts from which the idea was birthed.  At just over half an hour long, the piece is long enough to play like an HBO special, but short enough to not venture into the realms of preaching, punching down or feeling didactic, choosing instead to be deeply relatable to all who are receptive, and doubly so for those of a particular age raised in the quote-unquote Black experience. 

The framework of The Black ABC’s is integrated masterfully, with each short connected vignette managing to almost immediately get it’s intended main point and subtext across, the majority without the use of dialogue.  For example, W is for Worldstar emulates the relatively recent phenomenon of viral internet fights, with Topaz Jones serving as the recipient of a collective beatdown presented via rapid-fire cuts between handheld footage that makes it hard to discern exactly what’s going on.  This sequence not only captures the main idea of just how dangerous and overly aggressive a hood setting can be for a young man, but it manages to illustrate the secondary point of these very personal and humbling experiences serving the carnal need for entertainment via the new technology of cellular phone cameras, with many bystanders choosing to get close to and film a fight (unfair or otherwise) rather than insert themselves and break it up.  Several letters are also assigned to be brief segments of songs from the Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama album, playing out like trailers for music videos that manage to hold together and represent the broader ideas within the short film due to their equally important status within Topaz Jones’ personal hierarchy of influence and inspiration.  Sprinkle in some candid childhood memories and testimonies from older members of the Jones family, and you’ve got an emotionally and visually visceral gumbo.

What really sets the ideological boundaries for the film, however, are the interview segments.  Each of these sequences manages to get some lofty but important ideas across in regard to the betterment of the collective Black community without coming off as standoffish or overly intellectual.  Rather than flex for self-importance, each of the interview subjects opts to appeal to logic, intellect or emotion (if not all three) while speaking on ideas like educational reform, self-sustainable living, understanding the importance of intellectual property, following your heart versus following the pack, political and personal activism and so on.  Be it poets like Ivy Sole or Black Thought, educators like Rodney Jackson, activists like Francis Perez, Kaity Rodriguez or Keith White, or even family members like Emma Janice Jones, each of the unique and deeply personal shares all have a uniform intention : knowledge of self that leads to empowerment and, eventually, freedom.