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Chapter 11 looks at an African American family in 1970s Watts after the civil rights movement and the Watts riots. Its main character is the slaughterhouse worker Stan from Charles Burnett’s independent film Killer of Sheep (1977). In this film, Burnett makes a powerful counterargument in the debate on the “dysfunctional black family,” which a decade earlier was described by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Johnson administration as being mired in a “tangle of pathology.” Stan is neither shiftless nor lazy but tries to get ahead and secure a decent living for his family. He endlessly struggles for the survival of his nuclear family but is constrained in his efforts and their success by the racist conditions of his life in 1970s America. The chapter approaches the massive debate on the black family and fatherhood in contemporary America through the film and its public reception, both in the 1970s and 1980s and after its re-release in 2007. Thus, the author uses the film to explore this discourse from the 1960s to today, from Patrick Moynihan to Barack Obama, and analyzes their comments on black families and fatherhood as well as those by their critics.

This chapter considers more resistant forms of national remembrance than those created for the bicentennial celebrations. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of the American social fabric, alternative films depicted a more contentious relationship between a historic present and past. This chapter argues for the persistence of filmmakers’ interest in documentary, even as they experimented with other media or blended fiction and nonfiction. Long-form films and photo-books by the collective Visual Communications (Wataridori: Birds of Passage [1974] and In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America [1977]), documentaries made from the collaboration between anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and director Lynne Littman (Number Our Days [1976]), and the artisanal filmmaking of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]) presented more nuanced stories about the resilience of the city’s marginalized communities. Their work on Asian Americans in Little Tokyo, elderly Jews in Venice, and African Americans in Watts denounced national myths of bootstrap individualism and upward mobility, as well as industrial decentralization and uneven downtown redevelopment under the Bradley administration.

This chapter uses Hwesu S. Murray v. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., (1987) as a theoretical tool for analysing three films: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977); Kasi Lemmon’s The Caveman’s Valentine (2001); and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Considering the Court’s holding that Murray’s sitcom proposal that eventually became NBC’s The Cosby Show was not a “novel” idea and therefore not intellectual property, this chapter turns to culture as a site where images of black people and the production of knowledge around the meaning of those images has directly affected the social and political lives of black people. Film is used to demonstrate the troubling ways in which the government and society view black men’s relationship to black families by reading Murray through the 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and the President’s National Fatherhood Initiative. Doing so reveals the insidious haunting effects legal activity and social policy impose on black fathers, and in particular the father-daughter relationship. The haunting is compounded by nationalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism.

This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.