A documentary about citizen journalism in the digital age, Jennifer Holness and Sidney Fussell’s “#WhileBlack” uses, as its foundation, stories of police violence from the last decade — namely, the murders of Black civilians Philando Castle and George Floyd — but turns them into a scattered saga about too many disparate topics. Despite an occasional formalism that engenders intrigue, it ends far up too plain and unfocused to leave a lasting impression.
To denote what the film it about yields a lengthy list of ideas that are theoretically connected. These range from state violence, to the ownership of digital footage, to the emotional ripples of what several authors and experts refer to on screen as the act of Black witnessing, or the use of social media to document injustice. However, the movie’s raw assembly results in a lack of energy and dramatic momentum whenever “#WhileBlack” oscillates between these topics. The result is a reductive unfurling that frames each one as bullet points that must be touched upon through obligation, rather than related knots or tears in a larger social fabric.
The key subjects include Darnella Frazier who, as a teenager, filmed and uploaded the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — which led to worldwide demonstrations — and Diamond Reynolds, who live-streamed the aftermath of her boyfriend Philando Castille’s shooting in 2016, in a neighboring St. Paul suburb. The film begins with audiovisual gusto, luring viewers into a heightened, anxious space through tense music and snappy montages of protest, and it even employs a haunting use of space by layering audio from Frazier’s footage over the present-day location where Floyd was killed. However, these echoes, of places holding traumatic memory, crop up only once or twice, despite repeated references to the harassment and PTSD Frazier endured in the aftermath.
These expertly crafted initial scenes quickly gave way to a much less polished work, wherein a number of talking heads opine from an emotional distance on facts and figures, and even academic concepts, largely surrounding social media footprints and who sees the ad revenue from footage of Black death. These are a few of the plentiful subjects broached by the movie, which goes on to encompass snippets of various activist groups, civil liberties attorneys, and local politicians, but all these topics are crammed into a scant 84-minute runtime, and few are given the requisite attention.
The filmmakers make an intentional decision to avoid actually sharing footage of Black deaths and anti-Black police violence on screen to avoid straying into morbid spectacle, which is a commendable ethical choice most non-Black filmmakers might not have made. The videos are all out there for the average person to seek out, should they want to. However, this results in “#WhileBlack” pulling its punches. That these images aren’t used to elicit sorrow or righteous anger isn’t a problem in and of itself; rather, the issue is that they aren’t substituted with worthwhile alternatives that stir one’s soul, or one’s moral compass. Certainly, the mere discussion of police killing unarmed civilians ought to be enough to fill an audience with fury, but the movie ends up with too sanitized and too academic an approach to afford viewers the room for these emotions.
Ideas like reparative journalism and sousveillance — an antonym for surveillance, concerning watching the watchmen in a reversal of power — earn fleeting mentions, but are never the focus of actual inquiry. The interviews themselves are informative, but unobtrusive, and the while intimate footage of Frazier and Reynolds’ personal lives paints a slightly wider picture of their circumstances, their moods in the aftermath of their unfortunate digital breakthroughs is kept largely at an arm’s length.
That they narrate their recollections with such matter-of-fact cadence is, cinematically speaking, an opportunity to probe why they present themselves this way, in order for the filmmakers to truly unspool the movie’s notions of deep-seated psychological impact. But instead of presenting their interviews with any sense of audiovisual contrast — even music that might help unearth what they’re trying to express beneath the surface — Holness and Fussell seem to shy away from emphasis or documentarian exclamation, and instead match the tonal casualness with which their subjects speak.
The interviews circle back repeatedly to the importance of footage as a means to reclaim power, but the images “#WhileBlack” creates, and those that it re-assembles from existing sources, lack the vitality to make this feel innately true. Everybody under the sun seems to weigh in on the stories of these two Black women, and the Black men whose deaths they filmed, which we as a society have to already come to understand are of vital importance. However, the film itself does little to illuminate why, or to expand the story as most people with an internet connection already understand it.
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