Introducing: That Black Cinema Press Life with Jonita Davis

My journey to cinema writing and criticism began with a childhood spent watching way too much TV. A Gen-X kid born on the cusp of the millennial generation line, I cut my teeth on TV shows like Webster, The Cosby Show, Family Matters and Punky Brewster. I came of age with films like Goonies, House Party, Love and Basketball and others I really didn’t understand at the time. I consumed TV that was way beyond age and understanding and continued well into adulthood, like Living Single, Girlfriends and Law and Order SVU. TV and cinema were my best friends, my safe space and my constant confidants.

TV and film for me and others my age were life. We were latchkey kids, kids whose parents held parties in the front room, while we huddled around a black-and-white tube TV in the back bedroom. There, we were babysat by the TGIF lineup, and I can’t imagine what life would be like without that experience.

Despite the exposure, I didn’t want to become a critic until well into my college career. I was a young aspiring writer, churning out short stories and poems, and my interest was in the story. That came from both of my grandmothers. My paternal grandmother introduced me to Star Wars in theaters and other sci-fi worlds via the books she sold at her flea market booth. My late maternal grandmother was Trekkie who loved professional wrestling and the Lord. The juxtaposition of Noah’s Ark and such tales with Roddy Piper and the Undertaker’s escapades definitely kept my mind ticking.

Both made books accessible—the Bible and anything by Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Octavia Butler, along with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and James Baldwin. I was always interested in stories of people overcoming, reuniting, exploring and even creating at the heart of the action/drama/comedy. I consumed these stories and I wanted to write them. I told people as early as the third grade that I wanted to write books when I grew up.

Now, I didn’t want to become a critic in my girlhood, but I was following them. However, it was only because of the way the Chicago TV critics dissected a story. It was like reverse math for me. Instead of creating a story, they pulled it apart and dove deep to discover a hidden meaning and to determine if the story was told well. Every weekend, I loved watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert break down my favorite films into basic elements that either worked or didn’t. Dean Richards worked daily to hit the high points of a film to come at the essence of a film and a grade in judgment.

As a latchkey Black kid who sometimes watched too much cinema, these three white men had an impact. Their uncanny ability to see the “bones” of a story was like a superpower to me, one I tried to emulate. I felt that my purpose was to break down stories so that I can figure out the formula for writing my own someday.

Writing stories was always my goal. And I maintained from the beginning of my career in writing and journalism until I wrote my first entertainment pieces. This started around 2006 with my first stories about potholes and Halloween campus parties while I was a reporter for the Purdue Voice. Then in 2009, I wrote a commissioned book Michigan City’s Marinas, which is a part of a pictorial book series. However, I used those captions to write a story that told a story beyond the photos. It was the first to read like a novel in the connected captions.

Then, in grad school, around 2013, my adviser Dr. Dan Punday introduced me to cultural studies. At its core, it’s the idea that any point in history can be dissected and explained through cultural elements—which include film and TV. That was what Siskel, Ebert and Richards were doing, their superpower! Their ability to break a story down was now a way to analyze the society we live in. I started reading bell hooks. In Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, she was doing the work I always wanted.

It wasn’t until 2016 that I wrote my first piece of film criticism for print. It was a look at how the words of victimhood weaken the comic and cinema character Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad. She fights the Justice League armed with a baseball bat and an occasional glitter cannon. She has to wield some strength and superhuman power in order to knock Batman to his bottom in the comics. But the criticism at the time reduced her entire arc to the role of Joker’s girlfriend. The Suicide Squad film, love or leave it, corrects this misreading.

I never looked back.

You can read about the rest of my career in my bio. The academic work, the essays, the journalism, the books. My first novel, Carrying On, released in July 2022. It’s a mystery-comedy novel that has gotten some good reviews so far.

You can see how deep my cinematic roots go and where my storytelling reporting style comes from. For DETOUR, I now get to share stories of my travels as a Black entertainment journalist. I also get to explore the journey that filmmakers, screenwriters, craft teams, and actors have taken in their quest to bring a film to the screen.

I’ll be breaking down the stories told onscreen, all the way down to the elements at the intersection of race, place, and cinema. I’ll explore what this all means to you, the reader and moviegoer, along with how the significance of a journey plays into the making of the story as well. Check out this recent article about the film Umbrella Men. I will also tell the stories of fellow critics, like the story of this Black critic covering the Venice International Film Festival.

Jonita Davis (jonitadavis.com) is a film critic, writer, and pop culture junkie behind the online publication The Black C.A.P.E. Magazine (theblackcape.com, @theblackcapemag). She is also a freelance writer, a published author, an English professor, and a podcaster. She has a master’s degree in English (Literary Criticism Concentration) from Purdue University and teaches writing at Waubonsee Community College. Her previous works include Michigan City’s Marinas (History Press 2009), Michigan City’s Washington Park (History Press 2011), Questioning Cultural Appropriation (Enslow Publishing 2019), and We Gon Be Black Today (Chicago Review Press, 2023).