Black Magical Realism & the Reconstructing of American Cinema

Part 1 of our conversation with philosopher Barrett Holmes Pitner about Ryan Coogler's latest film "Sinners".

Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan on the set of Sinners (Photo by Eli Adé)

Barrett and I met through two mutual friends, Mike and Jenny. Mike gifted me Barrett‘s book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, and Jenny then invited me to a conversation where Barrett was invited to talk about his book with us. Barrett and I connected afterwards and had some really interesting conversations about his book and the themes and ideas he explores in it.

The second time we spoke, it was right after I had seen the movie Sinners. I asked him at the end of our call if he had seen the movie yet. He had not. Without telling him much about the movie, I said, that I thought that it may have some interesting connections to his work. A few days later, he texted me that he had seen the movie and that we should talk about it. What follows is Part 1 of our conversation about the film, its impact, and why we both think it’s one of the best movies ever made.

We spoke via Zoom; he in Washington, D.C., I in Los Angeles. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Justin Scott Campbell: So I’ve written an essay on Sinners (2025) that you’ve read, and you’ve shared with me that you're going to write an essay as well. That being said, I wanted this conversation to allow our two viewings of the film to meet in the middle. And so, I'm curious for you, what was the experience of seeing the film like? Did you find it to be a good movie?

Barrett Holmes Pitner: For a film to be good, the baseline is the experience of being in the theater, you know what I mean? Like, within the construct of film, it's that experience. If you look at the promotional run for Sinners, it was essentially, “we shot it in this film stock. This is what it looks like. This is the aesthetic. So I want [the viewer] to be able to experience it in the full experience.” But even if you can't experience the full experience, these other experiences are still good, you should be able to go into the cinema and enjoy yourself.

And like, I think due to that framework of that experience, that's why a lot of people are seeing the movie like two, three times. They say to themselves, I saw it in this format, but this other viewing was on this type of film stock, and I'm going to go and make sure I see it in IMAX because I want to have that experience over and over and over again. And so that in of itself is evidence that it is a good movie. People want to have the experience more than once because they enjoy themselves for that amount of time. It’s really fascinating.

After college, I worked in the film industry, and got to see when a director was having a bad two to three days on set. Those bad two to three days can show up as being like a slow four minutes, five minutes in a movie. And during those slow four minutes, five minutes, you pull your phone out. That can kill a whole movie.

That's the difference between being a really good director for music videos or TV versus film. This was a movie where you just watched the whole thing. You didn't want to look at your phone. It was an experience. Viewed through that attention span framework, it’s a very, very good film, which is important, but to a certain extent, kind of shallow.

JSC: Say more about the shallowness of that framework.

BHP: Michael Bay is a very good director. You go to a Michael Bay movie, and you're going to have an experience for that whole time. But you're going to leave that movie theater and not have learned anything. There's not going to be any takeaway that you're going to have. It's not going to inform how you see the world or do anything. But you’ll feel the experience in the theater that a Michael Bay movie was awesome, you know, <laugh>.

JSC: Right <laugh> So, how would you describe Sinners?

BHP: You leave Sinners, and you’ve learned something. There was a transformative thing. It was more than just a movie. It's like a college course. Me and a buddy need to sit down and chat about it, and put that on the internet because there are things you can learn about it. This is the stuff where it's beyond the cinematic experience. And also, if it didn't have that cinematic experience, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

There are plenty of good movies that aren't that enjoyable, but you learn a lot. And so, you kind of endure that time because it's a joyful endurance, I guess, right? You’re saying to yourself, “I'm sure something, the important thing's going to happen in like five minutes.” Sinners was not that. So that's one of the reasons why I think that at a bare minimum, it's one of the best films of the 21st Century, and I also think it can go down as one of the best movies ever.

Barrett Holmes Pitner holding The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (photo by Moss Belkessam)

JSC: Yeah, it's my contention in my essay that this is one of the most important films of the 21st century. And I think making the further push of saying that it could be one of the greatest movies of all time, may be heard by some people as a kind of hyperbole.

BHP: Well, I think people would say it's hyperbole due to some latent, I don't want to say racism, but perhaps a cynicism that an African American is going to make a movie that's of that echelon, that's not like a niche movie, you know? Spike Lee, for example, is an incredible director, but in people's minds, it's like he's a niche director, you know?

JSC: They would say he's an incredible Black director.

BHP: The thing that makes Sinners such a good film is that aesthetically, it's gorgeous. It looks really, really good. You're not going to look at any of the shots and be like, that was a bad one. Also, the technical acting proficiency of Michael B. Jordan's two characters is just a chef's kiss. It was seamless. That's very, very difficult to do at a technical level. There is nothing easy or simple about this movie. You can study this in film school. People will look at this and ask, “How do they do that?”

I think Spike Lee also made a really good point about this movie when he said that it created a new genre of film. When I watched the movie, I kept thinking about spirit, soul, and how that's a thing that’s essentially Black culture. And you know, from my book, I used the German word geist to talk about that, where geist means spirit, soul. It also means ghost, but it also means mind and intelligence. And I think geist is also the metaphysical expression of culture. So, as Black people in America, we are victims of ethnocide, which is the destruction of our culture while keeping our physical bodies. From the Transatlantic Slave Trade, that's been foundational. And so I think Black cultural expression in many ways has been the preservation of that soul that America tries to destroy time and time again. This movie is an expression of that. The brothers in the film are trying to make something for their community where they can express their own music and have a good time. And not only are vampires trying to destroy it, but the Klan is trying to destroy it, too. This destruction of the soul is a thing. And so I think that's really important.

But what I think made it so powerful was the horror being mixed with realism. You could say that it’s like Jordan Peele’s stuff. Get Out is kind of like that too. But why I think this is different is that it reminded me a lot of Latin American literature. It is a kind of magical realism. In those stories, when the colonizers are showing up and killing all sorts of people, there's some sort of indigenous magic that they used to cope with the trauma or to survive. And that's just woven within Latin American literature. And it's like a key component of their culture. It gets expressed in a multitude of ways in their cinema. And so I think Sinners was magical realism in a distinctly Black American way. Before, if we were thinking about or imagining a good society or something, it'd be like futurism. We would just imagine a better future.

JSC: Right, which is Black Panther. That movie comes out, everyone was talking about this idea of Afrofuturism. “Look at this technology, Vibranium suits, the flying cars. And even in that film, Coogler is asking, if they had this tech, why are they not using it to help the diaspora?

BHP: And you know, Black Panther's a character that wasn't created by Black people, <laugh>.

JSC: Right <laugh>.

BHP: I think the magical realism is that the film is grounded, even though it’s historical, it's articulated as if it's grounded in the present. The magic is invoked to deal with the present moment of the film. It's not invoked to imagine another world that you live in, in the absence of the terror. It's like, no, the terror is all around us. How do we deal with it and hopefully transcend it? What's the thing that we can use to counter it? The invocation of that magic, which is like your spirit, your soul, that magic can come from your ancestors, it can come from the earth, it can come from all this stuff that was invoked here. And I think in terms of American cinema, that's quite new. I think that's like a new genre, which I found exciting. Frankly, I feel that magical realism is a thing that the African-American community actually needs. It's fascinating to think about why that developed in Latin America and hasn't really developed as much over here.

JSC: So, in our earlier conversation, I had a question for you, and I'm going to ask it now. Do you think that this movie is a Reconstructionist movie now?

BHP: So I'd say yes, but it feels weird saying that because it's such an incredible film that, you know, in attaching my <laugh> my philosophical concept to, I don't want it to be like cavalier or make it seem as though this exists only within my own framework, you know. There's a lot of hubris in that that I don't want to inject. At the same time, I do think that there is a very clear need to reconstruct how we articulate and understand the place in which we live. In Reconstructionism as a theory and the many facets of it, there is definitely a cultural reconstruction happening. And one of the tragedies of American ethnocide is that Black people are encouraged to live an alienated existence where we are removed from our spirit and our culture.

It's been articulated to us that if we forgo our own spirit, culture, and soul, we will get enough money in return, and that the transaction is worth it. Then that money never arrives. And so as you try to transcend that Faustian bargain, part of that act of transcendence is the preservation of that soul and showing the nuances, the shaping of that soul, where it has to kind of get reborn each time after the different stages of destruction. And so, I think one of the ways that Black people disconnect from the soul happens because so much trauma has been inflicted upon us [that] we don't want to talk about it. It's therapeutic to act like it never happened. And so, the awareness that African Americans have about Jim Crow can be very slim. Unless your parents were at the forefront of the Civil Rights struggle, they ain't talking to you about it <laugh>. You know, that's just not a thing. And so that's like a severing due to not wanting to relive trauma and articulate that trauma onto your kids. So having cinema describe, depict the trauma while showing the struggle of the preservation of the soul, that's reconstructing culture.

I think another really fascinating part is that Coogler demanded that he get the rights back after 25 years. That's a reconstructing: there is a system that basically says, “Hey, if we own your stuff forever, trust us, it'll be financially beneficial for you.” It makes a lot of sense for a Black person to say, “I don't agree with that. There's not really a track record for that holding up.”

JSC: Right. Sharecropping being one example of many.

BHP: Right. Watching this movie, and you go, it makes no sense for a studio and not Ryan Coogler owning the rights to this forever. That's an absolutely absurd idea. And so, how they negotiated for the rights feels Reconstructionist. I think even the marketing for it was very reconstructionist in that there was no real orthodox marketing campaign. The marketing was basically Coogler talking for ten minutes about his movie. The marketing wasn't Michael B. Jordan showing up as some idyllic, commodified individual. You know, come see this movie because he’s got muscles. I'm not saying that he's a commodified person in general, but like that's how stuff typically gets marketed. Sinners is marketed in a very soulful way. I didn't see it the first week it came out, and I felt as if I had done something wrong. <Laugh>.

Justin Scott Campbell pictured next to French artist Frantz Absalon’s wooden sculpture title Liberté, which was produced to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France (Photo by Cedric Richer)

JSC: It's funny because it comes out on Easter weekend, and I don't know if that was on purpose. Was it a way of saying, “Well, if you want the rights back in 25 years, let's see if people will come to your movie on a holiday weekend.” And I think the fact that it was so successful that they had to extend the IMAX. I guess the reason why I asked about the Reconstructionist piece, too, is because you talk about America being in these cycles. A hundred years ago, we were in this cycle of coming out of the actual Reconstruction and then going into, you know, the 20th century. In my essay, I talk about how the film Birth of a Nation and The Clansman, the book, played this role of re-telling the story of American history in a way that everyone just generally accepted as being true, even though it wasn’t. The film is based on this antebellum romantic “Lost Cause” myth in which slavery was a good thing and the Klan was needed to control Blacks in the 20th Century. And so I'm curious, what are your thoughts about Sinners doing a similar move of telling the actual history of the 1930s and the Jim Crow South? Do you think people will take from this film a similar idea as they did from Birth of a Nation?

BHP: So I guess what I'd say is that we're talking about two slightly different things, but they're all connected. My idea of Reconstructionism is that it's a simple but complicated idea. The main premise is that the America that is multiracial, that cares about equality, equal protection under the law, due process, cares about civil rights, voting rights, stuff that we think are just foundational to good democracy, was created during Reconstruction. We need to be aware of that so that we can continue to do the work of Reconstruction now. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is that there's this concept I have called the American Cycle, which really exists to show the cycles that America has been in historically, which highlights the importance of Reconstruction and, therefore, Reconstructionism. This cycle has four stages. There's the Founding Era, which is democracy mixed with ethnocide, or you could say tyranny, authoritarianism, all of those words, fascism. And that's how America was founded. They tried to have those woven together, and chattel slavery was America's iteration of tyranny, authoritarianism, fascism, and also ethnocide. And so there's an Abolitionist Era that happens right after that. And clearly people of color launch their own Abolitionist movement a millisecond after slavery commences, right? But eventually, white Americans will join the cause, and that's when the Movement forms. And so, you know, you have the 19th Century Republican party and there's the abolition movement of the 1800s that culminated in the Civil War. And then you have the Era of Reconstruction where they tried to reconstruct America into a democracy that doesn't have ethnocide, tyranny, or authoritarianism at the center of it.

And that's when we have all this progress, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, Civil Rights, the Justice Department, Department of Education. The role of the Federal Government at that time was facilitating African Americans being able to participate in American life at a level that was clearly unprecedented prior to that.

Well, Reconstruction lasted about 12 years. And after that, there was an Era called Redemption because these people who were Southerners, former Confederates, wanted to end Reconstruction. They wanted to “redeem” the South, and to redeem the South was to make it how it was before Reconstruction. Once the federal troops left the South, the Redeemers were in charge, and they worked to steadily undo all of the progress of Reconstruction. And that culminated in Plessy v. Ferguson. And that then created the foundation for the American Cycle to start anew.

And now you have a second Founding Era that is Jim Crow, where that tyranny, authoritarianism, all that stuff was back. Ethnocide was back. Only this time, instead of it being slavery, it was sharecropping and Jim Crow. And there were poll taxes and literacy exams and all this kind of stuff. The Klan came back. And so Sinners was depicted in an era that we need to be very aware of. A lot of people don't think about the horrors of that era, but this film shows the reality of Jim Crow and the Black experience of it but with a bit of magic realism too.

Essentially, Birth of A Nation was a movie that was created to launch this second Founding Era, to celebrate “The Return of America.” I think it's difficult for people to realize that. Now, when you talk about Birth of a Nation at that time, and you talk about Jim Crow and Sharecropping, we look at that as a stain on our history that was an anomaly, but these were really just a return to the beginning. That stain is also the fact that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, all those guys, owned slaves. They did horrible things. If movies were a thing that could have been made while they were alive, they would've made a movie about how great it was to do horrible things to Black people. They made a whole country built around doing horrible things to Black people. So I think it's important for people to know that Jim Crow was just an attempt to remake America into how it was at the beginning.

And so then you have the Civil Rights Movement, which is a second Abolitionist Era. And I say, this era goes all the way to Barack Obama. And the reason it lasts so long is that, due to Reconstruction, you couldn't be explicitly racist in your laws.

And so to undo, to abolish all of Jim Crow, you couldn't go, “I'm going to look through the laws and get rid of all the ones that say Black people can't get this thing or that thing.” It's all coded. It's all based on economic indicators like how educated you are, your literacy, how much money you have, stuff like that.

JSC: The neighborhood you live in, all of it. Yeah.

BHP: Yeah. And so you have to wait for the outcomes. That takes a long time. That's why you can have a book like The New Jim Crow come out in the 21st century that says, “Hey, you know what, we created this whole school to prison pipeline, and all these prisons are now located on land that used to be plantations, and now they're for-profit prisons. And these prisoners are disproportionately African American. And they're in these prisons working and not getting paid anything. And they're making products for big businesses. Sound familiar? And so prisons are the “new” Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was also the new slavery.

So, Obama is the beginning of the second Reconstruction. The big difference between Reconstruction under Obama and the first one is that they explicitly knew they were engaging in Reconstruction during the first one. That meant they had a whole policy, a whole agenda to literally reconstruct the society at the time. Reconstruction under Obama was just like vibes. At the same time, you can see voter participation, education, all sorts, all these shifts that happened under his presidency. The amount of shifts that were “the first time this has happened since Reconstruction,” was a lot. And so now Trump is here, and Trump is clearly a second Redemption Era, or a Regression era. MAGA is a name for trying to get America back to how it was before stuff like DEI and civil rights-

JSC: Universal healthcare.

BHP: Universal healthcare, exactly. Public education, the Department of Education was put into place to reconstruct America. So, the era that we're in right now [Trump’s second presidency], the importance of Reconstruction is made obvious when you know the cycle. If we don't continue to fight for Reconstruction and to continue the principles and ideals of Reconstruction, we're going to wake up and there's going to be a third Founding Era that will be similar to Jim Crow, which was similar to the founding of the nation, the actual “Birth of the Nation”.

Part two of this interview will be sent out on Friday, May 23, 2025.