I’d also recommend this wonderful essay on The Color Purple by Robert Daniels for the New York Times: “The Color Purple Tips Its Hat to Classic Black Musicals” about the way in which this new film might be seen as a wonderful syllabus in terms of the ways in which it embodies and references the Black musical in film history as a tool of resistance against stereotypes, a tool of freedom and of joy. 

Daniels writes, “Even when Hollywood saw little use for Black performers other than as mammies and butlers, the musical genre, a storytelling mode composed of magical realist fantasy and hoofing artistry, provided space for Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge to manifest their glamorous glow. Through rapturous songs, sung in resplendent gowns and tailored tuxedos, the promise of Black liberation was heard.” And he continues, “The genre’s possibility for emancipation is showcased in the latest film version of The Color Purple, where in the main character, Celie, “her boundless imagination mirrors the continued influence of what [director Blitz] Bazawule called ‘the universal Black cadence,’ how an ordinary shuffle or a game of patty cake can become a song. That practice imbues The Color Purple with an inventiveness to empower Celie’s story, positioning the arts as an important language for resistance and a necessary tool for Black people to be more than vessels for trauma.” 

When director Julie Dash found that, following the release of her luminous, powerful film Daughters of the Dust (1991)--one of the greatest films of all time--she received only offers to make films about the Civil Rights and the Klan and all the stories she wanted to tell were rejected by the Hollywood powers that be, she found her own path forward as an artist outside of Hollywood mainstream, writing a novel, working in television, making films for museums. In a Hollywood that even still, too often rejects the stories of great directors like Julie Dash and expects Black filmmakers and Black stories to always and only center on slavery and the Civil Rights-- “vessels for trauma,” as Daniels puts it--The Color Purple stands apart. And while it’s difficult not to be cynical -- I am not sure how much has changed since Dash first began making films or even since the #OscarsSoWhite campaign -- I will hope that the unapologetic vision of The Color Purple is just one film among many more unique films to come out of Hollywood from Black creators.