The Black Experience has been a subject that has sorely lacked attention within film for decades. When it is displayed, often times audiences see black people shackled in anguish and pain, and these films rarely deliver a resolution that is deemed a "happy ending," as we've seen in classics like Little Miss Sunshine or Home Alone.

I've always considered the Academy Awards a vital staple in society because it's a representation of a film year and a snapshot of the current climate of America. When you go back and examine the 49th Academy Awards, in which Rocky beat films like All the President's Men, Network and Taxi Driver (all 1976), it's a representation of how the country felt. Gerald Ford was president following Richard Nixon's disgraced resignation and he was in the midst of running for re-election. After Ford was defeated by Jimmy Carter in November 1976, people of the country, who felt like the "underdogs" in a fight for its soul and moral compass, felt like they could win again. Rocky represents that. The true underdog.

But what did black children of the era see? What do they see now when they're watching a film? Sure, they can aspire to be the next Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, but is that all they can do? Education has to play a pivotal role in laying out the roads that a child can travel. Does a young black child know that they can be the next Bradford Young, Oscar-nominated cinematographer of Arrival (2016), or Joi McMillon, the first African-American woman nominated for editing the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016)?

In the span of classic cinema, it's difficult to pull the name of Gordon Parks out of a casual conversation with moviegoers. Parks was a man who went on to adapt his own novel, as well as direct, produce and compose his own music for The Learning Tree, in conjunction with being the first major studio feature film directed by an African-American. And this absence isn't just from an average white moviegoer. This applies to many communities filled with a melting pot of cultures who doesn't recognize the inspiration that is Gordon Parks and what he was able to achieve in the late 1960s.

It should also be noted that the focus on the black man in America has sorely ignored the coming of age of a black woman. Films like the aforementioned Moonlight have made history concentrating on the trials of a boy growing up in Miami. Meanwhile, films like Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993) and Akeelah and the Bee (2006) are labeled as just unnecessary sequels or popcorn flair, yet they speak to an audience that has not been spoken to for decades in cinema. When director Dee Rees' blazed onto the scene with Pariah 2011, a film focusing on a 17-year-old teenage girl (Adepero Oduye) being raised in Brooklyn, it mirrored just about every sense of my own upbringing that was littered with strong black women and a complex analysis of the world. Look for films like The Color Purple (1985) and What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and you'll find the black woman rising above the ashes of poverty, domestic abuse and the determination to find her own voice.

The Black Experience on Film focuses on the ultimate redemption of the young black boy or girl, who is being shaped by a society that sees them one way while struggling relentlessly to be something better.

by Clayton Davis