Herman Gray, a professor of sociology at Stevenson College and the University of California at Santa Cruz, organized "Black Masculinity and Visual Culture." Gray navigates the murky waters of African-American youth charted by rappers and hip hop artists. His catalogue essay foregrounds that generation's "imaginative reworking and rewriting of the historical tropes of black heterosexual, masculine (hyper)sexuality, insensitivity, detachment and cold-bloodedness into new tropes of fascination and fear."(3) Yet he presents a cautionary note with respect to the reconstituting of traditional notions of heterosexuality, phallocentrism and sexism, as well as the conflicted relationship with middle class African-American and gay and lesbian communities. Particular films of note were Marco Williams's eloquent travelogue shattering black cultural myths on class and gender, "In Search of Our Fathers" (1992); and Tony Cokes' and Donald Trammel's dense, in your face journey into the relations between Althusser's theory of interpellation and Lacan's mirror stage, as constituted within hip hop orality, "Fade to Black" (1990).     Yet this distinctive array of selections and its seductive remapping of the black male psyche was as amazing for its omissions as its inclusions. Don't the realities of film and video production in the U.S. indicate that the majority of "black films" produced each year will not be feature length ­ that they will be "short" narratives, experimental and predominantly documentaries? Why was practically all of the work selected for this exhibition feature length? Why wasn't a programmer selected from the new generation of under-35 artist/curators? Why did it seem that the only criteria for a film to represent blackness ended up reifying a scientific definition of race? Aren't Madonna, Vanilla Ice, Maya Deren and Jim Jarmusch mining the same field of "blackness"? What about hybridity? Has not the "American" in American art been exposed for its aspirations to purity? What of the lessons from black British filmmakers like Maureen Blackwood's "Passion of Remembrance" or John Akomfrah's "Hardworth Songs"? Or even closer to home, the program of Afro-Latino, a video that Stuart Hall organized at the Public Theatre by Fabiano Canosa and the Latino Collaborative? Lastly, if one has not, and it seems most (black) academic film writers and curators fit this category, gone to either New York's "New Festival" organized by brother Wellington Love or the "Mix: Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film and Video Festival" held together by sister Shari Frilot, then you've missed some of the most cutting edge work done around the black body in years. Yes, of course it makes sense that Isaac Julien's signature work "Langston" would appear as part of the film screenings at "Black Male," but wouldn't it have been delightful to juxtapose his equally enthralling "The Attendant," an S&M fantasy on black gay male subjectivity from the view of a museum security guard, alongside Fred Wilson's "Guarded View" an installation of headless mannequins in museum security uniforms? Wouldn't that have begun to address the spontaneous temporality and sonic dimensionality that these theme shows seem to repress?     While it's true that the traditional cinema house remains the primary site of mass cultural reception and critical debate, most of the titles in the Whitney's "black film" program could easily have been rented at a local video store for much less than the $8 admission to the museum. The misconception that short films and their directors are only feature film "wannabees" is a disingenuous myth which has historical connections to the late 1970s rhetoric and formation of the "black film movement" (partially under the aegis of the Black Filmmaker Foundation), which we find resurfacing in the post-Spike Lee phenomenon of the 1990s. The effect of this has been a displaced reading of contemporary black visual practices. Hard to ignore is the fact that many of the works produced in the short film or video format not represented in "Black Male," are seminal to any post-modern examination and destabilization of today's race, ethnicity, national, class, gender, sexuality and high-low divisions.