It's one of Hollywood's most iconic opening moments –?the camera sizing up John Travolta as he struts down the sidewalk to the Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever (1977) –?and one that was, to hear critic and filmmaker Elvis Mitchell tell it, more or less a brazen steal from the Black cinema of the era.To get more news about Watch the video online, you can visit our official website.

"Every generation gets its own Elvis, or Eminem," Mitchell quips in his new documentary Is That Black Enough for You?, as he cuts between Travolta's prancing Tony Manero and Richard Roundtree's formidable entrance to the 1971 blaxploitation classic Shaft, their propulsive theme songs and sartorial swagger an unmistakable echo of each other.

The observation is typical of Mitchell's playfully provocative, historically incisive documentary –?co-produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher – a rigorous, richly entertaining, and deeply personal work that surveys the explosive period of creativity in Black filmmaking from 1968 through to 1978.

Ignited by civil rights upheavals and film studios looking to capitalise on audiences in urban markets, it was an unprecedented decade for Black movies, though one that has often been lumped under the catch-all term blaxploitation –?an affectionate label that nonetheless lent a veneer of disrepute to films that were socially and politically engaged.

As Mitchell notes, it was "a brand that offered acknowledgement and dismissal simultaneously".

Writing and narrating, the former New York Times and Village Voice critic goes beyond the pimps, hustlers and wah-wah guitar sounds to locate these films in the larger historical context of Black cinema, taking a considered approach to the subject in all of its complexity – one that elevates his documentary above a mere celebratory retrospective.

For Mitchell, who was born in 1958, it's also a personal story — of his own cinematic coming of age, and his love for an art form that has historically failed to reciprocate his affection.

"It's been a lifetime of watching, and thinking, and writing about movies," Mitchell muses at one point, over clips of 20th century blackface, minstrelsy and classical Hollywood's demeaning bit parts for Black performers like Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best. "I keep coming back, despite the waves of disregard they keep hitting me with."That sense of the personal is burnished by the recollections of featured guests, from those old enough to be rich repositories of cultural history –?like the great Harry Belafonte, still equal parts smooth and spiky at 95 –?to the actors who also came of age watching these movies (Samuel L Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Laurence Fishburne) and those who've inherited their legacy (Zendaya, a generational outlier here, presumably on hand for, you know, kids).

If it moves at a fast clip, then it's a testament to the sheer amount of work to highlight –?no easy task, considering the range and richness of films that include such outside-the-mainstream fare as Bill Gunn's haunting horror parable Ganja Hess (1973), William Greaves's time-bending Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), or Charles Burnett's working-class masterpiece Killer of Sheep (1978), a once-forgotten film that Mitchell dubs "the crowning achievement of the decade".

Is That Black Enough for You?!? overflows with analysis of these and dozens of other films, including familiar hits like Shaft, Super Fly (1972) and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), whose scores –? that Mitchell says "weren't just textures, but detonations of thought and sound" – pioneered the marketing of tie-in soundtracks years before it became de rigueur Hollywood practice.