Compared to critics, it was not so simple for me, as a historian, to parse the filmmaking in Judas from what you might call its history making; that is, the historical narrative it presents. I watched Judas as a movie lover, a devoted Oscars follower, and a fan of the actors, but also as a student of history currently writing a dissertation. I recognized creators who, like me, were struggling to assemble a historical narrative, albeit one in a different medium than my own. Through such a lens, the flaws that critics identified appeared, to me, to be the familiar challenges of writing history.
One critic, for instance, faulted Judas for lacking a sense of place, which, at its core, is a problem of context. The film opens with a sequence of stirring archival footage that moves at a breakneck pace from scenes of protests following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to interviews with Black intellectuals H. Rap Brown and Angela Davis and, finally, to the work of Black Panther Party chapters across the country. This montage successfully situates the audience in the general intellectual firmament of the late 1960s, but it is less successful in grounding viewers in Chicago, where the story unfolds. The sequence leaves out developments specific to the Chicago Freedom Movement, the Daley political machine, and the particular abuses of the Chicago Police Department. To be sure, none of the footage included is irrelevant to the story in Judas. However, a focus on the national context ensures that those watching enter the milieu of the film with little to no grasp of the immediate Chicago context that gave rise to the local Panthers and to Hampton.
Historians know this problem well. What does our audience need to know to understand the significance of this story? How much is too much background? How do we best strike a balance between the national and local scales? King would have had to grapple with similar questions in the production of Judas, and the finished product reflects the difficulties we all face in answering them.