“In a racist society being a black man married to a white woman means that you cannot have any kind of meaningful relationship together, any kind of real trust in each other. My black friends hate her and don’t understand her and hate me for being with her and fear us and envy us. But there it is, the remotest chance that you’re in love, and that you are able to overcome those cultural obstacles.”

Jim Collier

Based on the true experiences of Jim Collier, a young black American musician, Black Fantasy combines factual reality and poetic fantasy to express intimately what it is like to be black in contemporary white society, and in this case to be black and married to a white woman. Collier’s improvised monologue on his psychological reality forms the film’s underlying structure. Images of his fantasies, deftly interwoven with scenes of Collier talking directly to the camera, further explore the experience of a black individual whose every thought and feeling is filtered through a racial consciousness imposed on him by society and circumstance. Filmed on the streets and in several lofts in the New York area, and accompanied by original music which underscores the intensity of emotion inherent in Collier’s experience, Black Fantasy is a very personal account of one man’s conflict in love and life. […]
Life becomes a fabric of paranoia, woven out of the intensity of hostility and the excruciating anxiety of being black in a white world. To survive Collier learns to control the violent and distorted emotions that sustain his life: rage and resentment which he directs through his wife – hating her because she is so white – at the white society that oppresses his race. […] But from the nightmare labyrinth of a racist society Collier and his white woman have drawn on the extraordinary strength and will power of their love to endure the indignant stares, tolerate the hatred, and fend off the weariness of being eternally on exhibit.

From the original press-book of the film, 1972