"This is war. I’ve never seen it, but I lived through it today.” So says a woman from the West Philadelphia neighborhood under assault in Let the Fire Burn, a sorrowful, enraging documentary composed solely of archival footage surrounding the 1985 confrontation between the city’s cops and the African-American radical community MOVE. A long-stoking, deadly afterburn of the neo-revolutionary violence that arose in America 20 years previously, the tragedy is seen here as a combustion of two forces, both guilty of arrogance, excess, and abuses. The final battle—ended, after 10,000 rounds of police ammunition fired, by a bomb dropped on the MOVE house, resulting in 11 deaths and 61 residences destroyed by fire—answers the question of how much worse the consequences are when the stewards of public order operate according to their most callous and hateful instincts. Lastingly worse, in a way that kills civic self-respect as well as innocents (five of the fatalities were children).
Director Jason Osder anchors the narrative in a pair of legal proceedings: the hearings of a commission appointed to investigate the events, and the deposition of 13-year-old Michael Ward, the only child from the MOVE headquarters to survive. The immediacy of the testimony, halting or furious, and the fresh psychological wounds of the witnesses justify Osder’s decision to forego original interviews; while they’re edited into and contextualized by news clips, there’s blunt force in the anger of two MOVE women insulting their interrogators, monotonal policemen skating around self-incrimination, and young Michael, burn scars visible on his face, recounting the spartan life of children in the communal home and his precarious hours of refuge during the May 13 shootout and inferno. The testimony is uncolored by nostalgia, haziness, or the studied quality often acquired from years of retrospection; self-revelation comes spontaneously. When a black minister expresses inability to comprehend a police tale of fugitives reentering the burning house, a cop blurts, “How could you? They’re MOVE members.”
On a socio-political level, local news excerpts suffice for chronicling the central feud in Let the Fire Burn; there’s little nuance in this ideological clash, from MOVE’s primitivist lifestyle (with symptoms of malnutrition seen in their swollen-bellied, unclothed kids) and profane harassment of black working-class neighbors by loudspeaker, to the Philadelphia authorities’ aggressive “pushback” tactics, lingering after the mayoralty of strong-armed Frank Rizzo to inform his theoretically more tempered successors’ rhetoric and actions. (After a 1978 skirmish that left a Philly cop dead, DA Ed Rendell, a future Democratic mayor and governor, is heard praising the “commendable restraint” of the PD, just as we see police repeatedly kicking a prone man in the head.) As the investigation proceeded up the chain of command, the fire and police commissioners traded accusations on whether an order to extinguish the blaze was ever received, implicating Wilson Goode—the city’s first black mayor—as either a liar or perhaps just someone whose reign was held in no respect in the city’s other power centers.
Osder not only breaks from the fashionable historical-doc template with his all-archival choice, he captures the true heart of terror with scenes of TV reporters and, most piercingly, local citizens crouching, running, and cowering as tear gas and smoke billow through residential streets, suddenly faced with the unchecked violence of rogue “law and order.” Long before a title card emphasizes that no one was ever criminally charged for the destruction unleashed upon West Philly, the grim tapestry of lies, loathing, and violence that marks the MOVE saga is a damning legacy for urban governance to transcend. --Slant
I've now watched three films by Joseph P Mawra, if you count Miss Leslie's Dolls, directed by Joseph G Prieto, who might be the same person. Drive-in grindhouse movie producers of the 1960s did not leave comprehensive paperwork behind. Either way, this is more of a chance than I'll give some legitimately great directors, so what gives? After all, the first thing I saw from him was Shanty Tramp, a film which treats lynching and interracial sex as equally shocking and taboo. I realise this kind of exploitation movie is meant to shock and discomfort, but I'm not sure the aim is to leave you firmly convinced that everyone involved in writing, producing and directing this is a piece of shit.
But Mawra is not a criminal! It's society that's the criminal, man! Murder in Mississippi suggests that Mawra only made Shanty Tramp because the demand for racist pornography in 1960s America was so intense that if he hadn't filled it, someone else would have. This is not, I grant you, much of an excuse, but putting the disengaged, half-arsed Shanty Tramp next to the dynamic, relentless Murder in Mississippi makes it easy to see which story lit a fire under the director. It's the latter, and it's an explicitly anti-racist story.
Obviously Murder in Mississippi is still thousands of miles south from tasteful. Tarantino would blanche at the amount of racial slurs, and any violence meted out on its female lead reliably ends up ripping the neckline of her dress down to the bra. The pressures of the poverty row production often show - there's one scene where a character misses his mark falling over and ends up in the shadow of the camera. But there are also tightly constructed montages of looming, leering racists in vivid noir lighting, and the plot - involving racist Southern policemen trying to cover up their murder of a civil rights activist - is both tawdry enough to work as a sleazy Z-movie and genuinely provocative.
It ends in exactly the way Shanty Tramp doesn't, with a speech from Lyndon Baines Johnson about the evil of racism. There are also lengthy scenes where the heroes register African-Americans to vote, and persuade them that voting can make a difference. I imagine a lot of the original audience would have regarded this as rank filler, but viewed with over fifty years' difference it's a lot less dull than the endless whipping and slapping that pad out Mawra's other films. There is a real anger to this, and its tasteless aspects amplify, rather than undercut, the moral fury. --Graham Williamson, Letterboxd
Slavery by Another Name challenges one of America’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. This documentary tells a harrowing story of how in the South, even as chattel slavery came to an end, new forms of involuntary servitude, including convict leasing, debt slavery and peonage, took its place with shocking force — brutalizing and ultimately circumscribing the lives of hundreds of thousands of African Americans well into the 20th century. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold and coerced to do the bidding of masters. The program spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments, filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today. The program also features interviews with Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize- winning book “Slavery by Another Name” and with leading scholars of this period. --PBS
Melvin Van Peebles (a key black filmmaker who was acknowledged in a 1967 Festival tribute) narrates this documentary, made for European television, on the history of African American screen images. Van Peebles describes what to him is more than a travesty, but a tragedy: as a boy, he learned shame while sitting in movie theaters. (As an adult, Van Peebles would powerfully address these very images in his film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.) Classified X traces the progression from the "old Negro" stereotypes, to the "new Negro" of liberal postwar Hollywood, to the "no Negro" of today. And it shows, with simple irony, how very much alike they are. Witnessing the early all-black cinema's attempts to "buy a few precious seconds of black humanity on screen," then seeing Leslie Howard portraying a Negro, we have to ask, along with Van Peebles, How does Hollywood get away with it? --BAMPFA
Illuminating a mostly forgotten but deeply chilling event, “The Tulsa Lynching of 1921” documents what is probably the worst race riot in American history. Director Michael Wilkerson tells the harrowing story cleanly and very effectively, using a combination of recollections by now-elderly witnesses, commentary from historians, celebrity voice-over readings of contemporary accounts, and an impressive collection of black-and-white photographs and some film depicting the destruction of an entire black community.
In 1921, Tulsa was considered the “Oil Capital of the World,” and the black community was among the most prosperous in the nation. The Greenwood section of town was known both as “Little Africa” and as “The Black Wall Street.” The film does an excellent job of concisely laying out the various conditions that set the stage for the riot, from the return of unemployed (and heavily armed) veterans from WWI to the popularity of the film “Birth of a Nation” and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.
The catalyst for the violence was a misunderstood incident where a black man named Dick Rowland accidentally fell onto a white female elevator operator, who screamed for help. As historian Don J. Guy points out, though, this wasn’t the real incident — that occurred at the local newspaper, The Tulsa Tribune, which published an afternoon article distorting the event and calling for a lynching. By that evening, crowds of white men were gathered at the jail seeking blood, and violence soon broke out between them and a much smaller group of blacks.
Supposedly to keep the public order, the sheriff began deputizing any white citizen who wanted to join the police force, and soon hundreds of Klansmen, now representing the law, began organizing what, in the words of historian and retired General Ed Wheeler, was effectively a military operation.
By the next day, over 300 blacks had been killed, over 1,200 homes had been burned, and the surviving African-American population of Tulsa was forced into confinement. Those who were vouched for by whites were released, but made to wear ribbons that immediately bring to mind the later yellow stars used by the Nazis to mark the Jews.
The newspapers continued to refashion the incident, and all copies of the initial incendiary article disappeared. The city council passed laws that effectively made it impossible for the black community to rebuild, and a tent city was created to house the impoverished homeless population.
Wilkerson presents a fascinating story, which is even more horrific for its having remained under-acknowledged. The eyewitnesses who were children at the time relate some specific details that make the story even more vivid — a white man, for example, telling of a young girl happily handing out gum that clearly had been looted from a black store. The written accounts, read without any ornate interpretation, give a strong sense of the total shock of the incident. This is a film that could certainly become a staple of history classes. --Variety
The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is famous, but for some time it’s been available only in washed-out prints with poorly translated, white-on-white subtitles. The newly translated and subtitled 35-millimeter print at Film Forum is presumably the version that was privately screened in August for military personnel by the Pentagon as a field guide to fighting terrorism. Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski volunteered this blurb: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.” I wonder if these politicos are aware that Pontecorvo’s epic was once used by the Black Panthers as a training film? In fact, not much in the current Iraq situation is historically comparable to the late-fifties Algerian struggle for independence dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, but its anatomy of terror remains unsurpassed—and, woefully, ever fresh.
The movie’s original U.S. distributor inserted the disclaimer: “Not one foot of newsreel or documentary film has been used.” That disclaimer might still be helpful to first-time viewers. The Battle of Algiers has often been compared to Potemkin as an example of incendiary, documentary-style political filmmaking. But Eisenstein’s classic was a flurry of highly theatrical techniques; there was a formality to the revolutionary chaos he unleashed, with carefully patterned crowds surging on cue. Pontecorvo’s approach is much looser and more caught-in-the-moment, although everything is carefully choreographed. What perhaps accounts for the extraordinary realism is a combination of Pontecorvo’s chief neorealist influences, Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan (the movie that inspired Pontecorvo to become a filmmaker), and his own wartime experience as an anti-Fascist partisan who commanded the Milan Resistance in 1943. The Battle of Algiers is a movie made by a director who knows (in both senses) whereof he shoots.
Co-written by Franco Solinas, who would later write Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, the film was originally intended as a piece of agitprop for the cause of anti-colonialism. (De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country in 1962, so the struggle was still fresh for audiences.) Subsidized by the Algerian government, the movie began as a sketchy screenplay written in a French prison by Saadi Yacef, the rebel leader of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Upon his release, Yacef approached three filmmakers: Luchino Visconti, Francesco Rosi, and Pontecorvo (demonstrating that, whatever else might be said about them, some revolutionaries have good taste in movie directors). Yacef not only became the film’s producer but also stars in it as El-hadi Jaffar, the military leader of the FLN. The existential ramifications of this casting are breathtaking: When we witness the bombings of civilians in the cafés and dance halls of Algiers’s European Quarter, or the hit-and-run assassinations of French policemen, we are seeing re-creations of what Yacef himself perpetrated. When Jaffar is trapped and about to be blown up by French paratroopers in the casbah, Yacef is acting out his own arrest. What must have been going through his head on the set?
The other rebel protagonist is Ali La Pointe, played by Brahim Haggiag, an illiterate peasant chosen by Pontecorvo for his riveting, prole-hero features. Ali—his eyes, to be exact—is the fervid center of the movie. A petty thief, he is radicalized in prison by the executions he witnesses, and recruited by the FLN upon his release. (To test his mettle, and to make sure he’s not a spy, Jaffar orders him to assassinate a French cop.) Ali is not a character, exactly; he’s the embodiment of downtrodden Muslims clamoring for liberation. Pontecorvo has a great eye for faces that carry within themselves a depth charge, and in Ali he gives us an unforgettable mask of suffering and rage. There is destiny in that acetylene glower of his; it tells us that time is on his side.
His adversary is Colonel Mathieu, played by Jean Martin—the film’s only professional actor—and modeled on General Massu, the military commander of Algeria. (Ironically, Martin, primarily a stage actor, had once been blacklisted in France for signing a manifesto against the Algerian war.) If Ali is fire, Mathieu is dry ice. He represents military efficiency at its most draconian: His lecture to his paratroopers about how to decapitate the FLN is an object lesson in the calculus of anti-terrorist warfare. When a press conference is staged with a captured FLN leader, and his words begin to stir sympathy in the room, Mathieu shuts down the show. He may represent Pontecorvo’s paradigm of colonialist thuggery, but as is so often true with movie villains, he gets the best lines. This man, who fought as a hero on the side of the Resistance and served during France’s recent defeat in Indochina, is given his due—if only to reinforce a deeper point. When Mathieu tells the reporters that they must accept the consequences of war if they want France to win, he is exposing the ugly truth behind all policing; people in power prefer not to know about the dirty work—the torture—that keeps them there.
Pontecorvo makes it clear that terrorists must also face their own moral reckoning. The strongest scene in the movie comes when three FLN women drop their veils and assume a Western look in order to infiltrate the European Quarter and plant explosives in two cafés and an Air France ticket office. We see tired businessmen at a bar, passengers waiting to board buses, teenagers dancing, and, most pointedly, a baby licking an ice cream cone—all soon to be blown to bits. Is Pontecorvo saying that these people are tragic casualties of a necessary war? Perhaps. But in the end, the horror unleashed in The Battle of Algiers cannot be fitted into neat partisan formulations, which is perhaps why so many disparate groups, from the Panthers to the Pentagon, have tried to claim the film for their own agenda. What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway—the sense that all sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion. -NYmag
In this black-and-white cinéma-vérité documentary, writer James Baldwin and comedian/activist Dick Gregory debate passionately in front of an overwhelmingly black British audience. The film shows something exceptional for that period: an uncensored conversation about the black experience, as if no white people were present. This open-hearted, almost intimate public debate tackles many important themes in the US and UK. With the majestic eloquence that characterises not only his literary style but also his speaking, Baldwin provides subtle and critical commentary on complex problematic issues such as race and colour. An insightful document that is still relevant in substance and urgency. --IFFR
"In the days before his execution, Nat Turner will agree to tell his story. But after his death, his words will become the property of others, as his body was during his life."
Someone please explain how Charles Burnett keeps making these thought-provoking, emotionally powerful masterpieces in such bizarre formats. A Disney TV film, a 12-minute short film, a neorealist 80-minute feature where nothing happens, and now this 60-minute PBS/History Channel documentary on the Nat Turner rebellion.
Burnett looks at how the task of telling the story of Nat Turner is a treacherous, slippery, and morally complex one. Because Turner's "confessions" of 1831 were channeled through a white lawyer named Thomas Gray, we can never know for certain who the "real" Nat Turner was. All historians can hope for is the nuggets in the Confessions which can sound like Nat (nuggets which are few and far between). This gives artists a plethora of material to work with: to reshape, reclaim, and refashion Nat Turner to serve their own desires. But this also means that we can never understand Nat Turner from a truly historiographical point-of-view. Thus, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property becomes a brilliant investigation on the shortcomings of historical interpretation, of artistic license (best seen through its extended treatment of William Styron's controversial fictional novel The Confessions of Nat Turner), and of the blur between reality and fiction in representation. From major players--from Styron himself and slavery scholars Kenneth Greenberg and Eugene Genovese--to border players who have lots of stakes in the issues--Ossie Davis, black and white Afro-American-studies professors--Burnett interviews a slew of fascinating folks who give their insights into how they interpret Nat Turner. All have equally legitimate claims. All have points where they easily contradict one another. All have moments where we disagree with them based on what someone after them says. No one is ever "more" right", and Burnett keeps the proceedings electrically objective and still Wiseman-ly subjective. The most fascinating, telling, damning, interesting quote comes from an old white woman who is a Southampton County museum curator, the location of the Nat Turner Rebellion: "All I'll say is this. Slavery....was so wrong. But murder....is wrong, too."
When a documentary-with-recreations such as this becomes as important a historiographical tool as the actual confessions of the slave himself, you know you're in deep over your head in knottedup matters that not even the Seasoned Historian can untangle. In its final ten minutes, Burnett (like Charles Willson Peale in his Artist in his Museum, or the titular Wizard in L. Frank Baum's tale) pulls back the curtain of his own fantasy, his own complex mixture of truth and fiction, and we're blown away when we see the Wizard at work making the story happen. This is necessary viewing for anyone who wants to know more about America's history of slavery (which I assume includes every thinking-living-breathing American).
I would also recommend watching this AND reading Kenneth Greenberg's excellently compiled The Confessions of Nat Turner and Other Documents before tackling the upcoming behemoth of 2016 independent cinema that is The Birth of a Nation. Burnett's documentary and Greenberg's anthology give us important insights and interpretive lenses on how to best approach the increasingly complex story of Nat Turner. Brace yourself. It's about to get even trickier. --Letterboxd
Note: The actual film ends at 56.13 in the video below, though the youtube video, which I assume someone ripped from their TV, continues past that point.
As comprehensive analysis of the institutional mechanisms of museologics, Les statues meurent aussi’s (Statues Also Die, 1953) prime contention is, in effect, that anthropology and ethnology have their Schroedinger’s Cat; that the removal of an object from its spiritual context-in-community, it’s enslavement and caging in the museum and it’s sacrifice to the white deity of Art, cannot but change it’s state. The black cat, once its museum-box is opened, is always found dead. Astoundingly, in what is only his second film, Marker starts with a cogent and prescient discourse, a formulation of race politics before the days of the civil rights movement, before the rise of post-colonial “third world” studies, and well before semiology and cultural studies established themselves as recognised academic disciplines.
Where could such an unprecedented assemblage have arisen from? Les statues was not the first “anti-colonial” film, though undoubtedly a very early example. France at the time was still a major colonial power, with a history of colonisation throughout the world on most every continent, stretching back to the 17th century and encompassing, at various times, over a hundred colonies of various sizes. The colonial “possessions” were the pride of the nation, celebrated in major exhibitions, the most famous of which was held in Paris in 1931 and attracted 33 million visitors from around the world. This is not to say there was never any opposition to this state of affairs. The Communist Party mounted a small counter-exhibition to the 1931 “Exposition Colonial Internationale”, entitled “The Truth on the Colonies”. Alas, it attracted but 5,000 visitors. Clearly, any countering of the status quo was an extreme minority viewpoint.
French interest in the culture of their colonies stretched further back, and the Musee D’Homme, whose collection features prominently in the film, had its roots in the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero, established in 1878. The influence of the colonies’ cultures and artefacts on the French avant-garde through time was also considerable, the championing of what was considered ‘primitive’ art by the Fauves and Cubists being but the best known. The “Africa” of the avant-garde, however, was largely a fanciful exoticised ‘other’, as exemplified in the work of Raymond Roussel in the 1910’s. Andre Breton and the Surrealists’ lionisation of African art is also fairly well known, but even their seeming espousal can be seen to be but an extension of the negrophilia which came to prominence in Parisian life in the initial decades of the 20th century. Nevertheless, one can easily conceive of an evolutionary line that can be traced through the strata of various artistic practices, from painting and decorative arts to literature and poetry, and even to theatre and dance, as well as, of course, to film, marking a contagion of one culture by the other(s), and resulting in an irreversible hybridization.
Where then are the precedents of Marker’s approach, which seeks, in a sense, to resituate the Musee D’Homme’s collection within its milieu, to reinvigorate, to reanimate it? Perhaps the more appropriate though lesser known lineage can be traced to the interests of the breakaways from the Surrealist group, Michel Leiris and George Bataille, who went on to form the short lived but influential College of Sociology. Leiris, in particular, had an abiding and continuing interest in anthropology and ethnography, and his approach was distinguished by his refusal to take a stance which pretended in any way to be neutral, uninvolved. His 1934 text, L’Afrique Fantôme (to date untranslated into English), incorporated biographical elements, including self-examination and commentary on his relation to both the process of ethnographic study and to the people and culture which were being observed. Such an approach would seem remarkably close to what Marker would develop in his own oeuvre so many years later.
What was the contemporaneous context that produced Les statues? The journal Presence Africaine, which had only come into existence three years earlier, commissioned the film, whose tone certainly fits in with the direction the journal would take in its questioning of France’s colonial presence, the outlining of the effects on the peoples and cultures an occupational force exerts, and the validation of African artistic output. Yet Marker’s text, after presenting the argument of the cultural fixing in formalin of the museum display, then immediately plunges the viewer into the cosmology in which the statues exist in vivo, the fabric of the African universe they came from. Where does this remarkable narrative of, to use a Deleuzeian term, “becoming black” come from? Certainly, the cult of the search for authenticity was on the rise in a post-war France that had lost (at the very least, some of) its self-confidence during its occupation by the Nazis. For, ironically, it had become, effectively, during a short period, a colony itself, of the German Third Reich. Even Sartre’s existentialism might be cast simplistically by a cynical observer as an attempt (if only partially) to regain an intellectual and moral higher ground by an intelligentsia wracked with a collective sense of guilt. Yet the authenticity proposed in Les statues is one which eschews the individual, positing a universe suffused with an inasunderable fabric of interconnected meanings, where “all of creation moves in formation”. This is a world at once profane and profoundly sacred: “Hence, every object is sacred because every creation is sacred;” a Markerian universe which was again invoked so powerfully in Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983). The formulation is all the more remarkable in its precession to so many, very much later, conceptions that would achieve currency in structuralism and post-structuralism, which primarily derived from the linguist Ferdinand De Saussure’s view of language (at the time little known) as being a fabric of interconnected terms which depend on each other to determine their meanings, each term being meaningless in isolation, the very ‘death’ suffered by the statues.
The milieu of the statues Marker presents is a poetic treatise on immanence, a world of multiple becomings where every element conspires to increase the powers and capacities of every other. A conception imbued with notions remarkably similar to Henri Bergson’s “creative evolution” and “elan vital”, and a sense of Spinoza’s formulation of an universe suffused with divinity, Marker would seem to have been proposing an alternative to the increasingly alienated lives that post-war France, and indeed the world, was beginning to pursue, to try and find an archaeology of the tribal underlying the veneer of everyday life, its vernacular of supposed civility, to try and find hope again. It is a conduit through which to connect to an animistic, archaic, Arcadian ancestral memory, a place where “all of creation moves in formation”. It proposes an anti-transcendentalism, a non-static, anti-essentialism that speaks of a chaotic world of inseparable becomings and inter-connectedness where “the broadest activity connects with the world as a whole”.
In this field of significations, even death assumes the role of an active principle. Here, the dead are kept “nearby to honour and benefit from their power, in a basket overflowing with bones.” They are the source of another fecundity. “They are the roots of the living.” The generative force of the universe arises even from the dead, it pervades. “The roots flourish.” The poet/sorcerer, Magic Marker, encircles the elements in even such a fallow field (to European eyes) to find the rhizomes which generate further enunciations. The statues and masks are the liminal, the point through which the elements which constituted and expressed the world of the dead regenerate, reconfigure, are reanimated and enter the world of the living. Marker may as well be speaking of himself when he says “the sorcerer captures in his mirror the images of this country of death, where one goes by losing one’s memory.” For “These masks fight against death. They unveil that which it wants to hide.” And what death wants to hide is the underlying generative force for, “winner of the body, death cannot do anything against the vital strength spread through every being and which composes its double.” The force is free from the assemblage in the physical milieu it inhabited, and “It wanders. It will torment the living until it has taken on its former appearance.” Where does this appearance reside in the meantime? In the statues and masks now imprisoned in the museum: “And it is this appearance which is fixed in these legendary metamorphoses in order to appease it until these winning faces are done repairing the fabric of the world.”
Yet the colonisers’ society has lost this facility, this network of becomings which allows the dead to pass through to the living again: “We put stones over our dead in order to prevent them from escaping.” And so these statues, these portals, must be “Classifed, labelled, conserved in the ice of showcases and collections” and no longer take up their vital strategies. Not only are these arteries of the lifeblood of civilization cauterised, their very fabric is reconfigured so they become nothing but a postcard of the exotic other; “In the country where every form had its signification, where the gracefulness of a curve was a declaration of love to the world, one becomes accustomed to an art of the bazaar.” The imperatives of an art of becoming are replaced by an art of commerce, where the speed of production and the law of supply and demand replace the free movement of spirit. “Into this country of gift and exchange, we have introduced money.” The entire economy of the signifying regime is shifted and changed. It is “Also an art of portraits. Henceforth incapable of expressing the essential, the sculptor seeks resemblance.” The line it traces is no longer the line of flight, the line which can allow escape from the totalising territorialisation of the state machine. It is no longer a search for provisional encodings that can allow for movement in a smooth space outside of the controlling stratifications of the culture police. The entire plane of consistence has shifted and changed. That some of the same elements may still be part of the assemblage no longer matters. The black art thenceforth made is mortified.
The line of contagion which had energised the Western avant-garde, travelling in the opposite direction, Marker seems to argue, resulted in a moribund African machine. The colonising state mechanism of striation sought to contain any exuberance: “All that was pretext for works of art is replaced, be it clothing, symbolic gestures, intrigues, or talking.” What then remained as a plane of expression for the African? What Marker proposes is a form of ‘technique of the body’. There may no longer be any instruments, any opportunities for what would be considered a disruption of colonial rule, but in the midst of the coloniser’s milieu, the negrophilia that the Europeans themselves have paradoxically embraced gives the African line of flight a fillip. The signifying regime of statues and masks may have been contained and adulterated, the movements of dance made merely a spectacle of exoticism. “But a moving black is still black art.” So the black athlete is celebrated while giving rise to a new form of enunciation in this alien milieu in which s/he can again thrive, while at times even threatening the dominant discourse. As is the musician, particularly in the forms of jazz and blues, which originated in their forcefully transplanted homes in the new world, and came from their painful experience, the singers and musicians map out a new field of signifiers.
The image of a jazz drummer’s improvisation, while an underlying drum solo on the soundtrack accompanies, is intercut with a sequence which shows what this new form of oppositional art confronts, “the world of loneliness and the machine”, where any form of protest is met with batons and machineguns. In a formulation which harks forward to Godard’s style more than a decade later (the famous description ‘the children of Marx and Coca Cola’), what we now find, he says, is “the rhythm of the factory confronting the rhythm of nature: Ford meets Tarzan.” The description of the plight of the colonial subject can equally apply to the lot of the colonizer: “His work is able to provide neither spiritual nor social sustenance, he works for nothing, his reward is nothing but a derisory salary.” But the rupture to this assemblage (if only provisional and temporary) would have to wait a decade and a half til the month of May ’68.
But Marker’s response is one of hope, a vision of a “new community”. He finds everywhere the vestiges of the tribal, communal organisation, even in the field of medical science. In a montage using only three shots showing the collection of blood, and the subsequent work of producing a vaccine, the voiceover asks us to “Look well at this technique, which frees mankind from magic. It presents sometimes with magic a strange relationship of gestures.” Sorcery is reborn as science, and shares some of the same gestures. “Science, as magic, admits the necessity of the sacrifice of the animal. The virtue of blood. The harnessing of malevolent forces.” Death, the death of stasis of the Western world, is again transformed into the generative death of the archaic mode of signification. For what is needed is to pass through the liminal of death to arrive again into the world of the living. For “death is always a country where one goes forth at the cost of one’s memories.” And for Marker, the zone of memory is the generative field of all signification. So he concludes with a program for a restitution of what has been lost to our ‘modernity’:
“There would be nothing to prevent us from being, together, the inheritors of two pasts if that equality could be recovered in the present. Less remarked, it is prefigured by the only equality denied to no one, that of repression. Because there is no rupture between African civilization and ours. The faces of black art fell off from the same human face, like the serpent’s skin. Beyond their dead forms, we recognize this promise, common to all the great cultures, of a man who is victorious over the world. And, white or black our future is made of this promise.”
Surely had it known of this tract, the Black Panther would have smiled, lifting a sole paw in solidarity. --Senses of Cinema
King Leopold’s Ghost is not a movie to be evaluated simply as a piece of cinema seeking to balance form and content. Of the form there is little to say, especially since the content is so overwhelmingly mesmerizing in its depiction of the depths to which some human beings will descend in the oppression, torture, mutilation and murder of others in the systematic pursuit of profits. Millions of people were murdered in Congo, and not because of some theocratic imperative, as in the mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus after India gained its independence from Britain. Nor was it simply another instance of European colonialism in Africa.
King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) was in a class by himself as a colonial exploiter. He reigned as King of Belgium from 1865 to his death. He also reigned as King of the Congo Free State from 1876 to 1904, when he was forced to abdicate because the horrors of his supposedly “benevolent” rule could no longer be hidden or suppressed. But he didn’t abandon Congo empty-handed: He sold his holdings in the colony to the Belgium nation for what might be described as a princely sum, if not an outright swindle of the Belgian people. The monuments to Leopold’s greed can be seen today in many parts of Belgium and the French Riviera. Indeed, the thriving port city of Antwerp was built virtually on the backs of the wretched Congolese laborers engaged in the labor-intensive industries of mining, harvesting and hunting for gold, diamonds, rubber and ivory, among many other valuable commodities. In more recent times, Congo has become one of the chief sources of uranium for the world’s nuclear generators and arsenals. That is the ultimate horror of the film: that not much has changed since Leopold II began his artfully capitalist manipulations over a century ago. In the end, he is almost a comic figure in what has turned out to be an unending horror-movie nightmare of prodigious proportions.
Among the more fascinating footnotes to this saga of evildoing is the derogation, even destruction, of the legend of British journalist, explorer and self-glorifier Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), best known in the popular mind for his expedition into Africa in search of David Livingstone, whom he greeted with the words “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871. I still remember Henry King’s 1939 Stanley and Livingstone, in which Spencer Tracy as Stanley asks the famous question of Cedric Hardwicke. It turns out that Stanley had a more shameful mission in Africa, serving as Leopold’s advance bullyboy to intimidate the natives and hunt elephants for their valuable ivory. In essence, the time-honored Stanley was an imperial thug for Leopold II, and the Congolese people felt the lash of his whip, both real and metaphorical.
A more edifying footnote involves the immortal Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose experiences as a steamboat captain in Congo provided him with the background material for The Heart of Darkness (1899). When Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s tale, journeys up the river in search of the madman Kurtz, he finds him hallucinating to the refrain of “the horror, the horror”—Conrad’s elegant summation of what he himself had found in Leopold’s tormented realm. Ironically, Leopold himself never set foot in Congo, though his massive footprints in the region are still visible today in the poverty and suffering of the Congolese people, who have never benefited from the exploitation of the region’s vast resources.
The U.S. government and many of the largest American corporations have collaborated with the Belgian colonialists and their own military and corporate sponsors to keep the people of the region from shaping their own destinies. During the period of the Cold War, President Eisenhower and the C.I.A. conspired with the Belgian military to have nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba arrested and murdered by a military thug named Mobuto Sese Seko, who continued the looting of Congo in the name of the anti-Communist crusade—an ideological dodge that Leopold himself would certainly have appreciated if only he’d been around to see it. King Leopold’s Ghost can be recommended as an economical education in one of the lesser-known atrocities of the capitalist system, as well as an eye-opening account of history’s most ruthless amasser of wealth. The people down at Wall Street should erect a statue to the larcenous Leopold: Why should Belgium and the French Riviera have all his monuments? --Andrew Sarris, The Observer
The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom occasions a New York screening of the rarely shown documentary King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Consisting primarily of newsreel footage, the movie chronicles Martin Luther King Jr.’s stewardship of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination thirteen years later. This vital commemorative event takes on even greater urgency when viewed against the backdrop of quite recent, dispiriting legal decisions: the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in June and George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case last month. Just as important, King: A Filmed Record also counterbalances the unconscionably cartoonish dramatization of the civil rights era in Lee Daniels’s The Butler, now in theaters.
Produced by Ely Landau, King: A Filmed Record was originally shown as a one-time-only event on March 24, 1970, nearly two years after the reverend’s murder on April 4, 1968. (The three-hour-long documentary, according to the New York Times review, played at more than fifty theaters in the five boroughs of New York alone.) A brief prologue juxtaposes speakers of fiery rhetoric—“We’re going to put every cracker in America on his knees! We want black power”—with snippets of King’s speeches espousing nonviolence and interracial harmony. From there, the documentary proceeds linearly, inexorably, stirringly, devastatingly, detailing the cycle of action and reaction, of courage colliding with hate, that defined the years covered in the film: bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, and marches met with fire-hosings, clubbings, and bombings.
This history, from which we are only a generation or two removed, is presented without narration and with an economy of titles listing dates and names—whether those of King’s allies (Fred Shuttlesworth, Reverend C. T. Vivian) or foes (“Bull” Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, who sports a button declaring NEVER on his lapel). Ten people in the film appear without any ID at all: a multiracial group of prominent actors (eight men, two women) who recite from unidentified texts. Often disjunctive, sometimes ridiculous, these interstitial segments, directed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, aren’t entirely without interest: I’ll never forget the slight twitching of Ruby Dee’s left hand during her reading, as if she, still charged with raw emotion, were revolting, ever so slightly, against a staid exercise.
Of course, there are few speeches from this country’s history as soaring, as transcendent as those delivered by King, whether in front of national monuments or from church pulpits; this invaluable film’s greatest asset is the presentation of several of these electrifying orations in their entirety. But just as unforgettable are those moments that capture “the moral leader of our nation,” to use A. Philip Randolph’s description, in unscripted delight: King, soon to address a church in Chicago regarding the open-housing movement there in 1966, beams as Mahalia Jackson sings “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”; he laughs as an associate presents him with a series of gag gifts for his birthday. “Thank you very much. I’m just getting older is all,” he says to his well-wishers. This birthday—King’s thirty-ninth—would be his last. --Artforum
A vital archival document. No talking heads. All images sourced from news footage and home camcorders. Begins with the Watts protests and continues with Rodney King, but the film is structured as a ceaseless stream of pain and anguish, rage and fury. The filmmakers know that systemic racism, the failure of the justice department, and the brutalization of the Black community by the police state will continue, and it has. We have seen this again and again, and the film asks us to be emotional spectators, to recognize the patterns in coded racist rhetoric by officers, presidents, judges, and government officials, and to observe the minimal changes, the little differences that only further emphasize how hardly anything has changed in this fucked-up country. It's awful how with films illuminating the past, they also relate immediately with the present-day. Turning off Netflix and then opening and scrolling through Twitter is harrowing. There is no difference. This should not be the case. Abolish the police, recognize that black lives matter, and be vigilant in this time of anxiety and rebellion. --Silentdawn, Letterboxd
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), the directorial debut of director Ivan Dixon, a rising star in the black American film world, has to date only been available from bootleggers or as an occasional short-run independent DVD release. It remains outside the canon of film history and is rarely screened in the US or elsewhere. This wasn’t always the case. On its release the film was the talk of Variety – here was a blaxploitation movie with a difference. That was until the FBI deemed it cause for concern and all but one of the existing prints were seized and destroyed.
The novel on which the film was based was written by Sam Greenlee. It found publication in the UK in 1969 via Allison and Busby only after having been rejected by 40 US publishers. Translated into six languages and receiving the Sunday Times Book of the Year award in 1969, the book’s hip, streetwise observation and wider political savvy made it a sensation. Early reviewers considered Greenlee’s novel a fictional accompaniment to Franz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, a primer for struggles of the oppressed and a first-world companion to Gillo Pontecorvo’s film masterpiece The Battle of Algiers (1966).
After graduation, Sam Greenlee served in the army before working for the US Information Agency on government propaganda promoting American culture overseas. He was one of the first black foreign-service officers, holding assignments in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece between 1957 and 1965.
Disillusioned with his role, Greenlee returned regularly to the US and couldn’t fail to notice the outbreaks of inner-city rioting, especially in his home town of Chicago. Deemed rebellions by Greenlee, the 1968 Chicago riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King demonstrated insurrection on an unprecedented scale, bringing in to quell them the full force of the army, as well as the police and the National Guard. Police were ordered by Mayor Richard Daley to shoot looters and rioters on sight. US filmmaker and actor Tim Reid, whose company later helped to release Spook, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004: “When you look back at the times… Martin Luther King was assassinated, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy. Black people were really angry and frustrated; we were tired of seeing our leaders killed. What do we do? Do we have a revolution?”
Greenlee left the US Information Agency but remained on the island of Mykonos and wrote The Spook Who Sat by the Door, often dubbed the first black-nationalist novel, in four weeks in 1968. Its original title, The Nigger Who Sat by the Door, was pre-empted by Dick Gregory’s newly published Nigger: An Autobiography. ‘Spook’ was substituted, the word deriving from a slang term for ‘spy’. It also plays on the notion that people of African descent were inherently superstitious and scared of ghosts. But most of all the ‘spook’ is the spectre of black revolution that has consistently haunted US white supremacists since the days of slavery.
The story itself narrates the quest of African-American CIA operative Dan Freeman, recruited as part of an affirmative-action programme. After a very competitive selection process he trains in high-level combat and espionage. However, following this arduous training, this model recruit is rewarded with a post in the reprographics (aka photocopying) department, ‘left by the door’ as a token of the CIA’s ‘racial equality’. Freeman leaves after five years and returns to Chicago, ostensibly to work for the city’s social services. But now he is primed and committed to revolution in the major US cities. The story is both a fanciful conceit and a razor-edged ‘what if?’ provocation in response to the urgency of the times.
For the movie screenplay, Greenlee teamed up with director and actor Ivan Dixon, acclaimed for his role in the pivotal film Nothing But a Man in 1964. Dixon was profoundly inspired by the novel but all his attempts to secure production funding from the major studios were unsuccessful. The search took Dixon and Greenlee across the globe and finally into Africa. Having spoken with interested Nigerian bankers, they were later disappointed to find these men had been ‘advised’ against doing business with black filmmakers from the US.
Returning home and desperate, they turned to individual donors within the local community. Greenlee lived on the South Side in Chicago, the main setting for the film. Not surprisingly, the city’s mayor Richard Daley refused to give them permission to shoot there. But help was at hand. Dubbed ‘chocolate city’, Gary, Indiana was home to a new administration under its first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. Hatcher opened the city doors to the Spook production team and gave them access to Gary’s police and fire departments, and even a helicopter for shots of the post-riot devastation. Though the film was set mostly in Chicago, little was shot on location apart from clandestine handheld and pick-up shots.
Halfway through shooting the film, Dixon and Greenlee ran out of money. Shown footage from the ‘riot’ scene cut together with shots of a sexy nightclub dancer and band, United Artists were easily persuaded to support what looked like a blaxploitation movie.
In addition the film was now to have an original score by electric-jazz musician Herbie Hancock. Greenlee believed that Hancock took on the project for its sheer scale, as well as for personal reasons (they grew up in the same neighbourhood and Hancock went to the same high school as his sister). Like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), Hancock’s soundtrack was the perfect groove for this labour of love, its funky, highly charged ‘Fender Rhodes’ sound of the 70s building on Hancock’s deeper musical roots in US African-American music.
Prior to the 70s, Sidney Poitier was the big African-American film star. He won the Academy Award in 1964, the same year that Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize – and the same year that the Civil Rights Act was signed. However, by the late 1960s Poitier was out of favour with young people. They wanted an image to reflect their own predicament, someone less idealised and less passive.
In 1971 filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles independently funded his own movie, Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song, after rejection by the main studios. Its tale of revenge and injustice is delivered at a stunning pace and with a combination of jump-cuts and montage akin to the European New Wave. Its success led Variety to consider movies capturing the black American experience as being highly marketable for a significant percentage of the filmgoing population. Thus the blaxploitation genre was born. Sadly, the majority of these movies were precisely that, serving up an onscreen array of stereotypical gangsters, cops, drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door had its premiere in 1973 and was an overnight smash. Initial takings impressed the movie trade press. But its troubles quickly resumed. Theatre managers were approached by FBI members who advised against holding further screenings. All the prints were seized, though director Ivan Dixon had the foresight to archive the negative under a different title, and it’s for this reason alone that the film survives today. Historians consider such disruption and intimidation to be characteristic of the FBI’s COINTELPRO strategy – a covert and illegal project to discredit any homegrown community-based political movement in the US.
The film was effectively erased from history and the careers of all its protagonists foundered. Ivan Dixon was never to direct another film and the film’s star, Lawrence Cook, never found a role of comparable weight. Greenlee, financially bereft, continued to write and encourage other aspiring artists, and does so to this day.
Critically speaking, the film was hailed by the public for its sassy dialogue, stylish cinematography and cool soundtrack, while some critics found Spook resonant with the times. Yet its provocative message was missed by a mainstream media ignorant of the war that was being fought in the projects and ghettoes of the US. Unlike the later Rambo movies, which really did encourage violence in support of Uncle Sam’s military mission, Spook is an agitprop call to action across the social divide. It resembles Battle of Algiers in its textbook authenticity of social revolution, and is a regular presence on required-viewing lists for both intelligence and revolutionary groups.
On one level it’s a heist movie and, after a considerable set up, an unstoppable rollercoaster ride. However, Spook is much more than thrills: this is a film about ideas and types. During his work for the CIA Freeman demonstrates every possible clichéd role played by the black man during his 400 years in the US, from enslavement through the many masks of servility and complicity to those of rebellion.
Often painfully funny, the film leaves a strong aftertaste. When new recruits are instructed to steal from the enemy instead of their black brothers and sisters in the ghetto, Freeman alludes both to the invisibility of the ‘blacks with the mop’ and to their plight. A smiling cleaner enters an executive office and removes the company president’s collection of briar pipes from under his nose. Freeman tells his new recruits: “Your oppressors hardly know you exist! That’s the real issue.”
In a later scene, the gang conceals its actions by posing as hopeless junkies – no cops would believe such characters could pull off a heist. (Interestingly, the politics of drug trafficking at the time show the Superfly hustler as simply a pawn within a wider heinous trade that hides behind a respectable face, an argument beautifully captured in the lyrical counter-narrative of Curtis Mayfield’s haunting soundtrack to that film.) Turn reality on its head and use it to your advantage, Freeman tells his recruits: slapstick humour as corrosive satire as urgent call to action.
The film has its flaws. Spook is predominantly presented as a boy’s own adventure, with the exception of the Dahomey Queen who supports Freeman’s struggle despite her background. Anyone familiar with the history of the Black Panther Party would know that 60 per cent of its members were women, among them Angela Davis and Chaka Khan.
Despite this, the major achievement of Spook is its depiction of a spectrum of social roles within the African-American community. It’s a vivid picture of the language of race politics whose complexity and inherent contradictions go to the heart of the African-American experience, encouraging the viewer to transcend class and consider their collective plight. Without this critique of individual complicity in oppression, The Spook Who Sat by the Door could be accused of being a rabble-rousing exercise in fuelling blind resentment, but as Freeman tells a fellow gang member, “This is not about hating white folks… this is about loving freedom enough to fight and die for it.” --BFI
Unique in African-American History, Black Liberation is not just a "movie on Malcolm X." It incarnates his authentic spirit and will, The leader was actively involved behind the camera, as an essential creative and political force. Malcolm X did not want an idolatrous movie, replete with lengthy footage of himself at a microphone. Instead, he was determined to make an uncompromising film that was truly of, by, and for the African-American people. A politically serious European director shared that vision. He freely offered formidable cinematic experience, as well as his own film equipment and production facilities. Both men knew that the project would retain its integrity only if its makers owned the means of film production. Armed with minimal, yet strictly independent resources, they drew their filmmaking collective directly from the African-American community.
Black Liberation stars — the African-American People. Therein lies the power of the leader's filmic testament. African-American faces and voices speak for themselves. The men, women and children of this film — and their children — possess an extraordinary heritage. Black Liberation touched thousands of lives, and served to organize and politically educate the communities where the shooting took place.
Ossie Davis participates in the narration of Black Liberation, as a gesture of political solidarity. You will also hear the voices of Malcolm X, of other leaders, and of the many men and women unknown, who speak their minds, their hearts, their souls. The voices and music of the African-American People complement the explosively metaphoric documentary and docu-dramatic imagery.
The film moves at a speed consistent with the editing style of our present day. Twenty years before MTV, Black Liberation mastered the contemporary language of quick, synthetic imagery. The African drums of Black Liberation propel a rush of visual metaphor. On second and third viewing, the images reveal further layers of meaning, hitherto unseen. The style is straight out and near-subliminal at once. Black Liberation grabs you bodily, and takes you to the limit.
Judged incendiary in its own time, this film was never openly distributed in the country of its origin. Prints have been circulated within the African-American community, but were never plentiful or accessible enough to meet the demand. In the Third World and Europe, Black Liberation won respect both as "The First Truly Underground Film Coming From the USA," and as an exceptionally fine example of the cinematic art. The list of international awards would be impressive for any film, but it is stunning for a feature made primarily as an uncompromising expression of political rage and hope. Black Liberation is a prime example of how form and content can truly be worthy of one another. An explicitly political film can be a fine work of art.
--Zoelund
“Filmed and edited by William Klein … in collaboration with Eldridge Cleaver and Robert Scheer” read the red-lettered credits at the beginning of this portrait of Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver. In the late sixties, Cleaver left the United States for Cuba, then Algeria, in order to avoid prosecution. Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther tells the story of his political activism in exile and becomes itself more incendiary by the minute. But it also stops from time to time to take stock, such as in the conversations between Cleaver and Scheer or in Cleaver’s encounters with representatives of Pan-African peace movements or South Vietnam. How does the American struggle fit into the struggle against worldwide imperialism and how does the Panther’s revolutionary language fit into Klein’s images? A film that creates affirmative images, but still asks how images produce images nonetheless. --Berlinale
Political philosopher and visionary, husband and father, dynamic orator and militant minister. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men. Born Malcolm Little, he later became "Detroit Red" and "New York Red" — a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he emerged as Minister Malcolm — Malcolm X, the fiery, eloquent spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Finally, he became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, an internationally recognized leader and advocate for oppressed peoples. He was both loved and despised, revered and feared — until an assassin's bullet cut him down at age 39.
American Experience marks the 40th anniversary of his death with "Malcolm X — Make It Plain." This in-depth film portrait goes straight to the heart, mind and message of one of the modern era's most complex figures. Actress Alfre Woodard narrates the special.
This film chronicles Malcolm X's remarkable journey from his birth on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, to his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on February 21, 1965. His compelling story is told through the memories of people who had close personal and working relationships with him: prominent figures such as Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis and Alex Haley; Nation of Islam associates, including Wallace D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad; and family members, including his wife, Betty Shabazz, and his oldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz. Included is extensive archival footage of Malcolm X, speaking in his own words at meetings and rallies, and in media interviews.
At a time when black civil rights leaders preached harmony and integration, Malcolm preached a militant gospel of self-defense and nationalism that terrified many whites and disturbed, yet also inspired, black Americans. After his travels to Africa and Mecca, he returned with a deeper understanding of Islam and a new willingness to accept white allies. "The white man and the black man have to be able to sit down at the same table," he said in his last year. "Then they can bring the issues that are under the rug out on top of the table and take an intelligent approach to getting the problem solved."
In 1965, under attack from the Nation of Islam and under surveillance by the FBI, Malcolm X was assassinated while delivering a speech. Who killed him and why remains a mystery to this day, 40 years after his assassination. --PBS
Its fans include Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle. Its director is the not-so-famous father of an extremely famous - and, on occasion, extremely infamous - contemporary actor. It was nudged towards hip-hit status when Jane Fonda, appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight show in 1969, proclaimed it a masterpiece. Its stars include an electrifying Antonio Fargas, six years before Car Wash and seven years before Huggy Bear; the ex-husband of suicidal freak-and-dwarf photographer Diane Arbus; two midgets, playing the US president and his fun-size first lady, whose only other credit is Werner Herzog's Even Dwarves Started Small. It climaxes with Fargas, dressed as an Arab potentate, setting fire to millions of dollars with a Molotov cocktail, and - oh yeah - it's the first movie in history to deploy that notoriously potent revolutionary code-word "jism".
Robert Downey's Putney Swope, a scathing, hugely energetic and scattershot satire about the black takeover of a lilywhite Madison Avenue ad agency, made a lot of Top 10 Lists back at the end of the 1960s and then disappeared, seemingly for good. Now it's back, on DVD in the USA and at a screening in London. The chance to reassess it shouldn't be missed by anyone who cherishes the lost movies of a tumultuous era in American history and American cinema. I first saw it two decades ago and it has lost precious little of its pitch-black satirical zing in the years since. Indeed, like a number of movies from that period, it seems not less but more relevant now than then. It dated badly for a while, then came full-circle back into renewed potency.
So it's disconcerting to catch up with Downey and hear his first words: "I don't love it very much. It's an old movie and, in its own moment, it got very lucky to get distributed at all." The distributor, Don Rugoff of Cinema Five, was almost turned away from the screening by Downey himself. "And then at the end of the screening he came up and said, 'I don't understand this movie, but I like it. Come see me.' And he opened it about a month later on 3rd Avenue and the poster for the movie was so strong" - it's a fist giving the finger, with a sexy model instead of the digit in question, reminiscent of the logo for M*A*S*H, and the tagline "Up Madison Avenue" - "that when he showed it to me I said, 'it's better than the movie!' And it found an audience, which was very unusual for my stuff." (This hitherto had mainly consisted of short absurdist movies with tasty titles like Balls Bluff, Chafed Elbows and Sweet Smell of Sex).
Downey is pushing 70 now, has a fine full head of white hair, and sounds like your Jewish uncle who just drove 16 hours to the family reunion and now wants an iced tea, a knish and a comfy place on the couch. Push him a little, though, and he regales you with a few anecdotes about what a crazy old dog he was back in the day.
"I was making movies that were getting a nice response in New York and playing in one theatre in Greenwich Village for a few months. And I was also working at an outfit that was experimenting with films on the side. One day a black guy who was working with me came up and said, 'Hey we do the same job but you get paid more than me.' I said, let's go see the boss, who was a great guy, and he said, and this is in the movie, 'See, if I give him a raise, I gotta give you a raise, too, and then we're right back where we started.' And that stayed in my brain forever. And working around people who made commercials gave me a lot of insight. I had a brother-in-law who worked at an ad agency who put me into a meeting and said I was from South America and couldn't speak English, so I could just sit there and pick up all this real stuff. So that's how it happened."
The movie's impact may have had to do with its long and splendidly demented opening sequence, in which a hairy, biker-looking feller descends on Manhattan from on high in a helicopter (the back of his Hell Angels-like colours-jacket reads "Mensa: Chapter X"), strides into the ad agency's boardroom and, having been introduced as an high-calibre expert in market research, announces that beer is a bullshit product that appeals most strongly to men with a deep-seated sense of their own sexual inadequacy. "In short, gentlemen, beer is peepee-dicky" - whatever that means - and then he walks out, leaving us trapped in the room with a rogues' gallery of corporate grotesques, nodding-donkey yes-men, rich white stereotypes and barely sentient boardroom idiots.
Moments later, Mario, the founder of the firm, enters grandly and dies pretty much immediately, falling face-down on the boardroom table. A senile old place-filler (Joe Engler) - weirdly reminiscent of quaking little Jimmy Conklin from Preston Sturges's movies - keeps asking, "How many syllables, Mario?" over and over again, even as the sharky board members conduct a vote that, by dint of corporate racism and internecine paranoia, installs the token black member among them, musical director Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), as the company's new chairman and CEO.
After fending off jealous co-boardmembers who offer him various satanic quid-pro-quos ("If you give me the job, Putney, I'll get you into the Knights of Columbus!") Swope spends the remainder of the film ousting Big Whitey, installing a staff of no less venal, corrupt and money-hungry black hucksters and hustlers, and remaking the world of advertising by demanding millions from his gullible white-bread clients and making ads that underscore the crudity and dishonesty of the very concept of marketing itself.
Interspersed with the film's beautiful high-contrast black-and-white cinematography is a series of sort-focus Technicolor faux-commercials for products of quite stupefying crassness. After one toy manufacturer demands an ad for his latest kids' item, "a Junior-Miss flame-thrower that works on regular lighter-fuel", it's a short hike to commercials for "Ethereal Cereal" - the tagline is "No Sheee-it?" - or an explosion-prone neo-Nazi-backed car called "the Bormann Six".
Like I say: scattershot. Putney Swope is what happened when a New York Jewish absurdist comic sensibility like Downey's, far harsher and more cynical than the cuddly version being purveyed by at the time by mainstream contemporaries like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks (who in fact has a nanosecond-long cameo in Putney Swope), collides with a revolutionary African-American worldview.
The success of the movie is underlined by its appeal to the fans mentioned earlier: white boy Anderson, the Jewish Coens, and, far less predictably, three of the great black hopes of African-American standup comedy of the last two decades. I ask him if there were any Afro-Jewish tensions on the set. No, he says, not at all. But interestingly, elements of the backstabbing atmosphere in the script turned up on the set itself, particularly because of Johnson's inability to remember his lines. Downey has sometimes been accused, quite wrongly, of racism for replacing Johnson's voice with his own, but insists that it was a desperate measure forced upon him by a shortage of funds and the impossibility of recasting - something he was loath to do anyway because Johnson was a fine actor and perfect for the role. "Anyhow, I dubbed Arnold's lines later - that's my voice. So the other guys in the cast suddenly began to come up and say, "Get rid of him. I'll play the part,' and I began to see this dynamic taking place on the set that was in the movie, in a way."
Along with Jane Fonda, perhaps the movie's biggest help came from Vincent Canby of the New York Times, but more importantly from a reviewer at the New York Daily News, whose anti-encomium now adorns the US DVD reissue. She hated it. "Vicious and vile. The most offensive picture I've ever seen." "Yeah, that put it on the map in an even bigger way!" chuckles the director.
And the movie's effect on advertising in general? Zilch. "There was a guy at a college where I took the movie to show to students, and at the end he came up to me. He had on a bow-tie and he said, 'MISTER Downey,' both of which had me frightened already, and he said, 'I want to thank you for getting me into advertising!' And that's when I knew I knew absolutely nothing." --The Guardian
Robert Downey Sr. and Paul Thomas Anderson in discussion on Putney Swope:
Director Jason Osder anchors the narrative in a pair of legal proceedings: the hearings of a commission appointed to investigate the events, and the deposition of 13-year-old Michael Ward, the only child from the MOVE headquarters to survive. The immediacy of the testimony, halting or furious, and the fresh psychological wounds of the witnesses justify Osder’s decision to forego original interviews; while they’re edited into and contextualized by news clips, there’s blunt force in the anger of two MOVE women insulting their interrogators, monotonal policemen skating around self-incrimination, and young Michael, burn scars visible on his face, recounting the spartan life of children in the communal home and his precarious hours of refuge during the May 13 shootout and inferno. The testimony is uncolored by nostalgia, haziness, or the studied quality often acquired from years of retrospection; self-revelation comes spontaneously. When a black minister expresses inability to comprehend a police tale of fugitives reentering the burning house, a cop blurts, “How could you? They’re MOVE members.”
