SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (Melvin Van Peebles, USA 1971, 10.3., Introduction: Greg de Cuir Jr) A hustler named Sweetback goes on the run after saving a Black Panther from racist police officers and putting two of them in a coma. He receives support from prostitutes, the local community and some Hell’s Angels and at the same time experiences a political awakening. The author, producer, editor, director and lead actor Melvin Van Peebles used the money that he had earned from the Hollywood comedy Watermelon Man (1970) about a white racist who wakes up one morning to discover he is black, to shoot this independent black action film on the streets of LA. This furious, polemic blend of Black Power, sex and struggle against "the Man" was "rated X by an all-white jury", as the posters announced with marketing savvy. "The mother of all Blaxploitation films and still the benchmark for the genre; substantially more radical, intense and original than the commercialized works that quickly followed as a result of its surprise success, SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG appeared as a true independent film.” (Christoph Huber).
TAKE THIS HAMMER (Richard O. Moore, USA 1964, 11.3., followed by a discussion between Greg de Cuir Jr and Kevin Jerome Everson) In 1963, the TV channel KQED accompanied author James Baldwin on a trip to San Francisco as he met representatives of the local African-American population, which faced considerable discrimination despite being in California, supposed to be more progressive than US states. Baldwin was interested in “the real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” 15 minutes were cut from the original version because not everyone agreed with Baldwin’s analysis of race relations. The Director’s Cut was made available in 2014.
STILL/HERE (Christopher Harris, USA 2000, 11.3., Introduction: Greg de Cuir Jr) “We walk down the street and we see all these houses. And all these houses have some kind of brick.” The artist Christopher Harris chose a filmic form between essayistic city symphony and experimental film to document the transformation of his home town St. Louis for what began as a student project. He opted for 16-mm to shoot the city’s north side, which at the time was populated largely by poor African-American workers and white working-class families. Run-down buildings and billboards with peeling paint, derelict movie houses and churches: Harris’ profoundly poetic film is a torch to urban desolation, in which the camera – at times agile, at times still – gives the impression of being the last survivor of humanity, with the soundtrack evoking the ghosts of the past and the future.
THE BLOOD OF JESUS (Spencer Williams, USA 1942, 12.3.) An African-American congregation holds a service by the river in which several members are baptized, including Martha who is unhappily married to the dawdler and poacher Ras. When she gets back from her baptism, he accidentally shoots her. While her body is resisting death, her soul arrives at a crossroad and she has to choose between the temptations of hell and heaven. About 500 “race films” were made between about 1915 and the 1950s. Though made for black audiences with black casts, they were mostly produced and directed by white filmmakers. In contrast, THE BLOOD OF JESUS was a project by the African-American actor, director and entrepreneur Spencer Williams. It was a huge box office success with its hypnotic gospel music and breathtaking imagery that inspired many later African-American filmmakers.
DRYLONGSO (USA 1998, 12.3.) Cauleen Smith’s 16 mm debut is a portrait of the young art student Pica who is behind on her photography assignments. This is because she has embarked on a project documenting the African-American male, whom she regards as an “endangered species”. Pica has a difficult relationship with her mother, but she has an ally – Tobi, a woman who pretends to be a man on the streets to avoid harassment and her violent ex-boyfriend. Depicting daily life, the film explores the big themes – love and death, gender and race. It is a precise observation of the African-American community in Oakland, California.
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT (Spike Lee, USA 1986, 14. & 29.3.) Nola Darling is a self-confident woman who refuses to give in to expectations and to choose between her three lovers. Brooklyn, which has not yet become so gentrified, provides the setting for this film about a radically independent heroine who addresses the camera directly and from time to time brings splashes of color to a world that is otherwise filmed in black-and-white. Spike Lee‘s directorial debut marked the beginning of a new era for African-American cinema. Shot on a small budget of $175,000 with friends and family members, it ended up making 10 million.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash, USA/GB 1991, 13. & 21.3.) Set at the beginning of the 20th century on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, the film tells the story of several generations of Gullah, the descendants of enslaved people from West Africa. The Peazant family is meeting one last time before migrating to the mainland. The main focus of the film, shot by one of the most important cinematographers of African-American cinema Arthur Jafa, is the women, who have preserved the cultural heritage of their ancestors. The non-linear narrative is reminiscent of West African oral culture. “I wanted to tell the story like an African griot would. A griot is a man hired by families at celebrations– weddings, funerals, reunions – who over a period of several days would recount the family’s history. There would be many breaks – for a meal, for this or that. I wanted to structure the story the way he would tell it.” (Julie Dash)
THE HARDER THEY COME (Perry Henzell, Jamaica 1972, 14. & 27.3.) “You can get it if you really want”: The reggae star Jimmy Cliff plays Ivanhoe Martin, a young man from the country who comes to the slums of the Jamaican capital Kingston looking for work. After his possessions are stolen, he tries to make a living repairing bicycles and making music but it’s only when he starts dealing marijuana and killing cops that he achieves money and fame. The character of Martin was based on the real-life outlaw Rhyging, who was a hero in the 1940s. Henzell set his film in the 1970s, making a vibrant, insolent and colorful film that he saw as an expression of Jamaican identity. It achieved cult status in the US, particularly after it started being screened at midnight. The soundtrack, which featured Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, The Maytals and The Melodians, played a major role popularizing reggae internationally.
ORFEU NEGRO (Marcel Camus, Brazil/F/I 1959, 15. & 19.3.) Euridice turns up in Rio de Janeiro where carnival preparations are underway and meets the tram conductor Orfeu, who plays guitar with a samba school. When they meet again, they fall in love. But then a figure dressed as death turns up amid the wild carnival festivities and begins to follow Euridice. The Brazilian writer Vinícius de Moraes was inspired by the Greek myth about the singer Orpheus who tries to retrieve his lover Euridice from the underworld for his 1956 play Orfeu da Conceição and the French filmmaker Marcel Camus took this as his basis to make what has become one of the most famous film documents of Afro-Brazilian culture. The soundtrack combines samba with its roots in Africa and Bossa nova, which was developing in the 1950s and became world famous thanks to this film.
LA PERMISSION / STORY OF A THREE-DAY-PASS (Melvin Van Peebles, F 1966, 16. & 27.3.) The young Afro-American soldier Turner is stationed in France. On leave, he meets a French woman and spends the weekend with her. “With a script financed for $60,000 by the CNC and shot over six weeks in Paris and Étretat with a $200,000 budget, Melvin Van Peebles' first feature film takes a counterintuitive approach to the question of racism. Rather than dealing with economic and social injustices or police persecution, La permission elaborates a situation where its protagonist, a young soldier stationed on an American military base in France, is slowly filled with happiness. But at every moment and through every channel (language, gesture, fantasy...), misunderstandings, misinterpretations, mistakes, and prejudices are introduced that reign not only between people but also within the psyche. At the peak of joy, the conscience remains wounded; the highest pleasure is reached by climbing up the scaffold of compensation; separation is at work within fusion. In a racist world, there is not the slightest psychic salvation, whatever success an individual fate may have. But this permanent disagreement of the self with itself, between self and the world, populates the image and soundtrack with doublings, superimpositions, and symmetric and asymmetric echoes that attest to cinema's genius in understanding the affective resonances of a conflict that traverses, structures, and goes beyond its actors.» (Nicole Brenez)
LOSING GROUND (Kathleen Collins, USA 1982, 17. & 23.3.) The New York philosophy professor Sarah works on artistic ecstasy. Her husband Victor (Bill Gunn) has just sold a painting to a museum and wants to spend the summer in upstate New York, regardless of the fact that she needs access to a library for her work. He falls for the country life and for another woman; she takes revenge by accepting a role in one of her students’ films. Reminiscent of Eric Rohmer in its lightness and subtlety, this comedy about the complex relationship of a middle-class couple was Kathleen Collins‘ first and last feature film. She died of cancer at the age of 46 in 1988. The film received little attention and wasn’t distributed in the US. Released in 2015, it has since enjoyed the status of an almost forgotten masterpiece.
WHITE DOG (Samuel Fuller, USA 1982, 18. 3.) While driving at night, the actor Julie Sawyer spots a white dog that seems to be injured on the road and takes it home with her. Then she discovers that it is a “white dog”, a dog trained to attack black people and kill them. The dog trainer Keys attempts to rid the dog of its hatred. Samuel Fuller’s career was coming to an end when he was asked to direct the film that was based on a novel by Romain Gary. The result is unmistakably a Fuller work, a highly-concentrated tale with dynamic, at times brutally direct, images that is gripping and has a clear message. Upon release, this exceptional film, a lucid appeal for tolerance and forgiveness, was misunderstood as being racist and only gained well-deserved acclaim years later.
WITHIN OUR GATES (Oscar Micheaux, USA 1919, 20.3., on piano: Eunice Martins) A young woman moves to the South to become a teacher in an under-financed school. She travels to Boston to collect funds and meets a doctor and philanthropist who support her cause. “Oscar Micheaux’s bold, forceful melodrama, from 1919—the oldest surviving feature by a black American director—unfolds the vast political dimensions of intimate romantic crises. (…) With a brisk and sharp-edged style, Micheaux sketches a wide view of black society, depicting an engineer with an international career, a private eye with influential friends, a predatory gangster, devoted educators—and the harrowing ambient violence of Jim Crow, which he shows unsparingly and gruesomely. Along with his revulsion at the hateful rhetoric and murderous tyranny of Southern whites, Micheaux displays a special satirical disgust for a black preacher who offers his parishioners Heaven as a reward for their unquestioning submissiveness. Micheaux’s narrative manner is as daring as his subject matter, with flashbacks and interpolations amplifying the story.”(Richard Brody)
KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, USA 1978, 20. & 25.3.) A number of black filmmakers studying at UCLA from the late 1960s onwards started looking for alternative ways of representing African-American life to those found in classical Hollywood cinema and also Blaxpoitation films. The key figure of what became known as the L.A Rebellion was the cameraman and director Charles Burnett. His grainy and poetic black-and-white shows vignettes of the life of the sensitive dreamer Stan, who lives with his wife and daughter in Los Angeles. Simple pleasures, such as dancing or drinking a cup of coffee, allow Stan to forget the harsh realities of life for short moments. A "heroic demystification" (David E. James) of the working class, far from any sort of romantic clichés and carried by jazz and blues sounds.
ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (Robert Wise, USA 1959, 21. & 26.3.) The aging white criminal David Burke comes up with the perfect plan for a bank robbery that he thinks cannot go wrong. His accomplices are the black musician Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) who has a gambling problem and urgently has to pay off some debts and the white ex-convict Earle Slater who distrusts him and threatens to mess everything up. With its morally complex characters, this film noir directed by an old hand in Hollywood was an ideal vehicle for exploring the themes of racism, fears and tensions in society. It was produced by Harry Belafonte and his HarBel Productions company whose aim was to expand and diversify the representation of African-Americans in Hollywood cinema.
A DRY WHITE SEASON (Euzhan Palcy, USA 1989, 22. & 30.3.) is about the gradual political awakening of a white South African man in 1976. History teacher Ben (Donald Sutherland) leads a comfortable life that could not be more different from the harsh reality of his black compatriots. He still believes in the system when the son of his gardener Gordon is brutally beaten up by police at a demonstration calling for education rights and then murdered in jail. But when Gordon himself disappears without a trace, he starts having doubts and is forced to admit that South Africa’s legal system is a farce. Born in Martinique and educated in Paris, Euzhan Palcy was the first female black director of a film produced by a major Hollywood studio. She travelled to Soweto undercover to conduct research ahead of the film, which was at a clear indictment of apartheid but also a gripping mainstream film with American stars Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando alongside famous South African actors Zakes Mokae and Winston Ntshona.
GANJA & HESS (Bill Gunn, USA 1973, 24. & 28. 3.) In this horror film, the anthropologist Hess Green (Duane Jones, the lead in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead) is conducting research about the Myrthians, a made-up ancient African nation of blood drinkers. One day, his psychologically unstable assistant (played by the director Bill Gunn himself) injures him with a dagger that the Myrthians used for their ceremonies before killing himself. The next day, Green’s wound is healed but he himself becomes possessed with the need to drink blood. He starts a relationship with his late assistant’s wife. In the wake of the success of Blaxploitation films, an independent production company commissioned the theater director Bill Gunn to make a vampire horror. Gunn delivered an a work that was experimental, oneiric, hypnotic and mysterious from the very first minute and one in which the vampire myth is an allegory. The original version was well received in Cannes, but a US box office flop, which is why the producers released alternative versions. We are screening the original version of this bold film poem, which was reconstructed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
THE COOL WORLD (Shirley Clarke, USA 1963, 28. & 31.3.) New Yorker Shirley Clarke was a pioneer of independent US cinema, with an interest in non-linear narratives and a documentary aesthetic. In THE COOL WORLD she used a visual language without frills to tell the story of Duke, a 14-year-old member of a Harlem street gang who gets it into his head that he needs a weapon to become the leader. The raw energy of Harlem was directly transmitted by a jazz soundtrack by Dizzy Gillespie, and despite its depiction of daily life and dysfunctional families, drugs, violence and marginalization, this film was not a work of social reportage. (al/gv)
