Up Against the Camera
1959-1970: A REVOLUTION IN BLACK AND WHITE
At Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts, San Francisco,
July 14 through July 28.
By Kelly Vance
Reviewed July 14, 2000
Sick of fireball action flicks? Bored with adolescent sex humor and insipid
middle-brow escapism? Here's the ideal alternative to dumbed-down summer
movie entertainment:
reality. You'll have to set foot inside a museum
to find it, but a new Friday-night series of films
at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts has all the sizzle and spontaneity that's
usually missing from formulaic big-studio summer
movies. What's more, the seven films (three
features, four shorts) collected under the
heading "1959-1970: A Revolution in Black and
White" tackle the number-one hot-button topic
in Americaracewith a candor and honesty that's all too often sugared over
or buried in showbiz clichs.
I'm just as tired of hearing about the '60s as
anyone else, but there's no denying it was in
many ways a golden age of documentary film.
Decades before there were reality-based TV
shows devoted to police car chases, filmmakers
such as Richard Leacock, the Maysles Brothers,
D.A. Pennebaker, Robert Frank, Frederick
Wiseman, and Life magazine correspondent
Robert Drew borrowed elements from newsreel
journalism, handheld cameras, intimate
point-of-view, natural sound, minimal editing to
invent the documentary genre called cinema verit. The verit style was
also often distinguished by a social awareness that provided its own
editorializing despite the lack of voice-over narration and talking-head
analysis.
Verit still exists today, on public broadcast and
TV news coverage as well as in such phenomena
as guerrilla video projects, but its edge tends to
get dulled in the general oversupply of
information. The '60sas we've been told time
and again were different. Which is why the
'60s-era documentaries that Yerba Buena
curator Joel Shepard has dug up still seem so
fresh and exciting, years after their ostensible hard news value has expired.
Then, as now, the riddle of race relations was
perplexing, at times all-consuming. Nothing
demonstrates this quite as succinctly as David
Loeb Weiss' 1968 doc No Vietnamese Ever Called
Me Nigger. The title, sometimes attributed to
Muhammad Ali, is seen as a slogan on placards
carried by marchers in the Harlem Fall
Mobilization March in 1967, an anti-Vietnam-War
procession in New York to which filmmaker Weiss
and his crew took their 16mm camera and sound
recorder and got an earful of what African
Americans thought of the US government's war
on the Vietnamese people, of black Americans'
role in that war, and the inescapable conclusions
therefrom. "My boy is over there fighting for his
rights," declares one woman, "but he's not
getting them." One of the marchers' chants cuts
to the chase even quicker: "The enemy is
whitey/ Not the Viet Cong!" Weiss and his crew
(apparently all white) heard a variety of
impassioned responses from onlookers and march
participants that day in Harlem, but the predominant African-American
viewpoint was essentially, "This is not our war."
Intercut with the on-the-street footage is a
remarkable interview session with three
articulate, thoughtful, and very angry black
Vietnam War vets. If the civilians are outraged
at the injustice, these young men are
somewhere beyond. Throughout this film, we
can't help but marvel at the high level of political
discussion, even among characters hanging out
in front of bars watching the march pass, in
comparison with what we might see if a similar
march were covered today. In some ways, the
'60s were a much more violent and unpredictable
time, but we sense a difference in the mood of the people; they're
disgusted, but not hopeless.
The righteous indignation in their voices is like
music to our ears, compared to the cynicism
we'd likely encounter in 2000. As loud and
rebellious as it might seem, 1967 was almost a
time of innocence.
We can see that one of the three young vets, in
particular, wants to believe the civics lessons he
learned in school, but his brutal experience in the Army has shaken his
beliefs very nearly out of him (another soldier talks of giving C-rations
to a begging Vietnamese woman, out of pity, and then being mocked by his
white comrades).
"Keep your word. GI-trained black men won't
stand for racism back home": That's the
admonition from the three vets, all of whom
relate the disillusionment of seeing the naked
face of race hatred (toward Asians and blacks,
white America's foreign and domestic enemies,
respectively) in the war, and then coming home
to be turned down for jobs on racial grounds. "It's gonna escalate right
here," warns one of the vets. We wonder where they are now, thirty-three
years later.
Loeb's 16mm black-and-white film has that
fast-film verit quality to it, in which the edges
of the image almost appear to be in full color, so
deeply saturated are the b&w tones. It's
beautiful to look at, and the faces are
unforgettable in this time-machine trip back to
the corner of 125th and Broadway in 1967. A
solemn group of Black Muslims dismisses the
marchers out of hand, saying that the "Muslim
five percent" believes that the government is
always right. That's puzzling enough, but later on the antics of a claque
of white supremacists heckling the marchers reminds us that maybe we have,
indeed, come a small distance from the days when people chanted, "Kill
peace creeps!"
Very powerful stuff, and obviously not enough
people saw it the first time around. No
Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger screens Friday, July 21 at 8:00 p.m.
If the above film still retains every ounce of its
sense of betrayal, William Klein's Eldridge
Cleaver, Black Panther, in hindsight at least,
blends that message of black outrage with a
touch of historical human-interest curiosity. Shot
in 1970 when East Bay revolutionary Cleaver was
in exile in Algeria, the verit portrait captures
the mercurial Cleaver in some of his most profound meditations on race,
class, and powerbut also points forward to the post-Panther Cleaver, a man
whom history passed by. And we can feel that history passing him by in
every frame of this movie.
Cleaver strolls through the medina of Algiers in a
bright orange polo shirt and slacks, drawing
stares and shy smiles from passersby as he
outlines his theories. Trotsky would have been
proud of Cleaver; the former Oakland Black
Panther Minister of Culture, in between jibes at
"Mussolini [San Francisco mayor Joseph] Alioto"
and then-California governor Ronald Reagan (his
chief bugaboos), is seen seeking rapprochement
with black revolutionaries from all over Africa in the common cause of
opposing US imperialism.
The camera follows him all the way home, where he smokes grass and plays
idly with a knife.
Always, Cleaver seems to be the ultimate
political animal, forever seizing the time and
sticking to the issues, even when he and his wife
Kathleen relax into that sort of guarded "candid"
bull session we've seen so often in
rockumentaries. Indeed, in those days Cleaver
was almost a rock star to a certain segment of
the American population. But clearly the downtime, in places like Cuba and
Algiers, is draining the relevance out of him.
Then, when we've begun to see through
Cleaver's nonstop platitudinizing, director Klein
makes a smart move: he shifts gears and shows
a montage of repressive politicos declaring war
on the Panthers back in the US exactly the
things Cleaver has been ranting about in Algiers,
suddenly there in our face. At the time the film
was made, the race-baiting, divisive fighting
words of Reagan and President Richard Nixon
were commonplace, but seeing them now, in
apposition to Cleaver's complaints about
American brutality and greed, validates his
stance when he needs it most, and reminds us
just how vitriolic public discourse was in those
long-ago days. Cleaver doesn't shock us; Reagan
and Nixon do. And so does the official repression
of the Black Panthers, regardless of what we
know about their subsequent failings. In Klein's clever coda, the "cure" is
obviously far worse than the "disease."
Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther plays Friday, July
28, also at 8:00 p.m. The series opens tonight
(Friday, July 14) with a verit glimpse into the
establishment, specifically the war of nerves
between Alabama segregationist governor
George Wallace and the Kennedy White House on
the subject of school desegregation in Drew
Associates' Crisis: Behind a Presidential
Commitment (1963). That feature is
accompanied by a 1961 short on school
integration in New Orleans, The Children Were
Watching, and Edward O. Bland's Cry of Jazz
(1959), an influential examination of the significance of jazz in
African-American culture.
The other documentary shorts in the series are
Leonard Henry's Black Power We're Goin' Survive
America (1959) on July 21, and Newsreel's 1968 prison interview with Black
Panther Huey P.
Newton, Off the Pig, now known as Black Panther. This entire ambitious
series is highly recommended. It could open your eyes.
From: <http://www.eastbayexpress.com/movies/moviereva_current.html>
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