Week #7--Black British Cinema

Last week’s examples of Caribbean cinema were documentaries that focused on two prominent writers of the Caribbean and postcolonial theory: Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both of whom are from Martinique. In her documentary Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, Euzhan Palcy devotes the first of a three-part series on how her subject came to emergence, first as a poet, then as a teacher, and ultimately as mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city of Martinique. Palcy’s documentary captures the tension that Césaire faced in his attempts to transition from being a surrealist poet and a member of the French Communist Party to deciding as mayor what Martinique’s ties should be to France. A lucid observation that Césaire makes is that countries who had become independent had adopted its own brand of totalitarianism (Haiti and the Duvalier regimes), while Communist countries were adopting the same identity. Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask considers how Fanon psychoanalyzed of colonial relations, particularly the complex presence of desire in the colonist gaze that demands the colonized subject to be condemned. Fanon’s experience in psychoanalysis was crucial to his experience in Algeria, in which he examined the state of de-personalization his patients had undergone, where all notions of agency had been diminished. He would identify violence as the only strategy through which a sense of agency could be attained. Julien’s unconventional structure, in which he combines found footage, talking head interviews, and a dramatization of Fanon’s writings, also grants him some space to interrogate his subject’s blind spots. Julien points to areas in the book Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon looks condescendingly on Black women and homosexuals, which raises questions about whether or not Fanon had deeply internalized the notion of privilege upon which he had criticized the European colonizers.

Returning to Palcy for a moment, her documentary, plus her feature-length debut, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), are both examples of how film is used to instill a pan-Caribbean contemporary identity that is determined by its engagement with history. The historical presence of both Martinique’s early history (through the adaptation of the novel Rue Cases-Négres) and the recognition of ancestral African identity points to a lack of centrality in both Caribbean identity and Caribbean cinema. Both Keith Warner and June Givanni’s interview with Palcy point to the reality that Caribbean-based filmmakers have to work outside of their home country in order to obtain resources to make their film. Palcy talks specifically about the fact that in spite of a film festival in the Caribbean, there still remains no Caribbean film industry that preserves the production, distribution, and exhibition resources for Caribbean filmmakers. These artists, similar to African filmmakers, have to both compete with movies from U.S. and Western Europe that dominate the theaters, plus combat the stigma that their films are inferior simply because they are from a Caribbean country.

For Black British filmmakers during the 1980s, what they found most at stake was the interrogation of history specific to England and the African diaspora, and new ways to make their films and distribute them. The Black filmmaking workshop movement consisted of two collectives: Sankofa and Black Audio. Both of these collectives marked at the point the most significant presence of media-makers who were of African descent. While their films were an immediate response to the climate of tension and political unrest during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, they also interrogate the cultural memory of Black Britons to assert a more inclusive space for women and the LGBT community. These filmmakers were part of the first generation to be born in England, as their parents emigrated from West Africa and the Caribbean. In The Passion of Remembrance (1986) by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, think of how the different storylines throughout the film reflect the attempts to challenge the masculinization of Black consciousness, the increasing neo-fascist sentiment growing throughout the country, and the inclusion of sexuality within the Black Briton collective identity. What is the relationship between the film’s narrative and meta-narrative, in terms of the questions being raised and what the central characters face?

The Passion of Remembrance (1986)
Dirs. Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien

Cast:
Anni Domingo Female Speaker
Joseph Charles Male Speaker
Antonia Thomas Maggie Baptiste
Carlton Chance Gary
Jim Findlay Tony Baptiste
Ram John Holder Benjy Baptiste
Shiela Mitchell Glory Baptiste
Tania Morgan Tonia
Gary McDonald Michael
Janet Palmer Louise

Questions to consider while watching The Passion of Remembrance:
1. Identify the three different storylines that occur concurrently in this film. How do they all relate to one another?

2. How would you characterize the relationship between the male speaker and the female speaker? What do you notice when they share a space, and when they are in their separate spaces?

3. What do you notice about the images in Maggie’s films in terms of the relationship between image and sound? Based on the readings from Fusco and Mercer, what events do they reference, and how do the viewers of her work respond to her content?

4. What are some of the topics by which Maggie and Tony argue about? How would you describe Tony’s position, and how does Maggie challenge his arguments?

Week #6—Films of the Caribbean

As a native of Ethiopia who was reared through storytelling and trained in the theatre, Haile Gerima arrived as a student at UCLA’s Theatre Arts department in 1968 to learn how he could transfer his skills to the cinematic medium. Gerima and his African and African-American colleagues, most notably Charles Burnett, were very much products of their time, in that they were deeply engaged in the political and creative activity of the period marked by the Black Power and Black Arts movements. The filmmakers of the L.A. School merged their formal training at UCLA with their self-guided curriculum driven by inquiries about what it meant to make a Black film. Efforts were made to create a new cinematic language that would privilege people of African descent through form, content, and image. Conventions from other filmmaking movements, notably African and Latin American cinema, were transcribed to document the lives of African-American residents in the Watts section of Los Angeles. With respect to Latin American cinema, namely Cuban cinema, filmmakers from UCLA, also known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, or the L.A. Rebellion, learned to utilize portable 16mm filmmaking equipment to document the region as they were and capture footage that would merge fiction and documentary conventions. The conventions of Cuban cinema (i.e. B&W film stock, handheld portable cameras, natural lighting, location shooting, post-dubbed sound) were derived from Italian Neo-realism, a film movement that emerged during WWII when the destruction of studios forced filmmakers to shoot on location and depict moments throughout Italy as they were happening.

An artist immersed in the writings of Third World Marxism by way of Frantz Fanon from Martinique and Amilcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau, Gerima was most concerned with the relationship between race and class to enforce systemic suppression. Bush Mama (1975) centralizes Dorothy, a widowed single mother dependent on welfare, as a character that undergoes a transformation from passive victim to an agent of change for herself, her daughter, and her immediate community. Gerima identifies the welfare system, law enforcement, and the government (i.e. recruitment into the Vietnam War) as the institutional forces that keep residents in Watts like Dorothy and her neighbors economically and emotionally deprived. The presence of these institutions are immediately felt at the opening of the film, as the soundtrack, which layers helicopter choppers, a police dispatcher, and a social worker that asks questions about welfare benefits, are matched with the camera zooming in on the film’s title, written on a brick wall. Gerima also captures Dorothy’s transformation through subjective reality, as his repetitive use of image and sound function as a loop to illustrate the way in which she processes each dilemma she faces. Throughout the film, Dorothy’s presence within the diegetic world is intercut with images that appear to emerge from her psyche.

Gerima and his colleagues made films set in Watts that were said to capture domestic colonialism, in which overwhelmingly Black, densely-populated urban areas were isolated from both governmental resources that would resuscitate the neighborhood’s economy and overall morale and political progress brought upon by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The filmmakers also sought to identify the situation of African Americans as part of a global struggle towards liberation. In her documentary Aime Cesaire: A Voice for History, Euzhan Palcy captures the life of the poet and politician based in Martinique. She captures how Cesaire argued for self-autonomy amongst the citizens of Martinique as a poet and, later, as the mayor of Fort-de-France, the country’s capital. Throughout the documentary, focus on how Palcy depicts Cesaire’s initiation as an artist and how he sought to inspire Martinique’s citizens as a poet and a teacher by establishing a spiritual connection with ancestral Africa. Later, think of how Cesaire seeks to negotiate his reputation as a poet with his duties as Fort-de-France’s mayor, and how his overall legacy is threatened by his conflicting views towards colonialism in terms of Martinique’s relationship with France.

Week #5—Challenging Revamped Stereotypes of Hollywood

For roughly two decades, there was not a film by an African-American filmmaker to found. It wasn’t until 1969 that Gordon Parks would direct an adaptation of his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree. Interestingly enough, Parks’s follow-up film, Shaft (1971) would be released on the heels of the success that came from Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, released earlier that year. As demonstrated in the colloquy on Black Cinema Aesthetics, Sweetback is a polarizing film, in that there are as many people who celebrate the film for its consistency with the sentiments of the Black Power and Black Arts movement as there are critics who condemn it as a sex exploitation movie. One of the film’s critics was Haile Gerima, an Ethiopian-born filmmaker who studied film production at UCLA. Gerima argued that Van Peebles’s film provided an illusion of empowerment, in that the beating of two police officers does not lead to the structural changes that eliminate the forces that oppress Black people.

The more sensational aspects of sex and violence for which Sweetback was criticized would be appropriated by Hollywood studios when they learned that Van Peebles’ film grossed $10 million dollars in spite of being made with no mainstream funding sources. Studios also noticed that 30-40 percent of the moviegoing audience was Black, which made them more enthusiastic about making Black-themed action movies. The motion picture industry was in a financial slump, as it faced competition from television for a decade. Studios were also producing outdated westerns and musicals, which gave the impression that they were out of touch with the public. The financial success of Sweetback prompted Hollywood to even take projects meant for White stars to be used for Black actors, hence was the case with Shaft. Other films would follow such as Superfly (1972) starring Ron O’Neal, The Mack (1973) with Max Julien, and Black Caesar (1974), which featured Fred Williamson. As the films would become more popular, they were also met with increasing criticism for using hyper-masculine protagonist who engaged in excessive sex and violence with no consequence. Similar to Gerima’s criticism of Sweetback as giving the illusion of empowerment, social critics and activists argued that these movies offered a vicarious sense of conquering an oppressive system, but they were never able to escape their situation. It is said that as these criticisms increased, the movies, which came to be known as blaxploitation flicks, would decrease in popularity. In addition, many other movies of inferior quality would flood the genre and contribute to its demise by the mid-‘70s.

In 1975, Gerima would release Bush Mama, which was his thesis film to complete his Master’s of Fine Arts at UCLA. The film focuses on Dorothy, a widowed single mother dependent on welfare. As she becomes impregnated by her current boyfriend, T.C., she is pressured by her case worker to abort her child so that she can continue to receive benefits. At first glance, there are some commonalities that could be found between Bush Mama and Sweetback. Both films feature a character who transforms from a passive victim of his/her circumstances to someone in full control of their agency. They also take place in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and each employs non-conventional film techniques that reference Third Cinema, French New Wave, and Italian Neo-realism. The major difference between these films lies in the distinction between the individual and the collective. Sweetback’s initial awakening of consciousness comes from helping a local revolutionary activist escape from police custody after beating the cops unconsciousness, but he remains isolated throughout the film. Dorothy undergoes tremendous internal examination to become engaged in her own well-being, but her personal situation reflects the community at large, as they attempt to survive under aggressive systematic suppression from the police and the welfare state. As you watch the film, think of ways in which Dorothy’s transformation is visible. Also, pay attention to how some of Dorothy’s immediate contacts impact her transformation positively and negatively. In addition, think of what Gerima does differently in terms of editing and sound. Consider how Gerima cuts scenes in and out of the diegetic world, and what the relationship between the images symbolizes. Also, think of the different sources of sound within the film’s soundtrack. How do they reflect both the external and internal forces that pressure Dorothy?