SLAVERY AFTER "DJANGO UNCHAINED"

I placed "Django Unchained" at number 3 on my own list of the best films of 2012 (http://www.opinionatedjudge.blogspot.com/2013/02/best-films-of-2012.html).The reason I did so is that, despite the varied critical reactions the film has gotten, I believe that writer/director Quentin Tarentino has used his particular creative gifts and the clout that he wields in the movie industry to do something brilliant and important. He has altered our collective consciousness about race and American slavery, for the better.
 

Oppression and wrongdoing do not simply resolve themselves; they reverberate for generations.  Americans, even educated ones, know this in theory but ignore it in practice.To use American slavery as an example (though there are others), we like to act as though it is old news of merely historical interest, and even that it gets too much attention.  It happened a long time ago; it doesn't have anything to do with us today.  To keep dwelling on it--to quote a certain Supreme Court justice--just perpetuates outmoded racial entitlements. Although film is a medium with a singular capacity for telling stories with immediacy, our movies recount the history of slavery from a certain historical remove, and we tend to soften it by, for example, featuring prominent white heroes (as in "Lincoln," which I did admire very much, or "Amazing Grace," about the movement against slavery in England).  As important as these stories are, they don't confront us with the current legacy of past oppression.
 

With "Django Unchained," Tarentino has used his admiration of and facility with such discounted genres as spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation films to lure multiracial audiences (and in places like Portland, largely white audiences) to invest nearly three hours looking at aspects of our relatively recent past that we have declined or even refused to face.  As he has himself pointed out, one cannot make a film as lurid as slavery was in reality. Our popular media has never given us a depiction this specific or this visceral: slaves are whipped, chewed to death by dogs while bystanders watch, made to walk, chained, on bare bloody feet for days; kept in burning holes to die of thirst. Watching the film, I found myself reflecting on where I might have fit into the diabolical social hierarchies enforced among slaves based on their physical attributes.  Would I have been one of an army of house slaves, working above all else to blend into the machinery?  Would I have been a virtual farm implement, toiling in the fields but subject to sexual exploitation at a moment's whim?  Would I have lived in relative comfort and been dressed as an elaborate sexual toy, only to have children ripped from me and later to be cast off when my beauty faded?  This is what humans being treated as property led to a mere 150 years ago, and it's brutal.

Also, in giving us a black hero who provokes audiences to cheer as he mows down white oppressors (who are the ancestors of many of us), Tarentino may well have subliminally provoked us to notice that no such vengeance ever occurred and given us the experience of wishing for it.

Further, his film not only depicts something never before imagined on screen; it conveys some things about how oppression works. A lurking question that troubles many people about slavery is why the black slaves didn't simply rise up and kill the whites; Tarentino puts that question (stated ironically) in the mouth of a vicious slaveholder and then devises a freedman superhero to do just that.  But the film also demonstrates the real answer to the slaveholder's ironic question: that the system of oppression functioned so as to ensure that such a freedman superhero (or even a modest uprising) would never happen.  The mechanics of that system are depicted with uncommon insight; a hierarchy of white enforcers maintained and benefitted from the system in varying degrees.  Even more remarkably, we also see a player who has not been portrayed with this kind of perspicuity:the head house Negro Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson.  The white vileness in "Django Unchained" is more familiar, and is certainly chilling--but Jackson's character is a revelation.  Far from a sympathetic Uncle Tom, his ruthless collaborator can also be an essential ingredient of oppression. He is terrifying; he also rings true.
 

I disagree with those who see in King Schultz (the character for which Christoph Waltz won his second Academy Award) just another version of the necessary white hero in a story about black oppression.Schultz is a German and he is not out to fight slavery. This is not his fight; he is out to make money.He winces at slavery's brutality because it is not his brutality; he is not part of this system in the way an American necessarily would be.His motivation to collaborate is less heroic, more practical and more believable.  He is not a stand-in for white Americans.  He is necessary to the plot (he buys and then frees Django), but the essential fight belongs to Django.

As Tarentino has matured as a filmmaker, he has begun to turn his penchant for filming violent revenge stories to more ambitious purposes.  In "Inglorious Bastards," he created a clearly fictional revenge fantasy against the Nazis, which was dangerous enough--but that story is not our American story in the same way this is  .Here we are the subject of the vengeance, we root for that vengeance.  In this movie, we--that is, Americans who benefit from our history of brutal slavery--are the bad guys.

The first time I saw, "Django Unchained," I was profoundly shaken by what I had seen.That seems to me an appropriate response to American slavery, and I am glad to have experienced it, and glad to have sat in a theater of mostly white Americans who experienced it too, even if they didn't reflect on it as deeply as I did. It's that much harder to dismiss this history as old news.One hundred and fifty years ago, the worst and most unacceptable parts of this story actually happened.It's now harder to pretend that it didn't.
 

[A version of this review also appeared today in the Portland Observer, http://portlandobserver.com/2013/04/opinionated-judge/]

THIRD POSTCARD FROM FULL FRAME 2013

Wow--in three days I have not seen a bad film.  And we've had post-show discussions for nearly all the films, too.  This has been an excellent festival!

My favorite film of the day--and one of my favorites of the festival--was "TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM" (9), an inspired tribute to back-up singers.  Featuring one of the best soundtracks of any film I can remember (it will be released soon), the film examines the role that backing vocals have played in a lot of the iconic music of the last forty years.  In everything from David Bowie's "Young Americans," the Rolling Stones's "Gimme Shelter," Joe Cocker's "Feelin' Alright," and Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama," the sublime harmonies of mostly female, mostly African American women have provided texture, soul, and some of the most singable lines.  Many have voices to rival the best solo artists, and they are versatile enough to adapt to a variety of different styles.  The film reflects on the role these singers have played in a host of great hits, wrestles with why so few have achieved stardom themselves, wonders about the mixture of ego and talent that goes into a successful solo career, and examines why some of these singers prefer to stay out of the limelight (though many don't).  The music is sublime, and the film focuses particularly on the stories of 8-10 of these women who account for quite a lot of amazing music.  It will have a theatrical release in June, and I'll be in line to see it again. 

The rest of today's films were also wonderful, though less buoyant.  "THE BABY" (8.5) is one of the most carefully crafted Holocaust stories I have ever seen.  It examines the life of Anneke Kohnke Thompson, who has almost no memories of her life before she came to the U.S. from the Netherlands when she was almost six years old.  She knew very little about her past or the circumstances of her parents' death (except that her parents died in the Holocaust and that her family had some connection with Anne Frank's) and was taught by the aunt and uncle who raised her not to wonder about such things.  As far as she is concerned, she has lived an ordinary life hardly worthy of the dramatic rescue she surmises she had as a young child.  The film came about because the film's Dutch director became acquainted with the woman who took Anneke from her parents as a baby at their request in order to hide her with a Dutch family in the country.  The filmmaker's investigation into what happened to Anneke as a child and Anneke's reaction to the unlocking of her past has the complicated feel of the truest of stories--absorbing, painful, confusing, and illuminating.  To say any more would blunt the film's impact, but I do hope it will get a cable or theatrical release. 

"THE CRASH REEL" (8.5) likely will get a theatrical release, fortunately.  It's the work of director Lucy Walker, who  directed the wonderful film "Wasteland," which I wrote about a couple years ago, and who again here displays remarkable subtlety with a complex story.  Her subject this time is Kevin Pearce, the Olympic hopeful who suffered a traumatic brain injury shortly before the 2010 Winter Olympics.  He's a compelling personality, and the beginning of the film mines a lot of archival footage showing his rise to prominence in his extreme sport prior to his injury.  Then the focus becomes Kevin's recovery and the unique challenge of coming back from a traumatic brain injury, particularly for someone whose whole life has been about pushing himself to more extreme levels of risk.  Woven into the film is the remarkable support that Kevin has received from his family; the film also questions the pressue that drives up risk in extreme sports like snowboarding.  All in all, the film is both moving and gently provocative.

Finally, "THE UNDOCUMENTED" (7) spends some time with problem of unauthorized entry into the U.S. from Mexico, focusing on the neglected issue of the huge numbers of people who die crossing the border.  Those numbers have spiked in recent years, though that subject isn't really on the national media radar screen.  The film focuses on the reasons why people cross, the loss to their families in Mexico when they do not return, and the treatment of their remains when they are discovered in the Sonoran dessert.  It rounds out some pieces of the picture that badly need attention if we are going to address immigration in a rational way.

SECOND POSTCARD FROM FULL FRAME 2013

The first and best film of the day was "GOD LOVES UGANDA" (9).  It's the courageous work of director Roger Ross Williams, an African-American gay man who was raised Baptist, all of which uniquely qualifies him to tell the story of how conservative American evangelical missionaries are exporting intolerance toward gays with missionary zeal, all over Africa but particularly in Uganda, with its relatively youthful and poor population.  Williams also put himself in harm's way in making this film, not only because hatred toward gays is on the rise in Uganda but because so many of the American Christians who he interviewed are so convinced that he needs to be fixed. What you see on screen, though, is a thorough and balanced portrayal of the American and Ugandan followers of the International House of Prayer, a conservative Christian organization based in Kansas City that seeks to export its position in the American culture wars all over the globe.  These folks get a lot of air time in the film expressing their own point of view, which is balanced primarily by two Ugandan ministers (both straight) who have paid a high personal price for speaking out against the tide of anti-gay sentiment being spread by American conservatives.  One has been excommunicated from his denomination and the other lives in the U.S. because of fears for his life in Uganda and now is studying the phenomenon the film depicts.  As he points out, the gospel is being used to pursue a very different agenda--one quite antithetical to the gospel, I might add--heedless of the fact that, in places like Uganda, people will take the law into their own hands.  As a result, LGBTQ people have been subjected to increasing violence and the Ugandan government is considering a measure that would make homosexuality a capital crime.  I was impressed by Williams' handling of this material; he doesn't load the dice and doesn't need to.  Everyone speaking for themselves is quite enough--and this is a story that really needs to be out there.

The rest of the day was focused on music personalities.  The first was "GOOD OL' FREDA" (6.5), a biography of the woman who served as the personal secretary to the Beatles from the time she was seventeen years old.  She's an endearing subject for her ordinariness and her modesty; chosen because she was a fan herself and took the fans seriously but also treated the band's secrets with absolute discretion, she is the only living person in the Beatles' inner circle whose story hasn't been told.  It's a pretty simple tale, but Freda is remarkable because the discretion that made her such a good secretary also makes it unthinkable to her to break that discretion even now.  As a result, what we see is largely her personal story--an ordinary girl who conducted herself admirably in an unexpectedly primary role in one of the great music success stories of all time--and then reentered a life so ordinary that her coworkers were not aware of her connection to the Beatles and even her daughter didn't know most of what she shares in the film.

"THE PLEASURES OF BEING OUT OF STEP" (6) takes as its subject Nat Hentoff, whose passion for jazz is equalled only by his passion for free speech.  He has been writing jazz criticism for Downbeat and poetic, discerning liner notes for decades, and has earned a reputation as a particularly thoughtful afficionado.  Hentoff is equally well known for his writing on the First Amendment; he has written several books and was a regular contributor to the Village Voice for many years.  The film meanders back and forth between Hentoff's two interests, and the lack of a more conventional narrative structure requires some work from the viewer but also sets off the relationship between his two passions.  Hentoff is a good jazz critic because he appreciates the freedom and expressiveness of good jazz; he also insists that freedom and expressiveness be available to all points of view, even those he finds personally offensive.  The film is an interesting window into the New York press and jazz scenes and an appreciative portrait of a compelling personality.

"MUSCLE SHOALS" (6.5) has the best commercial prospects of the three, as it it chronicles stories of the Muscle Shoals, Alabama music scene.  Muscle Shoals is the home of a famous recording studio that spawned a host of the best American records ever recorded.  Using some pretty wonderful archival footage and intervals with some of the top names in music, including Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Alicia Keys, and Bono, the film imparts a host of insider stories of the creation of some amazing music.  It's an entertaining exercise in music appreciation. 

FIRST POSTCARD FROM FULL FRAME 2013

I'm back where I belong -- at the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the premier documentary film festival held every year in Durham, North Carolina.  Four days of wall-to-wall documentaries, many featuring panel discussions with the filmmakers afterwards--I'm in hog heaven.

 

The first batch of films was particularly strong, beginning with "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners" (9), a long-overdue feature-length treatment of Angela Davis.  A couple of years ago when I saw the remarkable "Black Power Mixtape" (which I also highly recommend), I marveled at the lack of a biopic on Davis or Stokely Carmichael or some of the other leaders of the Black Power movement.  Although I still want a biopic, I'm delighted that director Shola Lynch devoted eight years of her life to this passion project.  Securing the funding for this project was no easy task (hence the eight years), because despite Davis's notoriety as a symbol of the Black Power movement, people my age and younger (and perhaps people older than me, actually, given the media accounts they had to rely upon) don't really know much about Davis other than that she was once on the FBI's most wanted list.  This film places in context the events that thrust her into prominence and makes sense of why she became such a lightening rod.  

Using contemporary footage and current interviews with Davis herself, her friends and supporters, her defense counsel, reporters, even the judge at her trial, the filmmaker shows us the articulate and strong young woman who within a short period of time managed to get hired by UCLA to teach Marxist philosophy, fired for her political views in a backlash led by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, and then implicated in a bloody courthouse shooting that galvanized fear of the Black Power movement of which she was a part.  Although her eventual acquittal by an all-white San Jose jury on three charges originally carrying the death penalty ended up being a triumph of the legal system, that triumph was surrounded by a host of legal travesties (including the scant bases for the charges themselves).  Director Lynch makes good use of the forty years since these events to find perspective that enables the telling of a story whose significance could not be broadly understood at the time--yet Lynch also bridges the distance of those forty years and helps us see what an inspiring figure Davis really was, and still is.  The contemporary footage looks so different now than I imagine it did then; from this distance it seems both clear and remarkable how brilliant and impressive Davis was, not to mention her skilled defense team (two black men and a white woman) and quite a number of other articulate women and African Americans who supported and responded to her struggle at the time.  This is a story that needs telling--and I hope the film, which opens in select cities tomorrow, will get a wider release.

"American Promise" (8.5) also yields complex rewards for those willing to make the journey.  The 12-year project of a highly-educated African American couple, it follows their intensely personal journey through the education of their oldest son Idris and his childhood friend Seun, both of whom began their education at the prestigious Dalton School in upper east Manhattan.  The parents of both boys choose the school with the highest of hopes for two bright, earnest, and engaging kids, but it is obvious from the beginning that, despite the school's newly acquired interest in diversity, its commitment does not translate into insight as to how to create a level playing field for kids who don't fit the mold of what already exists in that privileged and intensely white environment.  As the boys progress, and despite two sets of very supportive and involved parents, they, along with the handful of other black children, find themselves singled out as pupils in need of extra help.  It turns out that both boys had learning disabilities, but that does not totally account for the social and academic challenges these two relatively privileged African American kids experience.  So much of what this film depicts made me think of what I see minority students encounter in law school every year; their relative privilege and talent and promise so often does not shield them from demoralizing setbacks and isolation.  This film benefits from the filmmakers' bravery, their long-term commitment to the project, and their willingness to portray a rather unvarnished version of their own story that offers neither easy explanations nor easy answers.  The film also ends up being a moving depiction of the complexity of parenting in the broader sense, and how one's hopes for one's child meet that child's uniqueness, one's one limitations, and the inflexibility of the broader world. 
 

For something completely different, "The Last Shepherd" (8) is a deceptively simple and surprisingly moving portrait of a man who represents a dying breed.  Renato Zucchelli, a beefy man of about 50, views shepherding as his vocation, one he had to fight to pursue over the objection of his own parents.  He spends a few months each year with his large herd in the mountains outside Milan, and there one can clearly witness the joy that he and his sheep dog experience in equal measure in the freedom of shepherding as it was meant to be practiced.  But during the rest of the year, Zucchelli and the herd and his scruffy assistant Piero return to Milan, and guide the herd through the city streets to ever-diminishing patches of green.  Even here, there is something profound about watching this rotund man in a dirty tank top striding confidently through traffic in the midst of the undulating mass of sheep--and also something poignant about watching the ease with which his four children approach life with these animals.  The film's deep pleasures center around Zucchelli's connectedness to the elemental life of the animals and also his interactions with urban school children whom he introduces to shepherding; their intuitive response to the Zucchelli's herd despite having so little exposure to what shepherds actually do, along with the sensitivity of the film itself, raise legitimate questions about the cost of progress.

Finally, "Gideon's Army" (7) lacks the complexity of the first two films and the beauty of the third, but is a worthy exploration of the role public defenders play in the American justice system.  The film follows three dedicated defenders in the South, providing a window into a world of unsustainable caseloads that require of these practitioners the missionary zeal of Mother Theresa.  One thing I appreciated about the film is that it treats these defenders not as heroes defending the mostly guilty but as a necessary bullwark against a criminal justice system gone horribly wrong, in which the poor are herded into the system in numbers that reflect misguided public policy and then are pressured into pleading guilty as the least costly alternative.