Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 46 — Black Filmmakers Matter
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
316/365: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) (Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Conscientiously ham-fisted, theatrical, hyperbolic, and yet both hilarious and passionately angry, Lee’s cornerstone hit defined its era, marking out territorial discussions of post-civil-rights-era racial conflict no one else had dared to touch — and right in the middle of the Reagan-Bush “greed is good” years, and two years before Rodney King. From its visual recreation of summertime Bed-Stuy as a fluorescent terrarium to its vast palette of perspective-embattled characters, boiling along and locking horns until a Michael Stewart-style police killing sparks a neighborhood riot, the film manages to both limn the systemic problem and grasp even the white bigots’ points of view. Fiery must-see viewing.
317/365: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Incredibly, the first film directed by an African-American woman to be theatrically released in America — 1991 — this dreamy, stylized historical indie explores the lives of a Gullah family on the islands off the Georgia coast in 1902, and it’s a unique stew of folklore, film-as-memory, historical detail that demands awareness as no other film had of rich Black cultural legacies in America outside of — or alongside — the history of slavery and post-emancipation oppression. It’s startling visual originality (Arthur Jaffa was the DP) won the film an award at Sundance.
318/365: Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) (Archive.org)
We are in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (the filmmaker’s family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists, and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and U.S.-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. This isn’t a documentary, but the testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens, writers, activists, tribal leaders, etc.; the lawyers, European and African, on both sides are also genuine advocates. In and around the trial courses a neverending flow of relaxed, workaday life, loiterers, babies, laundry, troubled families, goats, sunglasses salesmen, fabric dyers, well-women, and so on — Africanness rolling onward. A beautiful nightclub chanteuse, whose marriage is dissolving, stops the court in mid-morning to have someone, anyone, tie up the back of her dress. The locals listen to the proceedings on loudspeakers, until they no longer wish to and watch TV instead (Sissako doesn’t let that opportunity slip by, inventing for broadcast a cheesy spaghetti western parable on cowboy diplomacy starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleimann). At one point, a wedding ceremony plows through the courtyard. But the witnesses are never deterred, and the core of Bamako is intense, eloquent testimony against the state powers that systematically, under the guise of aiding developing nations, rape them of resources and drain them through intolerable debt. (The name “Paul Wolfowitz” is spat out like a swallowed bug.) There’s no denying the integrity of Sissako’s assembled voices, especially once an elderly tribesman takes the stand and belts out a wailing, and unsubtitled, Bambara elegy of cultural woe, making everyone in the vicinity stop dead and go grave.
319/365: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
A legendary but unreleased phantom from the crazy, hazy summer of 1968 that finally got an actual release in 2005, Greaves’ film may be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard’s tail for him and one-upping the classic Chuck Jones anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a natural entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie, Zeno-like, never moves from square one. The suave, implacably jovial Greaves plays Greaves playing a vague indie filmmaker shooting a film about marital rupture in Central Park; with three mutually interrogating cameras going at all times, the set and surrounding passersby (including cops) get folded into the meta-verite mix, which is often prismed out for us as a split-screen triptych. Eventually, the discontented and cerebral crew begin filming themselves complaining about Greaves (and his script) when he’s not there, scenes that are sometimes cut up by Greaves later on; in entire chunks of the film, shooting and editing are actions in deep conflict with each other. Or so it’s made to seem, or made to seem possible. “Stop acting!” someone hollers early on; the magical moment when we see two simultaneous shots get refocused on distractions (a squad car, the actress’s legs) is trumped only by the sound team’s vituperative critique of Greaves’ “acting” — on and off-camera.
320/365: Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) (Netflix)
The first film the world has seen made by a west African woman, this bizarre and spooky feminist-anti-capitalist saga-slash-love story from Senegal in which a young woman is caught between her wealthy fiancee and the poor man she actually loves — and when he and others, after building an office tower and being cheated out of wages, vanishes at sea, the remaining women becomes possessed by their angry spirits, and haunt the building owner looking for justice. A worldwide hit, the film attacks familiar ideas and feelings about developing-nation inequity with an entirely original arsenal of narrative and visual ideas, all of which are, in fact, sourced out of tribal folklore.
321/365: Hyenas (Djbril Diop Mambety, 1992) (FilmStruck)
One of the greatest of sub-Saharan African films, this sharp-eyed Sengalese bad boy adapts Friederich Durrenmatt’s play The Visit, in the tale of an embittered old woman returning to her village decades after being cast out, and offering the impoverished inhabitants all the money they need if only they’d execute the man who impregnated and abandoned her years before. As the title suggests, the townspeople do not comport themselves well, and the satire lashes out not only at human folly in general, but the corruption of the post-colonial world as well.
322/365: Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978) (No streaming! — but on DVD from Milestone, and worth it)
A searing experience fashioned out of little more than black L.A. poverty, the post-verite-post-Cassavetes Zeitgeist, and the filmmaker’s bedeviling sense of space, composition, ennui and brute-lyric imagery, this famous film is on the surface merely a mood piece about the enervating, dead-end existence of being black in 1970s America, attaining attains an inexplicable elemental power and mystery that suggests, at least to the willing viewer, millennia of Godless desperation, human embattlement and food-chain horror. There’s no story, but there are people — mainly, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a poor slaughterhouse laborer with a loving wife and curious children whose life in the outer-urban wastes is in the process of bulldozing his pride and confidence. Burnett’s film proceeds from the very beginning as if every image and moment of Stan’s life is a mythic truth to gaze upon, and damn if it isn’t sweepingly convincing in the process. The action, for instance, of attempting to carry a disembodied car engine down a flight of tract-housing stairs has positively Sisyphean traction. It’s not a movie you pick dramatic highlights or even visual memories from; instead, it flows before you like a despairing folk song made real, a blues anthem older than movies or Burnett himself. Part of the film’s residual force stems from its status as legitimate film maudit— it didn’t ever get a full-on theatrical release, or home video distribution, until 2007, 30 full years after it was made. (Burnett’s stirring soundtrack, which rivals Scorsese’s for Mean Streets in pioneering jukebox eloquence, was largely uncleared for rights.) And yet it was one of the first 50 films to be chosen by the National Film Preservation Board as part of the National Film Registry, defined as honoring and preserving movies that are “culturally, historically, or esthetically important,” a full 17 years before it was finally made commercially available in any way for people to see. It’s a ghost movie, returned to haunt us.
Other must-see films by black artists:
Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton, 2010) (Pluto, Crackle, Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse, 1987) (Kanopy, Mubi)
Out of Time (Carl Franklin, 2003) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Guelwaar (Ousmane Sembene, 1992) (YouTube) (All of Sembene is essential, actually.)
To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) (Sling, Tubi, Amazon Prime)
Crooklyn (Spike Lee, 1994) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
12 Years a Slave (Steve Mcqueen 2013) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Uptown Saturday Night (Sidney Poitier, 1974) (Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) (Sling, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Les Miserables (Ladj Ly, 2019) (Amazon Prime)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982) (Criterion Channel)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017) (Netflix)
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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