The Black Pan­thers: Van­guard of the Revolution

Tak­ing a sub­ject like the Black Pan­ther move­ment, it could be very easy for a film­mak­er to lose a sense if objec­tiv­i­ty regard­ing his or her sub­ject. Direc­tor Stan­ley Nel­son wants to get to the truth of this con­tentious mat­ter, and even though in this new doc­u­men­tary pro­file he over­lays bois­ter­ous archive footage of the Pan­thers in action – either march­ing, orat­ing or organ­is­ing com­mu­ni­ty pro­grammes – with toe-tap­ping funk sounds, he nev­er entire­ly expunges the oppor­tu­ni­ty for crit­i­cism from the equation.

The arc adopt­ed by The Black Pan­thers: Van­guard of the Rev­o­lu­tion is one of a fiery ide­al­ism scup­pered by com­plex logis­tics and in-fight­ing. And not to men­tion the extreme mea­sures tak­en by the con­ser­v­a­tive media and cer­tain gov­ern­ment agen­cies to catal­yse the party’s even­tu­al down­fall. Ronald Rea­gan, in his role as gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia, seemed to be indi­rect­ly adopt­ing a polit­i­cal stance which would impact neg­a­tive­ly on the work the Pan­thers were under­tak­ing. But this only damp­ened their mox­ie rather than extin­guish it entirely.

The film offers a fair­ly com­plete sur­vey of the Pan­thers’ move­ments from the time when the par­ty was formed in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia in 1966 right through to the ear­ly ​’80s and the even­tu­al demise of one of their key per­son­nel, Huey New­ton. While all the detail, as elu­ci­dat­ed through inter­views with key sur­viv­ing mem­bers, is gen­er­al­ly inter­est­ing (for­mal­ly, it’s very con­ven­tion­al), it’s the wider ram­i­fi­ca­tions of their actions that sup­plies the film with added interest.

By way of intim­i­da­tion, the Pan­thers would exploit a legal loop­hole allow­ing them to bran­dish high-gauge firearms in pub­lic, intend­ed as a show of pow­er to their ene­mies and a state­ment sug­gest­ing they were will­ing to retal­i­ate against those who would direct abuse towards them. While con­ser­v­a­tive gun nuts now go to insane lengths to pre­serve the rights afford­ed to them by the con­tro­ver­sial sec­ond amend­ment in the con­sti­tu­tion, it’s inter­est­ing to see the ide­o­log­i­cal flip-flop­ping they went through back then as a way to take guns out of the hands of ​“threat­en­ing” peo­ple of colour.

Also, one point the film makes is that the Pan­thers’ pol­i­tics were in many aspects aligned to that of America’s mor­tal ene­my: Rus­sia. Through their col­lec­tivi­sa­tion pro­grammes and a desire to dis­trib­ute goods and wealth to all who need­ed them, the tac­tics under­tak­en by the Pan­thers’ looked sus­pi­cious­ly like social­ism. They were a dou­ble threat to the less-than-pris­tine sta­tus quo, and it meant that the pow­ers that be were bru­tal in their strate­gies to make them into sym­bol­ic pat­sies. In many ways, the film works bet­ter as a reflec­tion on the woes of con­tem­po­rary times than it does as a his­tor­i­cal document.