Like the era it represents, there are highs and lows in director Göran Hugo Olsson’s latest documentary.
Living up to its title, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 offers a snapshot, top 10 rundown of key events in the rise of the titular movement in the late sixties and early 1970s, made up of occasional uninspired choices that most will want to fast forward through and parts so moving they demand to be played over and over again.
The film is a meandering documentary collage pieced together from Swedish TV footage found languishing in archives, 30 years after it was shot, by director Göran Olsson. Throughout the hour and a half we get face-to-face with key figures such as civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, scholar Angela Davis, Black Panther leading member Eldridge Cleaver and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakham. It’s a whistle-stop tour of a distinctly American struggle as seen through the prism of the Swedish newsmen’s outsiders’ view, from the inside.
The primary concession to the passage of time comes in the form of voiceover analysis and opinion by modern figures in black music and academia such as Talib Kweli, Ahmir Thompson, Robin Kelley and Sonia Sanchez, with some commentators, almost inevitably perhaps, providing more insight than others.
Amongst all this is some footage truly worthy of preservation thanks to its documentation of social history in action, or at least in its reflection of this time of seismic social change as it was occurring. We see a defiant Cleaver in Algiers, Carmichael edgily interviewing his mother about her immigrant past in their family home, and a tense interview with a weakened but still terrifyingly lucid Davis during her controversial imprisonment.
But the most affecting segments are the snatches of film featuring those not in the eye of the storm but the desperate figures caught up struggling somewhere in its messy outer reaches. The most poignant being the candid interviews with the owner of a black book store in Harlem who’s dedicated to the education of the ethnic underclasses, and a heartbreaking one-to-one with a teenage former heroin addict turned prostitute desperate to turn things around.
It is, after all, these ground level voices that genuinely reflect the hope and despair that so fully permeated the era.
Published 21 Oct 2011
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