The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 | Little White Lies

The Black Pow­er Mix­tape 1967 – 1975

21 Oct 2011 / Released: 21 Oct 2011

A person with an afro hairstyle in an orange jumper seated at a table, speaking to another person wearing a grey jacket.
A person with an afro hairstyle in an orange jumper seated at a table, speaking to another person wearing a grey jacket.
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Anticipation.

There’s always an air of possibility and excitement surrounding found footage.

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Enjoyment.

Reaches its peak with fascinating glimpses of fringe figures as well as the headline names.

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In Retrospect.

Like the era it represents, there are highs and lows.

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.

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