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Rating: A revolutionary can die; a revolution cannot die.
Mexico City, 1968, “Night of the Black Panthers”; a black-gloved fist is projected for the first time into the sky, the freshly victorious Olympic champions bow their heads and scream in global broadcast – We are not racing dogs!!! – tearing an already beleaguered America apart, brought down by the gazelle-like legs of “Card Boy” Smith.
“We must win, win overwhelmingly, and then they will have to listen to us," Smith shouted at the top of his lungs, barefoot like his father who worked the cotton in Texas, with short black socks. The only white athlete on the podium, with a silver medal, innocently displayed on his chest the badge labeled Ophr (Olympic Project for Human Rights); now the provocation was complete and deep.
Other times, other stories, other cinematographic and non-cinematographic directions…
But now, fortunately and thanks to the acute alchemies of neoliberal thought, even cinema has rediscovered, after years of confusion and directorial and production gaps, its Bulgarian edict.
Thus new rules, for everything and everyone, to face strictly health-related emergencies for the moment, but who knows what real or invisible dangers the future holds above our defenseless heads; obscuration of the Earth's atmosphere, ion storms, bellicose landings from Mars.
And so no more reckless actions, dear David, you will have to change your hairdresser, that rebellious mane and the mind that deletes, stop the gloomy walks at dusk in your Inland Empire; from tomorrow your shadows must dissolve because the bacterial load generated by your Hyppocampe has become unsustainable.
It is not a coincidence that after the appearance of the hashtag #OscarSoWhite in 2015, the primordial spark of a project that seems extremely more complex, this phantasmagoric A.M.P.A.S. association came into play, which from 2024 will introduce new metrics (in cinema!!) for films nominated for Best Picture Oscar, which to be admitted to selection will need to meet certain inclusion requirements.
In particular, the selective criteria will concern the main aspects; plot, characters, acting, and people who worked on the production and promotion of the film.
In extreme summary, since it might be actually sad to delve on; to acquire the blue seal to access the nominations, the production must carefully select its actors, obligatorily including Hawaiian, African American, or Asian actors with strict rules and the same criterion adopted, and the thematic of the film narrative must fall within a restricted pre-defined perimeter (racial/ethnic group; LGBTQ+).
Browning's Freaks (1932) was one of the greatest cinematic cults of all time, a cursed and deformed film, renounced upon its release by the good thinkers of the time and quickly withdrawn by the distribution company, saw the first lights of the limelight only thirty years later at an initial and elegiac appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. Its cult and celebrity are primarily due to the presence in the cast of some theatrical performers with serious physical deformities. Finally understood in its caustic mimicry decades later, right after Bergman's cinema, which in its reflected mirror had already delved deep into the human entrails, these amiable theatrical performers were finally stripped of all their glitch axiom, overturning the stage and filling it with mirrors, reflected by individuals so common and normal and true simulacra of human monstrosity.
“Judas and The Black Messiah“
Chicago 60s.
In this first his first film, director Shaka King distances himself from the present and ignites his story from the racial movement of the Black Panther Party, a complex articulation of black power that encompasses several aspects of this racial community; the need for education, militarization, and action. Activism, even armed as a form of defense against local police intimidation, was associated with other internal forms of social aggregation; food distribution, free breakfast for children; establishment of free clinics.
The scene is stolen from the very beginning by the charisma of Fred Hampton, the young leader of the movement and ignited by the passion of Marxist/Leninist thought, a revolutionary anti-capitalist socialism that ingeniously propagates within his community and even among other racial groups, fist raised to the sky and gaze able to inflame the audience;
- I don't need a microphone, can you hear?
We of the Black Panther Party don't believe in any culture, except the revolutionary one
Don’t give me a 5-cent costume of a wizard or a shaman;
or anything that you think resembles the homeland.
After the death of Martin Luther King, the FBI began a phantom hunt for all forms of subversion forming in America's racial communities, hence the title of the film from the events of those years.
The Intelligence had now found a new mastermind in identifying and repressing every emerging Black Messiah, which with his increasing charisma could unify racial and ethnic minorities and become a widespread threat.
In a direction that exalts the context and subordinates the protagonists to co-stars, Fred Hampton, aka Black Messiah, has his counterpart and opposite in Judas/William O'Neal, the spy hired by the FBI to thwart the Black Panthers' plots; the pair split the scene with dynamic antagonism, identifying themselves in extreme representations of opposite visions, of freedom and opportunism, of radicalism and complicity, until a bloody showdown between angel and demon, a troubled and cyclical catharsis between revolution and its sabotage, a stone that rolls from eternity sowing death and ideals. Fatal in the film is the meeting, during one of Hampton's first rallies, with his future girlfriend Deborah Johnson, between the two, a deep empathy immediately creates, and the chemistry of the narrative is inevitably marked by this encounter, which in a couple of scenes overturns the film's emotional core. And in one of the most intense moments, when she is pregnant waiting for Fred's child and wonders if it is right to bring an innocent into battle, she asks him to listen to a poem written for him:
- What magic could a Philistine and a poetess create
However contradictory their fate would seem
We educate, esteem, love, and influence.
Perhaps we are here for deeper reasons than this war of bodies in the streets
His eyes will have your sparkle, our son will have your pupils.
This is a singular first work by Shaka King, in a current context where even from a cinematographic point of view some critical reason seems dormant and sweetened; so in this historical refrain, it starts from afar, from those convulsive 60s, where the black/white dichotomy was extremely simple and extremely complex but anyhow sheltered from any third-party attempt to ride the faction and subvert the orders.
This work is courageous like Hampton's passion, in trying to describe, quoting the Black Messiah, that power is in the people, is in numbers, in those who believe they can change the state of things and arm themselves with the power of words and poetry to move the masses in the game, in trying to describe, with all the intrinsic difficulties, what it means to be a socialist in America, also think of the story of Bernie Sanders, dismounted for some of his radicalities by the democratic establishment and perpetual quarrel with the champions of the technological and financial elite.
A film to see, possibly in an art-house theater crowded with white, black, and Asian people, smoky like in the worst bars of Caracas.
In a moment when every form of expression, of demonstration, is castrated by the digital chirp of the moment, which breaks into myriad and scattered fragments every attempt at reflection, of cohesion, before this new and mysterious utopia which has given us infinite potential to boast universal rights but has simultaneously reduced to the essentials our ability to shout furiously and discontentedly to the four winds.
We must win, win overwhelmingly, and then they will have to listen to us (Card Boy -Smith -).
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