by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

As a minimalist I have a particular attraction to the gravity of the ephemeral (a theatrical moment itself, for example) and the impact of the moment.  The singular beauty of one work of art, of one night, of one performance, of one...conversation - can change your life, for the better.

 It was filmmaker Kofi Ofosu (Akata, Public Toilet Africa) who told me that several films are unnecessary if one film can say it all. Fiscal impediments aside, film visions like any vision, will always be developed and transferred if the filmmaker has an urge to share it.  The urge, like Hendrix sacrificing his guitar, can be a momentary obsession of desire or carnal awakening or an epiphanic compulsion to express what feels nearly inexpressible.  I am not talking about inspiration, I'm talking about the seizure of the moment, reveling in all of that moment and endowing the people with the insights, secrets, and feelings you have discovered. The filmmaker is a shaman.

 So is Christopher St. John.  And sometimes it takes us years to understand the one vision given to us.

‘The single’ as a recording commodity and creative expression is an interesting recognition of the power of "one." Think about the one song, that particular 45 or cassette.  Strange how actually the digital age is not particularly supportive of the single, but the playlist concept which has slightly usurped even the idea of an album is; in cinema -- it is the TV series now that seems to have more impact than actual movies for example.

Still, the focus is on how many.  How many seasons or episodes, etc.  Quantity has replaced quality in many aspects of life, in particular the arts - high or low. In the peculiar and singular realm of Black cinema it is less about canons or exhaustive ouvres; bodies of work are less important than vital limbs. The instant.  That one song or novel (Ralph Ellison's lasting incredible contribution was the lone cosmic Invisible Man, not several middle-of-the-road books that sprinkle around its achievement) can have more impact than a litany of other works or corresponding pieces of art by that same artist.

When I was young, I thought it was more important to have many many works. This was beaten into my brain as a young artist: "You will create a whole body of work," "a life or career in the arts must be indulged in more than one offering," etc.  These cliches can warp the mind and vision of some artists.  If you as a baseball pitcher can pitch a perfect game, a no-hitter -- you will never be able to top that.  If you repeat it the next game and then afterward, the effect diminishes of course and so does the achievement.  The mysteriousness and the majesty of that one game seals itself up into a precise and provocative and powerful work of art that will reverberate forever.

In the annals of Black cinema, there are single films that mean more to me and have had more of an impact on others than the total number of films of several individual auteurs.  Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess.  Ivan Dixon's Spook Who Sat By the Door, Leslie Harris' Another Girl on the IRT, Wendell Harris' Chameleon Street...even if these artists did absolutely nothing else creative -- those films would stand the test of time.  They are complex and startling dramatic visions.  And no film contextualizes this argument in 2022 as much as the 1972 masterpiece Top of The Heap, a riveting written, directed, and starring Christopher St. John.

Top of the Heap blew minds fifty years ago, dividing critics and forcing several of the white critics - to run for shelter.  But fallout shelters don't really exist for incredible films that, as radical filmmaker Robert Kramer said, "should open the mind the way a can opener does."  Top of the Heap is a mesmerizing movie that charts the mental deterioration of a Black cop, George Lattimer (played by St. John himself, in a pitch-perfect performance), who eventually realizes he must let go of any fantasy of "getting to the top'' of the capitalist system as a cop or as any other talisman of mainstream "white" approved success.  The moral question of being a black police officer in a racist nation, doing the bidding of the oppressor as it were, is explored from all sides and explodes onto the screen like a cubist painting.  St. John gives us all of these points-of-view to acknowledge and consider -- his arguments, whether one agrees or not, are all shared and transmitted with the same conscientiousness and passion as all the other contradictory feelings and sentiments from opposing characters. 

There is much unnecessary attention placed on the conventional logline or "plot" of the movie: a Black cop is overlooked for promotion, so he goes insane and launches a vendetta on street crime while fantasizing about being a hero in an alternate universe, etc.  This simplistic description is held onto so that many critics, instead of lauding St. John's miraculous use of different styles and techniques which collide and coalesce to impart different meanings in the film, can perfunctorily dismiss and patronize a Black art film that reaches beyond their understandings and destroys their safely-hewn stereotypes of black intellectual life, emotions, expressions and approaches to art.

In a word, the film terrifies those who think or feel they know everything there is to know about Black suffrage, experience, or life in the United States of America.  For fifty years, mainstream American critics have struggled to give credence, acknowledgement, and respect to the cinematic works of the Black filmmaker.   It is a well-known fact from the street, for example, that filmmaker Abel Ferrera has seen Top of The Heap and digested the influence it had on him in an original way, with his 1992 Bad Lieutenant. 

Top of the Heap is problematic and riles many a white critic because it is, like Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and the following year’s The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a major feature film that did not take the white audience or point-of-view into account. But neither did the music of James Brown or Bo Diddley.  Heap was not made with the white gaze in mind and it speaks directly to its Black audience as succinctly as a Richard Pryor routine and as stridently as an Amiri Baraka play.  It coincides with the mind-expansion of Black revolutionary struggle and the critical stances of artists and thinkers as diverse as Sun Ra and Miles Davis to Pink Floyd and Stanley Kubrick.

In fact, Kubrick's icy 2001 hovers spiritually in the back within the first several minutes of the film when we first see Latimer dream about being an astronaut and going up into space.  Believe me, Jeff Bezos is late to the game:  the well-worn citizens of this country were envisioning themselves absconding from this planet a long time ago and for reasons that the Bezos' of the world create.  Lattimer is a folk hero in a way, a psychological projection of many of us who are trapped within the confines of hell, which is a Capitalist system that knows no bounds and certainly does not favor the lives of the oppressed.

Top of the Heap is arguably more radical than Sweetback or Spook because it maintains that the imagination might be the last route to liberation, but also because it challenges people - of all tribes - to see that their biggest enemy in our modern world is first and foremost the "cop in the head" as Augusto Boal, the creator of the Brazilian Theater of the Oppressed concept would call it.  WE are the cops who oppress ourselves and our own thoughts prevent us actually from achieving things.  This is another lens in which to view the film. If Lattimer is fantasizing about being famous or a hero going into space...who is to say that the reverse is also not true? The journey St. John takes in the film is painful:  he knows full well he should not contribute to the same system that is destroying him...but what is the alternative?  How to survive?  How to live?  Lattimer's ultimate decision is moving and genuine because he (we) earn this decision, the film grants us hope that we earn at the end because of the turmoil experienced on the screen for the preceding 90 minutes.

Critics like J. Hoberman, for the New York Times, would do themselves a service by being willing to experience something that they cannot understand outside the bounds of the ruling class categories of movie genres and the preposterous labeling of Black avant-garde films as "blaxploitation."  Hoberman’s desire to imprison the Black art film in perfunctory tropes is outrageous and he proves his - and white colleagues’ limitations - in their attitude to and understanding of art and life.  Christopher St. John's writing and directing and approach to cinema as an art has nothing to do with the white-created Blaxploitation movement and it is a travesty that after fifty years of being put through the wringer, he still has to contend with this pejorative and inappropriate context in which to discuss or share his film.  By acting in films that were cooked up from that era - precipitating it like the fun Shaft (Gordon Parks maintained it was absolutely not blaxploitation or in the midst of it, like the titillating Hot Pants Holiday) does not maintain St. John to be any kind of contributor to the Blaxploitation Boom.  In fact, St. John made very few acting appearances after 1972. This was Hollywood’s way of sending him a message after he made Top of the Heap, an art film when all the Hollywood gangsters wanted were stereotypes of Black people in the citie s, running amok with guns. 

Heap was a signal and battle-cry for filmmakers such as myself, artists eager to implement new styles and approaches and develop techniques of writing and executions of performance based on the tenor of each scene.  Heap is so revolutionary formally, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the brilliance of its scene by scene progression -- outside of the fantastical elements.

St. John, like Kubrick, Robert Altman, Haile Gerima, even Sidney Lumet -- employs different styles within one film, but St. John takes it further into cinematic fusion:  like Miles Davis' album On the Corner which was released that very same year -- the fusing of styles was something already being employed vociferously by Black dramatists, performers, musicians, and recording artists.  St. John was just the first one to actually incorporate fusion into a cinematic style via the dramatic techniques.  A lifelong member of the Actors Studio and, like Ellyn Burstyn and Al Pacino, a student of Lee Strassberg, St. John is a man of the theater - this lends his films a different beat.  Well versed in different styles of acting, for example, St. John employs this throughout his film and is the only known filmmaker I am aware of to do this for a film intended for a mass release.  And he succeeds.  Richard Brody, in a spot-on New Yorker article from 2020, first equated Top of the Heap with the early hints of Afro-Futurism (which St. John never consciously intended), but it's also incredible melodrama, gentle surrealism (watch the heartbreaking interlude where Lattimer sees his mother - a sequence Ingmar Bergman would have been jealous of), and rippling effects of Theater of the Absurd.  Some of St.John's best writing are droll absurdist moments:

When asked by the press, in a fantasy sequence, after returning from outer space - what the isolation felt like,  Lattimer quips: "Like waiting at the mailbox for your welfare check." 

Ishmael Reed would drool over that line!

Shifting tones and returning to the forsaken theme, when Lattimer visits his retired Police Chief and mentor, Tim, a white man (superbly rendered by Patrick McVey), tells Lattimer: "I'm so lonely, I can hear my teeth decay."  Eugene O'Neill could not have written a better line. And St. John molds the moment through a soft web of sentiment - you enter it and then cannot seem to shake it.

*

The international reach and appreciation of Top of the Heap has lingered in the air for five decades, but the movie still doesn't receive its due critically or intellectually.  Lesser films and directors have been made into Faber & Faber studies, receive substantial fees from academies, and have their screenplays published.  Our American film critics are contributing to the demise of cinema as much as our ignorant, foolish, nihilistic and vulgar filmmakers are.  Serious Black filmmakers are denied existence by both Black and white cultural gatekeepers and are reduced to aberrations by passive aggressive white critics who only write about the Black vanguard of American cinema with a wink.  They would use a tongue but the tongue is often cut off...when the king puts the critic on the payroll.

In 1972, Top of the Heap was a film that had several allies and contenders for "best" film -- movies like Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Aguirre: Wrath of God, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Heartbreak Kid, Fists of Fury, Frenzy...and yet was easily the most advanced of them all.

Top of the Heap recently played at Brooklyn Academy of Music in preparation for Christopher St. John's first directed film in fifty years, Avatarmania. St. John is not back, for he did not go anywhere.  But he is right where we need him: in the wings, waiting for the next moment to grant us his next vision. Stay tuned.