Visual Liberation: The Right & The Left. Critical Blitzes on Cinema’s Moral & Political Dilemma
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
The conflicts of cinema are blurry (l to r) Haile Gerima and Clint Eastwood
The Luminal Theater’s recent history-making screening of Haile Gerima’s rarely seen classic documentary Wilmington 10-USA 10,000 about the ten activists in North Carolina wrongfully convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 as a result of trying to organize a boycott against racism spreading in local high schools, and then imprisoned, exploded onto the screen after over 40 years in the very city in which it’s based.
Dr. Ben Chavis and two of the other surviving formerly incarcerated activists, Wayne Moore and Willie Earl Vereen, attended this historical event. It is a living testament to two things: cultural organizing (activism) and filmmaking (art). Gerima’s commitment to cinema cannot be overstated. The Academy Awards’ mealy-mouthed, if not bizarre and overdue, celebration of his talent and extraordinary body of work back in 2021 attempted to homogenize Gerima’s radicalism (once you’re considered over the hill and no longer a threat, you will always find those who shunned you welcoming you) – but it’s impossible to do so. Despite the unconventional relationship with Ava DuVernay, Gerima’s work will always resonate. For me, it was the ending of his 1982 Ashes & Embers. The final scene will always linger in my mind, the way Death in Venice does or that final scene in the cop car in Spook Who Sat by the Door. Evelyn Blackwell’s face and voice…and the sound of the swing alone in Ashes still chills me.
Gerima’s Ashes & Embers offered a Left-wing and liberatory offering about psychosis and Vietnam. It was a Black radical creation countering Martin Scorsese’s racist, however brilliantly made, 1976 nightmare fantasy, Taxi Driver. Made a good five years apart, they both still manage to express the anxieties of the margins and the mainstream, spiritually and politically - America’s Nixon-Carter-Reagan tumultuousness is felt in both films. And John Anderson’s performance is as haunting as De Niro’s.
Decades ago, I tried to get a movie house to screen them both together. My proposal constantly rejected. Why? Because there is no way a (white) classic American movie is going to be framed and/or presented as “fascist” which is exactly how I would have done it! (Mind you, fascism, in this case, is just virulent and organized racism. Gerima’s Ned Charles suffers from the horror of being in Vietnam and not knowing who to trust, his PTSD leads him inward, desperate for salvation. Scorsese and Paul Shrader’s Travis Bickle can only find redemption by soaking up all the racism and misogyny like a sponge and then eradicate all his demons (i.e. save the white world) by rescuing a child prostitute which is just a blatant declaration that the young, misunderstood, and “improperly” defiled white virgin must be protected at all costs. Film programmers are scared of such film dialectics: “don’t mess with the “classics.”
Scorsese’s racial hostility must be combated with Gerima’s radical insights, Black consciousness…and his love. Scorsese loves his characters, too; my goodness - yes. But we are used to seeing white films embodying this. It is still rare when it is transmitted from a Black gaze…the verisimilitude doesn’t quite stand up always. One should say “I’m Black and I am proud.” But, honestly, most of us who say it don’t actually believe it. We are working through our own psychic damage and coercing ourselves into finding ways to counter colonialism, self-hatred, etc. It will never work en masse because filmmaking as propaganda does everything it can to destroy the Black and tame the Brown. Mantras are vital, but a lot of movies do their best to destroy not only your chi, but your mantra.
Why bring all this up?
Well, because I am suffering as you might be – with the “God at 4AM Blues.” Where, sober or not, old or young – psychedelic transformations take place within you; you become possessed (obsessed) with the visions, the problems around you, the catastrophes. And while culturally, we have been a catastrophe since at least 1492 (I mean that sincerely) how this informs cinema, the 7th art and forever the youngest, is deeply concerning. Because all you have to do is take the last 110 years into account! A LOT of wasted money, but a hell of a lot more racism and hatred hurled and spread all over tiny slivers of celluloid that could leave you languishing in Gomorrah for a second eternity. If you consider how much money is wasted on bombing human beings in real life and then assassinating them on screen (reel life) – your mind would slowly give out…
If we turn the gaze onto Western cinema alone, and further onto ourselves – you will see that an Ashes & Embers/Taxi Driver double feature would not only be incredibly powerful, beautifully polarizing, and quite possibly reignite a good down home, dragged out argument in the theater or possibly into the street – where it really belongs – but an honest and eloquent encapsulation of the modern American heart of darkness.*
* Pasolini’s La Rabbia (Rage) would be an excellent model here: For this 1963 film, quite possibly my favorite of his, was released in conjugal with another short film made by a right-wing fascist, Gastone Guareschi – using the same footage and nearly the same grammar, both trying to answer what the moral and political dilemma of their time was. Pasolini’s militant revolutionary cinematic grenade was lobbed right back at Guareschi’s right-wing monarchism and although Guareschi’s film is lackluster even as propaganda, it does prove what we all know: there will always be an extreme opposite view or regard towards humanity. What you deeply care about, others will not. It is frightening because we are unequipped with how to “come together” as humans. But our problem is not our behavior as homo sapiens (overrated by the way), it’s how our bodies, minds, and souls metastasized and swallowed the impacts and brainwashing of colonialism and racism. If Blacks and the “Indian” indigenous have been put through the wringer, believe me it’s actually worse for the white mind because they don’t see a problem. The victim, while they may be eternally traumatized, might still be able to function and experience joy and give love and, dare I say it, even indulge their desire to want to bond with others. The attacker, the rapist, the person carrying the disease and willfully infecting – doesn’t care about any of that. For you exist to be defiled. Simple as that.
Visual Liberation or Visual Subjugation?
(top) Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s right-wing libertarian Dirty Harry (1980) and his Black “criminal” victim he famously taunts; (bottom) Steve McQueen holding a gun against Levar Burton’s head in The Hunter (1980). Just three years earlier Burton was Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley’s “Roots”. Think about that. There’s a fine line between holding a mirror up to nature versus shaping and promoting what you want it to be.
Unfortunately, it all depends on your own personal ideology, your racial understanding, and what your own sloppy notion of morality is. Any Afro-Pessimist knows the Black person is the most abused human being on the planet. And a great deal of Western cinema justifies, valorizes, sexualizes, and celebrates this atrocious view. Especially in its torture porn fetishes of hearing actors saying “nigger” in a variety of contexts, mock Blacks, or specifically have white simply shoot them. Pop music also caught up to these tropes and corporate “hip hop” is nothing but a denizen of aural moray decay glamorizing the intention (and right) to decimate Black people.
Right-wing tendencies, racist notions, demeaning and patronizing tropes and white supremacist wet-dreams have filled the film screen longer than any of us have been alive. And most likely, at least one of your favorite filmmakers is incredibly racist. To your face. I am not sure if that says more about us (the viewer) than it does the perp (filmmaker).
The desire to contextualize films and their authors beckons in a way more radically than it did even five years ago when “political films” had already reached a boiling point in mainstream culture, rendering anything “political” hollow. Radical chic itself became obsequious for a moment or two - or should I say, “Black” chic which saw its peak in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic’s brutal summer of 2020.
There is a way to start looking at our world and the past century’s motion picture art through the lens of moral and political sentiments, outrage, empathy, suspicion, bankruptcy, and ambiguity as the movie mind of some of cinema and especially Hollywood’s greatest practitioners have all at one time or another, seemingly, harbored Fascist or racist impulses or ideas as swiftly and as succinctly as some of our liberation and social justice radicals have decried or advocated for the opposite.
This is not a fancy prologue for a meditation on my own artistic cultural background, not a eulogy for my beloved protest artists but a twisted reversal of that passion and risk: a collage of the atrocious and the well-heeled principle of white supremacy that, while it may not flow through the veins of its makers, is obvious in the celluloid or digital tumors that have remained healthy in the connective tissue of many movies…
Popular artists as diverse as Barry White and Charlie Chaplin, bred in the gutter, understood the criminal, the pathologically averse to society; not morally ambiguous characters, but individuals suffering for the dignity and purity of their soul. Wretchedness is a condition imposed on you, one you then cling to, even proudly possess. It is the end all be all, the cul-de-sac for the colonized who have no idea about “resistance.” They’re victims who become engaged to Stockholm Syndrome if not on the other end of the spectrum. You need not read Fanon to know this.
But what of those, particularly artists, who play games with morality and politics?
He appeased liberals with the well-made Baldwin documentary, I am Not Your Negro, which was interesting anyway because Baldwin himself is the most fascinating author of the last part of the 20th century. But Raoul Peck has lost all “radical” credentials he mildly fostered with his excellent film Lumumba. Peck failed grossly, with Exterminate all the Brutes by either capitulating or agreeing with the Hollywood Zionist views on the state of Israel. And certainly, the political winds have blown up in his face as strong as 2023’s Tropical Storm Ophelia…In a cinematic discourse on colonialism he never once mentioned the oppression of the Palestinians. How was that possible? That’s because he is, like many, only willing to go so far. Especially when you’re given a pouch of silver for your journey. Black filmmakers, especially, are ghettoized into “Black” racial politics or histories. Hollywood likes it when we do that or, at the very least, romanticize Africa. While Peck’s cerebral and more disciplined mode of filmmaking actually trumps Gerima’s, he has none of Gerima’s radicalism at heart; and he thins out his political thesis to appease and conform. There is no diversity there is only conformity. Peck conformed to what HBO wanted. And, like the Saudis, he turned his back on his abused Arab brethren in the Gaza Strip.
Perhaps Fassbinder was right: Show the revolution onscreen you deny them the revolution in their life. Hmmm….We must show them the reason why revolution is necessary or show how radicals TRY to organize or rebel. The stage can show the ritual of this better than anyone because there is no glamor intruding. Romance, but not glamor.
James Baldwin’s essay “The Northern Protestant” is an illuminating portrait not just of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (whom Baldwin has no problem admitting is a true artist), but is also a compelling self-portrait through Baldwin’s analysis, or appreciation, of certain Bergman pictures. Towards the end of the essay, probably one of his most elegant, Baldwin illuminates the double-consciousness here: his twin soul in Bergman, the white Protestant. Coming from a harsh religious background, Baldwin understands Bergman in many ways. He even fantasizes his own art-film to rival Bergman’s replete with a kind of cubistic overview of the American Negro’s life from 1619 to the early 1960’s, in which his main character - a jazz musician - would go insane. It is humorous, tantalizing, insightful as ever…but I couldn’t help wondering how Baldwin would have ended his essay had he known the strange occurrence within Bergman’s life: the years he was a Nazi sympathizer. In fact, Bergman held onto his racist beliefs until at least a year after Hitler’s death and the end of WW2. Jane Magnusson’s 2018 documentary, Bergman: A Year in a Life, sheds excellent information including excerpts from his posthumously revealed diaries. It was a chilling little movie giving us greater insight into Bergman and remembering that sometimes even the satanic can create miraculous works…and more importantly, people can change. Intensely. Sometimes, even for the better.
But can you imagine? Bergman mourns the demise of the führer only to be excited to meet and be interviewed by James Baldwin nearly twenty years later. That’s a film right there. And I don’t say that lightly. I despise bio-pics, but what an incredible imaginative moment could leap from the factual interview and Baldwin’s essay itself. To this day I do not know of any Black American author who has written, analyzed and interviewed a major European filmmaker and came away revealing his own personal identification.
The first page of James Baldwin’s essay on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Berman from his 1962 Nobody Knows My Name collection.
Filmmakers who have stated, celebrated, or inferred racist ideas, right-wing sentiments, or in the very least – a creepy rabid nationalism or just generalized pathological contempt towards Blacks, etc:
· Griffith (A genius, perhaps. A damned good filmmaker who gave cinematic language to his hatred of Blacks. And to this day – virtually everyone chooses to separate his politics from his aesthetics. It’s like separating a person from their body. Only death can do that.)
· McCarey (a brilliant director of actors who started with the Leftist Marx Bros…and ended up paranoid about commies in America)
· Herzog (the greatest artist of them all here, possibly the most eloquent)
· Von Trier (he went from Liberal to Leftist radical to Right Wing Fascist)
· Scorsese (excellent example of the NY Liberal racist…that everyone loves because he’s “honest.”)
· Spielberg (yes, him)
· Tarantino (the cool white boy who got a “pass.”)
· Lee Daniels (he hates Black people, simple as that. This deserves an article of its own)
· Eastwood (Watch Garden of Good & Evil and Gran Torino – pay attention to certain lines of dialogue, figure out what’s character…and what is simply the author declaring how he feels. A good exercise. Because a movie about a racist is not a racist film – unless the director is trying to get you to empathize with a character who is racist. Ben Affleck did it marvelously well with his Gone, Baby, Gone - a film that was nearly as contemptuous of Black existence as Lee Daniels’ Precious)
“Good” traditional socially conscious Liberals or Radical Leftists:
· Cassavetes
· Lumet
· Welles
· Chaplin
· Eisenstein
· Pasolini
· Kramer
· Dixon
· Gerima
All Artists judge. We don’t have the ability to condemn necessarily, to punish in the physical world, but it’s the artist’s duty to judge. How we do it is what gives artistic power and expression its own political gravitas. We should see to understand other opinions, our enemies’ certainly – without the horror of catharsis, what is drama? But people also need the poet to critique and “choose a side.” Because most of us in our daily lives are incapable, unable, powerless to do so. We judge internally, without the protection to reveal how we really feel. That’s the artist’s job. The act of this alone can be courageous. Sometimes even fatal, depending on the circumstance, political authority or nation. But this notion that an actor, for example, should be a lawyer - not a judge - for his character, is only an idea that comes from the white bedrock of privilege: bourgeois moral decay.
Conservatives or The Right don’t pathologize their relationships with society. Which is why they may suffer less. He who is conscious is the one who suffers constantly. And while that may not be the only center where the best art comes from, it is certainly where the most of it festers.
Racists, war-mongers, Nationalists – to varying degrees are all warped. They don’t for one minute have a problem with the world because they feel they are the world. Their problems are with people in their world. When a white racist buys a book or an apple or a pairs of socks, he doesn’t think about it or question anything. When he parties he doesn’t think twice. Talent, the arts, expression— is all seamless, part of a whole, an organic entity. Which is why aesthetics to him are a strange discussion, philosophically or politically. Something is pleasant or it isn't. It is, actually, as simple as that for most of them.
The Left of center, however, separates their views on humanity from their cinematic or artistic decisions, rendering their work at times uneven in a dangerous way. Clint Eastwood’s rabid conservatism is honed and well crafted, at times giving the impression of art. Scorsese tries to unleash his imagination via the souls of white working-class Conservative men…while maintaining his stands in the public eye as a “liberal.” You can’t make films about thugs in Queens or Little Italy or Boston - and be left of center. All your time has been spent on white men who would vote for Trump (or if not, they at least would not shed a tear for a George Floyd.)
The reason why most of the best filmmakers hone conservative proclivities is because they see filmmaking as an extension of their national identity; and in America, particularly, they never ever question their ideologies, they prefer to play games with electoral politics – as if Republican and Democrat politics are sports. Knicks or Lakers? Mets or Yankees? Hmm…maybe they are right.
Conservative filmmakers don’t question their feelings towards other people, they don’t question their own actions. They’re too obsessed with valorizing their own angst (as white people usually) or pondering on “what America has lost” to the point of entering a near Nazi-hysterical reclamation of their “whiteness.” Cinema preserves the white man’s whiteness.
Their vantage point is from one angle – and rightly so, they are writing “what they know.” And how they feel about it is in the performance. Closeted racist- hypocritical Liberals have techniques that may actually be better to express their worldviews, but their art is ultimately worse. Because they are only concerned with THEIR humanity, not the world’s. And they can justify everything by adhering to a rigidly classical notion of plot: the hallmarks of capitalism oppression in drama.
Those who champion the oppressed view character and emotional truth as more vital, but they often wrestle with their own politics because they’re so brainwashed to believe they must constantly second guess them. So their good ideas are often dismantled by an inability to find the right form.
Werner Herzog represents the last great remnant of the dying White Man’s ‘Intrepid Colonialism’. Just watch his South American films with Klaus Kinski, they all superbly capture the Nietzschean Superman idea; the white man’s holy derangement. They are films that encapsulate and exquisitely symbolize the Anglos manifest destiny obsession.
Of course, Mr. Martin Scorsese’s latest film is torture porn, an insult to American Indian existence and perception – how could he possibly not do what the film does: express the white character’s (his) point-of-view and view the subjugated and oppressed perspective as less than and certainly not spiritually rousing as that of his “suffering” white men in most of his films. Scorsese is interesting. He fooled everyone at 30 because he loved rock & roll and later punk and is fond of the Blues. But so was Lee Atwater.
Don’t shoot the messenger. At the very least, employ him first.