Liz Garbus & The Assassination of Nina Simone
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Although Lorraine was a girlfriend. . . we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution—real girls’ talk. . . Lorraine was most definitely an intellectual and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle. . . Lorraine started off my political education, and through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.
- Nina Simone, 1968
The Yin & The Yang of the Black Feminist Arts’ Center: Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone in 1963, Harlem (Courtesy of the NY Public Library)
Nina Simone as Portrait of Protest Artist who suffers for our (Black folks’) sins...And who, like all of us, must pay the piper -- when we put truth and artistry before industry and "game playing."
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For decades, there has been a laissez-faire approach to the presentation of African American icons on the silver screen. More specifically, a nonchalantly reckless representation of some of our most vital and impactful figures in recent history. From MLK to Fred Hampton to Billie Holiday to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr to Charlie Parker to Nina Simone to James Brown, no other group has had so many of its biggest and brightest stars or trailblazers presented on onscreen – and with such passion and tactlessness – as Black people from America.
If I sound paranoid, it’s because I have been made to feel, since I was a child, that the rendering of “Black heroes” in motion pictures requires less thought, talent, and rigor than the expressions of the most mediocre white Americans (Jake LaMotta, Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Henry Hill, etc.) who were relayed with more passion and at times brilliance – than their subjects may have even deserved.
While I do believe human beings deserve to be rendered with the grandeur and respect usually only reserved for celebrities, presidents, and royalty, especially in colonized lands, I cannot in good conscience, as a writer with the soul of an actor, pretend that the journey and the sweat it takes to express the living soul of an extraordinary human being is greater or more important than the lives of the very ordinary joe, who will go nameless and may end up in a potter’s field. Alice Walker, in her greatest cultural achievement, committed the most righteous act when she made sure that Zora Neale Hurston had a proper gravestone. She celebrated the life and the work of a special human being in that one act alone. An act that could be considered a work of art, itself, unfortunately.
An effective way to embolden or destroy an understanding of history, especially Black American history, is to warp, destroy or kill the persona of a revolutionary Black figure - in activism or arts – through motion pictures. Replacing truth with annihilation at 24 frames per second. This lends itself to documentary films as much as it does to fictional ones. The result is an exhaustive assassination, and we become willing participants in a gruesome crime: a lynching.
Liz Garbus committed such an atrocity, simultaneously, as Cynthia Mort and Zoe Saldaña did with their biopic Nina in 2016 – when both parties put Nina Simone in their cross hairs.
Saldaña, in a pathetic acknowledgment in 2020, admitted she should never have played the role and several people over a decade ago were up in arms after seeing the actress in early set photos don an afro wig and dark makeup. Fans and critics alike witnessed the car crash the movie had become. I take that back: car crashes can be the result of real humans trying not to kill or destroy. This movie, a catastrophe, displayed an actress way out of her depth, a script without an iota of blood, and direction that was tepid, unsure, and without conviction. We don’t need apologies, we need better film artists.
If Barbra Streisand divides her critics and fans with something like a Yentl – the performance still had weight and gravity. You may not like it, but you can still recognize the talent. I didn’t particularly care for Dee Rees’ Bessie, but Queen Latifah gave the movie a core that transcended any limitations of the movie itself – audiences can always appreciate Latifah’s prowess on screen. She also has something to say about life. We all know Saldaña and director Mort were not enraptured with Nina Simone, nor her music. Being an ardent fan is not enough. If Saldaña had portrayed Simone the way Gary Busey had given us his Buddy Holly or as dignified as Jessica Lange gave us Patsy Cline, it would have meant something – despite the atrocious directing. But boxed into a corner – criticized for darkening her skin and wearing a prosthetic nose – on a sinking island, she had nowhere to turn, no one to pray to. She should have done the noble thing and quit. She should have declared on day one “I can’t do this….I know I can’t do this.” But she didn’t. And we have to live knowing people will always stumble upon that film without having others to watch or compare it to. At least one could get into an argument about the virtues of Berry Gordy’s Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross’ Billie Holiday versus Lee Daniels’ The United States Vs. Billie Holiday, with Andra Day, written by Suzan Lori Parks.
Why did Saldaña commit this grave error? Who, in their right mind, thought for one moment also that Nina Simone could benefit from a biopic? No one even thought about Jim Morrison until Oliver Stone presented us with his version of Jim in his 1991 The Doors, with a superb, if not underrated performance, by Val Kilmer, who studied Jim as a character – and rallied for the part.
We (Black artists) seem to not do this. The Stockholm Syndrome takes root and it is deep. Our relationship to Hollywood is Pavlovian and it has to stop. We deserve better cinematic renditions and portraits of all those we hold dear. I remember Paul Mooney once said that we kill our stars all the time while white folks would never allow for that to happen to a Judy Garland or Dolly Parton or a Frank Sinatra. I will pursue this tension between actors and historical figures in cinema, specifically Black actors in motion pictures elsewhere. But the question to ask now here is: What possesses us to also allow white filmmakers to colonize our minds with their own visions of who they feel our heroes should be, behave, and represent?
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Last week I watched Liz Garbus' 2015 What Happened, Miss Simone? documentary. Although a non-fiction film, the problem of interpretation and context and that dreaded word “representation” still come into play. And in a documentary, the portraiture is even bolder – because the subject is coming to you straight from the director, not being filtered or choreographed through a performing artist.
A successful hit at Sundance, John Legend even performed after its first screening (as if that grants it any power). The poster said "HER STORY. HER VOICE." Maybe. But it's not the story or the voice of Nina Simone. It's someone's idea and interpretation, yes but it's not Simone's voice. The timing of this wretched picture could not have been any better available for streaming in 2016 for counterrevolutionaries, conservatives, or the neo-Liberals who want to convince Black people that it's "entertainment, not art" that our own people want. I'm getting very tired of the exploitation of Protest Artists and the rabid excoriation of their majestic extremities, their profound mercurialism, and their tortured truth telling. Because it is torture to tell the truth. Some of the greatest artists, popular and unknown, have had to make a lot of difficult decisions and a lot of these decisions have to do with integrity, dignity, one's personal relationship to money or status (both?), and personal accountability.
Liz Garbus committed a cinematic assassination by warping the meaning of Nina Simone's art and life into a garish tabloid-riddled Lifetime network-style documentary about the underbelly of Simone's life, while spending less than a total of 25 minutes (out of 111 min.) analyzing and investigating her incredible skill as a musician, songwriter, vocalist, and intellectual. A radical left-wing artist and singular musician whose talent, politics, aesthetic, and tastes were all one. And yet there’s no understanding of this, no exploration of why Simone’s musical abilities were so impactful and different and how being a Black Marxist-Leninist also helped to frame her approach to performing, playing the piano, writing, etc.
Garbus had no interest in honoring the communist bent of Simone, she made her out to be an apologist, a petrified prodigal son who returns into the good graces of the establishment after shedding her revolutionary skin and intake of Hansberry & H. Rap Brown in favor of "well monitored" psychotropic drugs and irresponsible, but well meaning, "good" white folks who helped her find her way back.
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For many years I had been warned to not watch the documentary, especially after Tonya Steele's on-point Shadow And Act review. But I am crazy, or I like being abused. Oh no, sorry – according to Garbus, Nina’s daughter Lisa and ex-husband, Andrew Stroud (an NYPD sergeant, of all things!) - it was Simone who enjoyed being abused! Excuse me (yes, the film is that perverse and racist).
The fact that the lone major Black male figure in Simone's life was an abusive cop reads like a lost chapter of the fantasies a lot of the white Media ("the Black pathology racket" as Ishmael Reeds calls it): when in doubt always reveal the lurid and the sinister behavior of Black people. And always make clear, more like a threat than a warning: if the rebellious Black artist doesn't atone for their sin of being singular and preaching truth -- they will be destroyed.
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This is a healthy debate because it focuses on two subjects: the Interpretation of a Black Revolutionary Artist and the Problem of Documentary Filmmaking - as far as aesthetic and ideological constructs are concerned. Garbus commits the greatest sin a non-fiction filmmaker can commit: she exploits instead of bearing witness.
She’s more interested in maligning Simone’s imagination and creative beauty and warping the Black female warrior - than she is in divulging "truth."
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It was appalling to see Simone’s daughter contribute to the freak show in those interviews I and was deeply offended at the amount of time Garbus gave to Simone’s ex-cop husband. We see Dick Gregory praise Nina Simone for five minutes. We see her ex for nearly twenty minutes throughout, overall, and what do I most remember? Him casually smacking the hell out of her and cutting her with his ring. It would have been quite something had the director really wanted to get into the hell Nina was living, but when she showed the husband and daughter claiming that Nina enjoyed being abused - I said to myself: "Okay, we've now descended into a lower ring of hell."
As the film went on, it got increasingly lurid -- I felt nasty watching it. I feel bad for her daughter - I feel for anyone who was abused or has been involved in an abusive relationship, but I was very offended by the tenor of the movie and the last third where we see Nina's demise and then re-ascent. It left me miserable. Angry. I imagined the same producers and director doing yet another movie on Ali and it having contain that same strange-comfortably racist-patronizing tone. "Oh, Ali was a big mouth in his youth, blah blah blah...but look at the old devil now. Ha ha. He can’t talk out NOW, can he??" That's the white racist refrain I kept hearing in my head; I felt that the director actually enjoyed Nina's harrowing troubles because she felt that Nina had to "do some maturing."
And Nina’s mental illness diagnosis disturbs me, because of course they never really get into it. It would have been intrepid to broach the terror of manic depression or Bipolar disorder. Mania and vision are inextricably linked with genius and artists clutched by the pangs of such a brutal depressive disorder. Simone had more in common with Van Gogh than we may ever realize, only because no one is genuinely interested in how bipolar disorder plays out in the Black artistic genius. There is a very strong connection between Sly Stone and Donny Hathaway and the high priestess Nina. But it’s more fun for filmmakers to show us how we will end up if we are brilliant and radical, emotionally unstable and held hostage by a desire for liberation in every way. They want to show us what our third acts will look like, how we will deteriorate. There is no analysis or context. Garbus would have done a very courageous thing had she interwoven Simone’s political radicalism with her artistic revolution and her growing manic depression. She could have shed light on Fanon’s writings and put them in tandem with Hansberry’s cancer, Baldwin’s growing Christian rage and Simone’s seeing that post 1965 – there was nowhere to go but up…and out. The fire had been set and it would not stop spreading.
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Garbus, like most of the filmmakers on this planet, has no personal and artistic interest in Nina Simone, nor any political alliance. Artists like Simone are mere capitalist properties, reduced to what white executives spend on her, how much her records or original compositions generated, etc. Black artists, even our geniuses, are not regarded as anything other than curiosities, fiscal experiments. White archivists have very little devotion to the artistic journeys or goals of such artists. They can’t quantify their impact or influence or meaning outside of spreadsheets or controversy. You’re just another Black woman, you dumb bitch. One who loves her shiftless and abusive Black men, a woman whose voice and energy many appreciate, even admire – but just another Black freak, really. Another artist who just can’t help herself or her own people in any concrete way. But I suppose we should at least acknowledge you in some shiny corporate way, cause your own people won’t…we’ll fund you a little bit longer, but only to assure us you’re just an amusement.
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Garbus spends no time on Nina's arranging abilities, the majestic covers she did (her versions of Dylan, The Beatles, George Harrison, the Celtic folk song “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair,” etc.) the composing of her songs “To Be Young Gifted & Black,” or “Mississippi Goddamn,” her power and uniqueness as a pianist (and vocalist, who goes in and out of tune better than any other recording artist of the 20th century) or her approach to recording and her abilities as a band leader. I find this incredibly strange since she is now considered to be one of the most prolific recording artists ever and one of the most referenced and utilized artists now in movies, social media, and what have you.
What about Simone’s influence on other artists? Her incredible intellectual and emotional collaborations with Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin we all seem to promote on Instagram, yet we do very little analysis on that trio; her enormous impact on rock bands (John Lennon cited Nina’s vocal style and emotional rendering when contributing the lines “I love you, I loooooove you” to the middle eight of McCartney’s “Michelle” ballad on the Beatles Rubber Soul album; later his “Revolution” in 1968 inspired Simone to adapt the song and re-write as a response to the Beatles song, iterating a Black radical point-of-view) or just what about her extraordinary musical notions, ambitions and experience as a classical musician? She, like Miles Davis, attended Juilliard and left to pursue her own ideas about musical construction, classical ideas, etc. When I studied acting at Juilliard, I embraced her sweaty and “non-polished” approach to classical works. I thought it was important for actors to do the same. If Garbus had any real interest in Simone’s artistic impact – she would have explored all of this. But Black artists do not engender the same respect from filmmakers as their white peers do.
There are, finally, some dignified documentaries and meditations on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong – as artists and honoring their brilliance as artistic geniuses. However, the dramatic film on Miles Davis by Don Cheadle was abysmal. Judy Garland gets a decent and spunky rendering from director Rupert Goold and Cheadle gives us a joke. Not a cartoon, but a joke. When we do this to our own selves it actually emboldens white filmmakers to not treat our work or subjects as holy. And as far as life stories go, there is always a rush for the lurid and the shameful and the embarrassing.
We deserve complexity, not imposed racist visions of who we are. Our artists deserve better.
And Simone’s entire trajectory was complex.
Well, why don't we ask what really happened to the artistic truthtellers of the 1960’s?
Lenny Bruce was destroyed by the government, Baldwin receded into himself, staying more in France before eventually teaching at City College (he needed a stable income!!), and drugs overwhelmed just about everyone. The 1970’s saw a fractured split - the different modes of Black art or radical politics not only went mainstream, but it created a very stern underground that, for the first time since perhaps the one or two years of Baraka's Black Arts House in Harlem and the Beats in the 1950's was created entirely for an audience of converts. It wasn't interested in "winning over" anybody. This was healthy. Even mainstream directors like Godard went "crazy" and alienated his audience, getting more radical politically and aesthetically.
As Hendrix died and Sly Stone began to deteriorate, Lorraine Hansberry’s Marxism had finally awakened in Amiri Baraka, who increasingly wrote dialectical plays and was rarely published post 1973 due to his rabid conversion to Communism, and performers and satirists like Richard Pryor redefined stand-up comedy with the militancy and radical self-love Nina Simone inspired. But the seventies were deeply troubling and difficult for Nina: the record industry refused to support her increasing radicalism and eventually she was persona non grata. Even Black people abandoned her.
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Artists failures are our life lessons. Their triumphs are ours as well but their travails and struggles are like parables to be learned from.
The classic example is Billie Holiday: great instincts in music, terrible instincts in life. So what? Ingmar Bergman said, "I can live in my art but not my life.” Like a savant, some artists can create bold and brilliant work, yet haven't the slightest idea how to dress themselves or buy a dozen eggs.
Then, you have the artist whom society must make an example out of. And with those artists, you enter a hall of mirrors that reflects more than the images of the artist--it reveals the endless vistas of society's contempt for the artist. Especially if that society is a racist establishment.
I hate all establishments. But the racists ones are the worst. And what's the most hypocritical one of all?
The filmmaking establishment.
Liz Garbus, a well-regarded director with numerous festival wins and accolades, knows this establishment well. She's a very clever, comfortably funded passive aggressive, disgruntled Liberal-white faux feminist-who would do quite well holding a rod of electro-shock treatments as much as she would a camera: because she knows they both can kill.
This one beautiful page from Ellis’ book is more passionate and impactful than any frame of Garbus’ movie. Read it.
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Had I not known who Simone was I would be perplexed about what made her truly a genius or even a remarkable artist. I think that may be what angers me the most.
I am tired of white filmmakers, in particular, trying to usurp and contort the reflection of our artists.
The movie is "well made," whatever that means. If archival footage and polished sequences are enough for you, big deal. It’s easy to do that. Even easier to give Black people more horror stories, and the world at large more atrocious myths to chew on.
What Happened, Miss Simone? has no soul and is about as hollow as a cello. In the case of the cello, it need be: for the echoes and vibrations of the strings must be collected and spun back in order to generate beauty and truth. But for film, it is a death-knell. Perhaps some intrepid young filmmaker will respond to this movie, as if Nina Simone were still alive, and they will begin their movie by focusing the camera on the real problem and thereby call the film “What Happened, Miss Garbus?”