What does the Failure of Pictorial Representation and Frederick Douglass' Naive Prophecy Coupled with the Brutalization of Black Bodies mean for cinema?

cinematograph film means the first fixation by any means whatsoever on film or any other material of a sequence of images capable, when used in conjunction with any mechanical, electronic or other device, of being seen as a moving picture and of reproduction, and includes the sounds embodied in a sound-track associated with the film

 – the definition of cinematography as written by A.I. (‘lawsfinder.com’)

What responsibility does the photograph, picture, or moving image have towards the oppressed? 

 

Is there a moral obligation to be at the bedside of the suffering, on the shoulder of the underdog...or nipping ferociously at the heels of the powerful and vile?

 

The images of Black people being murdered - often by the state - captured by police cameras (!) – are high-tech lynchings.  Police officers create iconic imagery with their own lenses. Over the past four decades alone (I am being generous by not considering anything prior to 1980) we have seen more images of Black people in handcuffs, a chokehold, under a boot, getting shot or being beaten than we have of Black people doing anything else, except for sports imagery perhaps. Most human beings conclude that this is normal. They have accepted that “it is what it is” (one of the most dangerous phrases to crawl out of the new millennium).  

 

The racist, fascist impulse of white supremacy’s eye cannot hold back, “it must breathe,” they will insist. It must slither. If it breathes, then we can’t.

 

The smart and polished and attractive images Hollywood gives us does nothing to counter or destroy the iconography of Black people held prisoner to the eye of the camera.

 

Think about it. I do. A lot. So much so, I struggle with actually getting the operation done: rewiring my brain somehow to not process, deal, or confront this problem.  Because this problem is indicative of our social and political sin of racism. And in the USA while we vacillate between the horrors put upon the Indigenous versus the atrocious treatment of the African - who later indulged in his own captor’s games (Buffalo soldiers) - while eternally and wearily, like the American Indian, fighting to keep his sanity at bay. Not his madness. His sanity. Because if the Indian and the North American Black African peoples accepted what their own shamanic paroxysms in their mind tell them – they would not be concerned with representation, movie screens, or anything the White man did.  They would be the actual book Frantz Fanon himself never lived to write.

 

But, instead we are still trapped, trembling, in between the latter chapters of Black Skin, White Masks. We have spies who have infiltrated his Wretched of the Earth only to be found out and disposed of. Like paper in a shredder. That simple, that easy.

 

So, we wrestle. With ourselves, then the system around us. And on a good day we are convinced art matters, that creative solutions can be put in place. And while there is truth to that (why would I bother to write these words if I did not believe in some aspect of creative power?) we must first stop pretending to care and stop playing games.

 

It is not theater that is dead, it is cinema.  Theater is of the soil, the sky, the mucus in your membrane.  It cannot be destroyed until the last human thought is, until the final slaughter comes about. Or, even better – this being a film journal – until the final explosion.

 

The West has been obsessed with their fugazi highbrow, limousine liberal discussions about theater and the fact that it is “dying,” while no one actually knows what this means.  Theater in capitalist countries is simply under-funded, against the law in dictatorships or certain “communist” countries (theater in China and Russia will most likely never hurl at the world incredible artistic ideas they once did) – and everyone has a silent pact that movies will save them.  That cinematic images, that moving pictures will represent and honor them, while annihilating our problems. These are not romantic ideas, they are silly ones.

 

Filmmaking - or rather movie-making - is dead.  And it is our loyalty to the First Cinema’s propaganda that is killing us.

 

Essentially the more we chase movies and anything to do with movies (“cinema”) in this current climate - the more it has a refractory impact.  It’s a boomerang activity.  And it is killing us because we have all become inured to seeing Black people getting killed in motion-pictures. Likewise, the Native American, the Arab and so on.  Arab - and Palestinian filmmakers particularly - launched an open letter to Hollyweird recently about the representation of Arabs in Western movies and media. While I appreciate their moral outrage, a part of me feels such appeals and denunciations are too much too late. Slowly, I began to remember those heady days after 9/11. Nothing has changed of course.  Certainly nothing has even changed since Israel’s 1982 attack on Beirut, attempting to fully eradicate the organized hub of Palestinian resistance. Over 20,000 Arabs were killed.  That's half the amount killed in the past year alone. If one were to play the numbers game and apply this to the American Indian, to the Blacks of the world, to just solely the murdered in Hiroshima – what would this teach us? 

 

And what would the responsibility of images have to do with this? 

 

What would we be forced to agree that image-makers owe humanity? 

 

*

 

Cinema is, in fact, when phonetically written: SIN–ema.

 

Or, as the Mexican anarchist Luna Lol says, “Cinemas are just sins and more.”

(or sin y mas!)

*

 

While attending Isaac Julien’s immersive exhibition on Frederick Douglass' Lessons of the Hour at MoMa, I first learned of the murder of Sonya Massey.

 

I found it grotesquely ironic that in an exhibition in which Julien passionately tried to gain control of Black imagery and recontextualize Douglass’ belief in the power of portraiture  to challenge human indignities and “racist tropes” as MoMa describes it in their notes – that a Black woman, a second after apologizing for her simple “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” statement, was shot three times in the face, killed instantly.  The brutal act captured by a camera.

 

Such a brutal, cold-blooded act is part of our world’s collective unconscious and part of our society’s everyday experience. It has been normalized for some time, this didn’t happen overnight. But the cruel irony is that the more we actually talk about such things, the worse the atrocities become.

 

James 4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

 

Like St. Catherine, Sonya Massey’s execution was a result of the maniacal patriarchy unable to handle certain truths about themselves, less about the “witch” woman in front of them. In this case race and racism was the reason, not religion.  But how can one turn from the eerie parallels?  The Springfield county sheriff Sean Grayson has tried to use his own contempt for Black people as an excuse and in this case specifically claiming that this Black woman, who emanated no intimidating affects in the least, was a threat to his life. Grayson killed her immediately after she voiced “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” 

 

The Emperor Maxentius killed St. Catherine for pretty much the same reason (she would not revoke her belief in Christ which outraged Maxentius, who tortured her, and so she rebuked him). You can even imagine James Baldwin right now, cigarette in hand, rattling off a mile a minute about the injustice of it all and the frightening acts of racism that continue to destroy the world. The only real difference between the USA and Israel or Germany is that America prefers its genocides slower, kill one here, kill one there…keep the slaves in line. The vitriol, hate, and malice behind all these acts however are one and the same.

 

We made millenials who make apps and more and more lynch videos.

 

 

Brutalization of Black Bodies: What does all this mean for cinema?

 

Camera phones, police body cams, Hollywood motion picture cameras, independent filmmakers wielding their weapons to capture or express life...what happens when we are all obsessed with capturing, literally, the same image: the murder of a Black person?

 

When you think of motion pictures and Black people what do you think of?

 

Some of you will say Sidney Poitier slapping the racist in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night, others will have varied fractured memories of Buckwheat in The Little Rascals.  Some will curl up with their first glimpses of Earth Kitt or Sammy Davis Jr. lighting up the screen, others will regrettably be unable to shake images of Gone With the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel out of their heads while some of my own generation will simply and proudly reminisce on Denzel and Wesley as jazz adversaries or Spike’s cultural touchstone Mo’ Betta Blues, or his Do the Right Thing with Bill Nunn as Radio Raheem or perhaps you’re simply split between all the ultra-starched Hollywood images of Blacks as either Driving Miss Daisy or running the drug racket in The Wire.

 

I am being coy here on purpose because, legitimately, the more we talk about it the more we get closer to EVADING a certain truth. That truth is that cinema – or rather the moving image – we must distinguish the difference – has not only betrayed us, it has in my opinion – become our greatest threat because it kneels before the Zod of our time – America’s pathological racism.

 

The moving image, the video camera, the surveillance culture we inhabit is itself tamed and colonized and birthed by racist authors to begin with.  Which leaves a legacy of moving images, some on celluloid, some on magnetic tape, some backed up to hard drives where the digital information can be manipulated or toyed with.

 

EIther way the only images to be preserved aggressively – other than porn or our obsession with war – is the committed lynching of the North American African person.  The Black body is the garbage heap, the dump site, the reigning unfit subconscious of the Western world (the entire world’s!) view of all that it cannot achieve and fears. 

 

In Kofi Yeboah’s haunting 2022 film Amansa Tiafi (Public Toilet Africa), he stated, without any obfuscation, that the African continent (Ghana specifically) has become the world’s backyard dumping ground: a toilet.

 

Toilets are meant to be flushed, cleaned out and ready for the next drop of excrement.

 

That is exactly now what the media is as it pertains to Black bodies.

 

The Black person in all of our minds is not a movie actor and never will be – it doesn't matter who wins an Academy Award or how many great performances young, talented and good-looking Black actors indulge and give on TV or in movies. They will NEVER compete with the destruction and horrendousness achieved by the lynchings we are forced to participate in and grant our audience.  Whether we want to or not, Black bodies are now owned - lock stock and barrel – by snuff media curated by the United States police force in each and every state and by the news media who then pimp it and encourage everyone on social media to “share it.”

 

I heard a story that a man was killed once and it was casually recorded on tape by a group of police. Off-duty cops. Then the story changed and it was military men. Then it was changed and it was hunters. Then the story dwindled into: four white boys from NYC who simply had enough of being “second-rate” to the supposed latent creative “genius” of the Black men they had killed: one a musician, the other a rapper, chased them along a freeway… Obsessed and haunted by these artists acumen and creative prowess, by one’s charm and the other’s good looks, by one’s stunning ability to play virtually every instrument and the other’s ability to cram in more syllables and words into sixty seconds than any “mumble” rapper’s wet dream – these four men, like their Howard Beach ancestors - chased and beat these men, causing their deaths – and, of course, made sure, it was well preserved for posterity. Because Black people need just one thing to keep going, it seems, another, image of their destructions.

 

Another rape for their Monday morning sunrise.  Another reason to…get together and protest. Another reason…another….

 

These images of Blacks that we have been shown since the turn of the century - give ANY filmmaker a run for their money. In fact, if Werner Herzog challenges film artists to make “new images” – I issue a similar edict to my contemporaries in the arts, and more specifically to, budding film directors: We need new and unseen and unimagined Black imagery.

 

We are losing.  And we are being destroyed through the flesh and through the motion picture image. 

 

Sonya Massey’s murder - to me – is the last image I can ever think of and will never get out of my head and I am outraged that such an image can be so easily projected, streamed, shared into the universe and even more outraged that such a “movie” can be made at any given time of day, in the United States, especially when the lead actor - the heroine - was the unknowing antagonist of her fate. 

 

I am told the devil can do many things. He can even make you participate in a dance you don’t want to do. Can you imagine?

 

I don’t believe in God, no.  But I must confess, I know for a fact there is a devil. And the devil backwards is lived. That’s what devils do, don’t you see? They make the present tense living - the NOW - a past tense memory. A demeaned yesterday. 

 

If you once lived, you are now owned by the devil. It’s not that you deteriorated, died, or aged out. No, no, no. Death is a healthy, normal process. Death gives life. 

 

Murder, rape, assassination, genocide – these are talismans of the State that exist to make sure that Black people or those oppressed who threaten the very nature of the size of the dick of the state – are forcibly removed.  Executed.  Killed.  “To make her once lived, send in the devil.” 

 

The Devil does the dealing. Yes.

 

The video execution itself has become our Catherine Wheel – the spikes turning however are now the 21st century life itself, the century’s revolution - like a tire. It is simply the explosion of a barrel of a gun or a hand around a neck – bur in a video; a murder framed and completed by the collusion of digital eye which only exists to focus on the blood (or milk) that flows from the miraculous everyday people who give this world any shred of beauty that it has.

 

*

 

Cinema has crucified Black humans all over the past 120 years, but what comes of it?  Media ecologist Neil Postman always argued that information does not prevent horrors from happening. 

 

Do you agree?

 

7 DAYS into 2023, police officers tased, pepper sprayed and brutally beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols during a January 7th traffic stop, according to video footage released by the city of Memphis, Tennessee. The footage was transmitted and divided into four video streams, four different sources.  I want you to go back only as far as the Rodney King beating in 1991.

 

Photography, video, filmmaking – has all contributed to an atrocious and pathological distancing of the humiliation and defilement of human beings. In fact, it is actually used to commit the atrocities. Like literally, but spiritually when you constantly document murder wouldn’t you say that it alters the nature of the instrument?

 

What can filmmakers learn from the degradation of the image of the slaughtering of the Black human being?  Anything at all?  Filmmakers may be the last bastion of hope as it pertains to the compassion fatigue and desensitization that millions across the globe are experiencing but they will have to turn the camera either in on themselves (literally, be ‘personal’) or find a new vocabulary and conscientiously forge a whole new lexicon for movie grammar and language.

 

We are beginning to accept the visuals of our modern lynchings in more ways than we may think.  Filmmakers have to be aggressive and show no mercy to recalibrate our dignity and humanity on screen and in life.  That can only start when we become as soulful and demanding on screen as our greatest music is to our ears.

 

The violent and aggressive nature alone of movie language (capturing, “shooting”) has all but done me in, and I can feel myself closing in on my own self. Maybe that is why I attempted to escape and find something authentic in the theater again, respecting the nature of live ritual, the holy stage. The most religious or spiritual I have ever felt was and is in the universe of live theater where people in the dark watch people in the light talk about life.

 

I can no longer defend cinema because of the horrible actions surveillance culture and security cameras and social media had done to the very nature of what constitutes a movie, a moving image, a motion picture, a video.

 

The next phase of the devil will be with his camera-phone and nothing else (wait for that movie, it’s coming); a sick movie that will deify the robust fears critics erroneously had about Michael Powell’s masterwork, Peeping Tom.

 

For we are…that character from Peeping Tom but with no real psychological reason.  There is no backstory.  Our life actors have absconded with Stanislavki’s system and if the world's a stage as Shakespeare duly noted – then we are all its eager and willing spectator and sportsman; the world Olympics have folded in on itself on the altar of movies…First place is shooting a black woman twice, second place is choking…third – there is no third.

 

As there is no longer a third cinema.

 

We are left, finally, with what everyone seems to want: White Supremacy’s long-lasting wet dream of black brutality – neatly ensconced not in a picture frame – but a series of digital information that, when connected, make up a mass murder on screen like some kind of realigned impressionist painting.

 

This is the proof. It always was. 

In a mall, deep in America’s heartland, there’s a movie store that sells The Greatest Hits. The hits are literal. The collection opens up with the first blow to Rodney King in 1991 and then ebbs and flows further back into history (a brief image of Emmett Till’s bloated nightmare appears, lingering just for the right amount of time to titillate its viewer) and the 1,915 minute movie (the length to honor the year Griffith’s racist masterpiece was made) ends with a slow-motion shot of Massey’s face been blown apart.

 

Forget the Zapruder film. 

 

We are through the looking glass.  And the conspiracy here is not as labyrinthine or confusing as who killed JFK.  No Oliver Stone is needed here, we left him and those like him back in Kansas; there is no establishment moviemaker of our era equipped to deal with the reality of what has both happened to the Black person under American capitalism and what has happened to the Black image under American cameras.

 

Filmmakers are failing. Simply because they don’t see their own lives - our lives - as being worthy of dying for. They simply see our lives as worthy of two things:  amusement and schmaltz to be gotten rid of.

 

In contemporary film, how and where have hard earned struggles, truths, loves, hates, obsessions, devotions – been expressed on film as humanely and directly, with dignity, as the great wails or hollers or religious passions of Mama Thornton, Rosetta Thorpe, or Mahalia Jackson?

 

We will always be fodder for the movie camera, for social media, for a cop’s bodycam.

 

Yes, the devil is alive while we once…lived.

 

*

 

And so the reason cinema is dying –

 

Because the state’s cameras are recording more truth per second than

our creative film directors.

 

The state inflicts a point of view it WANTS to be true and fulfills it, rendering art impotent.

 

The state documents the truth of its creators, its engineer’s desires, its sickness exposed.

 

Film directors are still obsessed with everything BESIDES truth.

 

The splatter of Blood, the extinction of brain activity, the plundering of a soul, the putting out of a flame. The state does this mercilessly, ceaselessly and with no second thought about its audience because the audience in part is always waiting - in the dark - somewhere - for these atrocious images and the state knows this.

 

Once pop culture waited for a singer’s next single. Briefly, a famous director’s new movie— now we just huddle in anticipation for the next digital lynching.

 

The state’s cameras - as warped and hateful of human life as they are — cannot lie. They can only give and show what everyone wants to run from. And the more we run the more their cameras

Will shoot

Their assassins

Shooting us

-        October 12, 2024