Merry Xmas, and Stop Smiling!

Not as contradictory as it sounds. I do wish you a Merry Christmas, gleefully, sincerely, quickly, and somewhat exhaustedly, after all the baking I did last night and all the essay-writing (seriously!) I'm having to do this morning, in advance of my annual professional party. (At least writing this paper has involved sustained attention to two delicious movies.)

Speaking of delicious movies, and in the spirit of gift-giving, the best cinematic stocking-stuffer of the year is absolutely the elegant and richly outfitted Charles Burnett Collection from Milestone Video, centered around the seminal and at-long-last-available Killer of Sheep. As you probably know, after 30 years in a limbo of non-exhibition, the 30-year-old Killer finally bowed on commercial screens in the late spring. I was wowed by the movie in August, when it arrived to Chicago's Music Box Theatre and have been even more deeply wowed after two further revisits. After some hemming and hawing, I have elected not to include the movie in my upcoming Top Ten List and year-end awards, since I experienced all those #1 spots for Army of Shadows last year to be something of a cop-out. But, still pending There Will Be Blood, Persepolis and eight other (read: less auspicious) theatrical releases, Killer of Sheep does look to me like the movie of the year. My ongoing friendly relations with Stop Smiling Magazine allowed me to publish this online review, which I hope you'll enjoy...on or after today's joyeux noël. More from me before year's end!

Still Not Smiling

My kindest benefactors on the web, over at Stop Smiling Magazine, have given me yet another forum to sing the praises of a stunning DVD, this time for When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's 4-hour documentary on the flooding of New Orleans and its nearly apocalyptic aftermath for so many residents of that city. Levees actually expands as a nearly 6-hour film on the DVD, and once you've gotten started, you really shouldn't stop; the exclusive 105 minutes of previously trimmed material is actually some of Lee's best, correcting for some of the main feature's tendency to muffle its critique of Mayor Ray Nagin. The whole work, whatever its flaws or self-imposed limitations, is prodigious, detailed, expansive, and important in a way that precious few films in 2006 were, and despite appearing on HBO, it's certainly making an active end-run for my Top Ten List.

Meanwhile, speaking of lists, and of earlier benefactors, my comrades over at Cinemarati, a terrific consortium of web-based critics to which I belonged from 2002-2005, has commenced their annual counting-down of the year's best movies. So far, we have gotten the party started with Nathaniel's eloquent summary of the virtues of Volver (which I'd imagined would place a little higher); at #19, Michael Dequina is dazzled by Dreamgirls; and at #18, my old college chum Lynn Lee directs our attention to A Scanner Darkly, a nervy midyear offering that deserved a better shot than the major, Car-prone and penguin-happy critics' groups afforded it. Cinemarati has a wide-ranging membership of amateur and professional critics with enormously different tastes, so expect an interesting list, and forage around the rest of the blog and the individual members' sites while you're at it.

Picked Flick #35: Illusions

If Boyz N the Hood, one notch down on this list, represents a high-water mark but also a truncated possibility within the black commercial cinema, Julie Dash's Illusions survives as a gleaming nugget of underexplored, almost esoteric potential in the black art cinema, and the feminist cinema, and the formalist cinema, and the cinema of satire, and all of the other cinemas that Illusions embodies, upbraids, and smartly reassesses. Dash would eventually achieve greater notoriety as the director of Daughters of the Dust, a shimmering and polyvocal fable about the non-asssimilated Geechee cultures off the Carolina coast, and a complex and idiosyncratic miracle of markedly independent, culturally embedded filmmaking. A major foundation of Daughters' enduring mystique, not to mention a doleful fact about American movie culture, is that no feature film directed by an African-American woman had ever circulated in stateside commercial release until Daughters—a full year after causing a stir and winning an award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival—finally bowed in select American cities in 1992. Even without its consequent status as a cultural benchmark, the syncretic and oracular view of history in Daughters, simultaneously anthropological and mythological, as well as the detailed mise-en-scène and the ravishing manipulations of light and montage are the cornerstones of the film's success.

Illusions, though it lacks any trace of Daughters' dazzling visual palette, and though it concentrates on a smaller and simpler cast of characters, clearly prefigures the pliable and critical perspectives on history that would characterize the director's justly famous feature. Indeed, part of what makes Illusions so cogent and transfixing, despite a muddy sound mix and the other technical vicissitudes of a film-school project, is that its deceptively straightforward scenario is so rife with contradictions and diverse implications that a half-hour film about a handful of people can reverberate in so many directions. Illusions' central figure is Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee), a mid-level producer and project supervisor on a fictional Hollywood lot called National Studios in 1942. Few if any women of that time would have occupied a position like Mignon's, but her intelligence, diplomacy, and stern persistence quickly impress, and the wartime context—we see rows and rows of female telephone operators and office workers, many of them charmed by the military officers who are "advising" the studio's output—furnishes its own alibi for Mignon's unlikely post. The present day's task requires Mignon to oversee the re-looping of a musical whose soundtrack was poorly synchronized, and whose female lead isn't much of a singer anyway. Mignon, brusquely managing the technicians in the soundbooth, is calmed and then engrossed by Ester Jeeter (Rosanne Katon), the young, gregarious, and unsophisticated session singer whom the studio has hired to salvage the number. Ester sings beautifully, utterly unconcerned with the political frissons surrounding her recruitment as an invisible black vocalist to redeem an all-white film. Meanwhile, Mignon's behavior grows erratic and her comportment unsettled in response to Ester's singing, leading to the revelation that Mignon herself is passing as white in her professional life. Her intuitive connection to Ester and their logical alliance within the ideological hierarchies of America's dream factory are nonetheless dangerous to Mignon's own security, not just in her job but in her very skin.

Illusions proceeds through some deft and subtle sleights of hand, building toward an emotional climax that may or may not qualify as "empowering," and demonstrating considerable resolve in leaving so many of its key questions unanswered. What is the nature or future of Mignon's acquaintance with Ester? How long has Mignon been working at National Studios, and how long will she remain there? Has she actively dissembled about her racial identity or has she simply (if "simply" is the right word) allowed her colleagues to naturalize or ignore the signs of her own otherness? These are all examples of the narrative riddles that Illusions elects not to resolve, but even more fascinating to me is the complexity, if not the inscrutability, of the film's politics. Is Mignon's labor, even her very presence in the flowchart of power at National Studios, a progressive achievement in itself, or must she use her position on someone else's behalf—and how or for whom is she to do this? What to make of the fact that the film's discourses on gender and race grow both richer and narrower as it continues, and Mignon's personal traits and circumstances subsume our earlier perspectives on other women, other races, other battlegrounds, literal and political? What to make of Dash's technical gamesmanship, using a vocal track of Ella Fitzgerald to dub Rosanne Katon in the role of Ester, such that the "real" singer isn't "really" singing, and thus refusing a clichéd linkage of blackness to authenticity? Illusions has been considered and critiqued from a multitude of positions in the decades since Dash made it, but rarely among more than academic audiences, and seldom with a full account of the movie's countless and enigmatic significations. Like Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, another monument within black women's moviemaking, Illusions resists the diminishment of black women within documented history and within Hollywood scenography, not by excavating a true-life tale of improbable heroism but by fabulating a scenario that never exactly happened, tugging at our gullibility while nonetheless stating a powerful case for the necessity of invented archives, origin myths, interbraided politics, and historical revisionism. Illusions might speak most powerfully to and from the standpoints of black women's experience, but in one way or another, as we make our way through this nifty hall of mirrors, we're all liable to catch some wisp of our own reflections. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1983 American Film Institute

Picked Flick #65: Claudine

Praising American movies of the 1970s is like praising British literature of the 1920s. Who but the sourest contrarian could possibly dissent? What would be the point? And yet, the most familiar versions of that decade's litany of crown jewels—Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, the Godfathers, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Taxi Driver, Network, All the President's Men, The Deer Hunter, Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now—surely are a white and boy-clubby lot. (Surprise!) All the more reason why I wish that John Berry's funny and lusty and pertly political Claudine were more widely celebrated. Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, both of them instantly addictive, are cast as a sort of Loren and Mastroianni of the Harlem walk-ups. She's a housemaid and he's a trash-collector, but unlike the steaming heaps of movies where these roles would go utterly unquestioned for African-American actors, even major stars like Carroll and Jones, Claudine is all about how poverty, even where it's pervasive, denaturalizes life—though I rush to add, this is not some kind of abstruse thesis or clinician's pronouncement. Claudine is bawdily, turbulently down in the trenches, palpably at home in closet-sized kitchens and shit jobs and impossible day-to-day predicaments, against which the film and the characters push with spitfire aplomb.

The first shot of the film finds Claudine and her bumptious brood crossing a street, an image that will repeat at the film's conclusion with only one major change, which is either momentous or negligible depending on whether you favor a personal or a structural view of the film—an impossible choice, everywhere precluded. Claudine and Roop meet at work, though he works for the city and she for a family, and so nothing happening between them is happening on their own turf. Work keeps her from arriving on time to their first date, which begins in her own home, where she has to hide appliances and amenities from the surveilling eye of the Welfare Office case worker, who hears about Roop from Claudine's neighbors, whom we never meet because she never has any time to interact with them, because she's off working the job that the case worker also mustn't discover, in order to feed the kids who phone her incessantly on her first night in Roop's bedroom, which is no less permeable to espionage and intrusion than Claudine's bustling pad. Claudine doesn't keep this all in balance so much as she bends and flexes impressively to hit back as many of the balls as she can, and just as impressively throws her racket and stomps her foot when she knows she's losing a set. Meanwhile, she can't get away from her kids when she wants to but also can't find them when she wants to. Her eldest son Charles is absorbing himself in militant youth politics that the film ribs without dismissing. He swears that if Claudine really loved him, she would have killed him, in the manner of murderously protective slave mothers about whom he has heard, and yet his garbled, comically judgmental anger stems from evident and ubiquitous sources. Her eldest daughter Charlene all but draws knives on Roop when he comes a'courting, but later finds herself tearfully defending the achievements and battered honor of black men, when her unplanned pregnancy riles Claudine to majestic, literally violent fury ("I guess it's a shame you didn't get knocked up by Frederick Douglass!"). The film switches tones and registers on a dime, over and over and over again. Its candor in matters social, sexual, and political, just like its expressively bright color palette, is like an icy splash of river water, even though the film is as inveterately urban as a Spike Lee joint, and defiantly proud of its own dirt.

James Earl Jones upends his typical typecasting with his cheeky, sexy turn, and the juvenile cast is one of the best I've ever seen, especially Tamu Blackwell as Charlene. But of course it's Carroll who reigns over this movie, cocking her brows and lashing her tongue against a world of statutory double-standards and black comedy (pun intended). She's a tornado of sweetness and ire, craving romance and reliable help in equal doses, aghast that her own children view her 36 years as the thick of senior-citizenry. The magic of her performance, and of the film, is that with each new scene, as a new and specific hurdle tosses itself into Claudine's path, we see some new facet of this woman's resilience, sometimes ornery and sometimes humorous, and none of them bear the face of cliché. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #69: Within Our Gates

The most famously racist movie in American cinema is D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a film whose boundary-pushing visual grammar and sophisticated devices for managing parallel narratives are deservedly celebrated, and yet whose white-supremacist mythomania is so overt and passionate that actually watching the film is invariably worse than anything you might hear about it in advance. Until you have beheld the Ku Klux Klan riding valiantly to the rescue of an imperiled white lily of Southern womanhood, you have not experienced the full, gobsmacking force of the racist musculature behind early American visual culture. (Wasn't it kind of me to say "early"?)

Enraged by what he saw in The Birth of a Nation, African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux rode to his own rescue and filmed Within Our Gates—one of his two most famous films (the other is 1925's Body and Soul), but nonetheless obscure to most moviegoers, even those who retrospectively recognize the fundamental disgraces in Griffith's movie. This circumstance actually speaks to another American problem, wherein we have better memories for Faustian masterpieces than for exemplary acts of redress. Indeed, Within Our Gates was deemed lost for many years before it resurfaced just over a decade ago, in mislabeled film canisters in a vault somewhere in Spain. Knowing the severe obstacles this film has faced for decades just trying to get itself seen—not to mention the obstacles you'll encounter trying to see it, unless you live near a university library, or unless TCM is having an especially emancipated day—only adds to its blunt force once unveiled. Rather than a white actor in blackface chasing a histrionic Mae Marsh, Within Our Gates sports a harrowing sequence in which Sylvia Landry, its African-American protagonist, is not only beaten and sexually aggressed by a white man, but by one who comes to realize amidst this very encounter that he is her father—speaking not just to his brutishness in the present moment but to an entire history of disavowed sexual violence and natal alienation. Just as thunderous, both in its anger and in its bold execution, is a long flashback sequence that details the lynching of Sylvia's family, a passage which was customarily excised by craven projectionist even when Gates played to American audiences in 1920. The desperate physicality of the actors in these sequences, as well as their comportment in the more serene but equally interesting passages of the movie, are a succinct rebuttal not just to American memories of its racial past but to the dominating aesthetic of American silent features, which usually opted for a gentility and a stylized theatricality that Micheaux frequently eschews. Lead actress Evelyn Preer, a bright light of the African-American stage, has a soft but womanly poise that offers key counterpoint to the willowy fragility with which Griffith tended to shoot Lillian Gish. Furthermore, Micheaux, who worked without a credited cinematographer, is a cunning visualist, alternating abstract and realist backgrounds behind characters in seemingly straightforward dialogue scenes, so as to comment subtly on the varying moral depth of their points of view, their relation to or else their avoidance of the world they mutually inhabit.

Within Our Gates is full of surprises, following a multitude of characters and plotlines without settling into predictable allegiances. Micheaux's critiques of bad habits within the African-American community are as lucid as his indictments of white-supremacist ideology. The film wholly avoids a Manichean division between black saints and white predators, and the introductions of romance and religion among the film's active concerns do interesting things to our views of several characters. The closing scenes are unforeseeably optimistic, and Gates has taken its licks over the years for making this turn, though it seems to me that the thinly motivated dissolve amidst the final shot squares it quite self-consciously in the realm of fairy tale. Of course, the most delicious surprise in Within Our Gates is that it exists at all, against the odds of America's post-WWI self-deification and despite Micheaux's omission from too many debates and film texts where he rightfully belongs. One particularly succulent reward came in 1992, the fourth year in the cycle of National Film Registry inductees, when Within Our Gates entered the Library of Congress' most esteemed collection of American films right alongside The Birth of a Nation. In the national archives at least, but hopefully in other places too, Micheaux can call Griffith's bluff in perpetuity. There is more than one way to write history in lightning. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)