Free Angela and All Political Prisoners

Dir. Shola Lynch

Can I just state that this was the first film that I have been truly anticipating for quite some time. All because of this woman who I discovered via the excellent and highly recommended Black Power Mixtape:

In amongst the amazing footage and stories told about the black experience in USA from 1967-1975, her story stood out the most for me. The tagline for Free Angela certainly rang true for me. I knew the name but I did not know the story.

And what a story it is.

A little back story on the subject matter. Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar and author. From a highly educated background, Angela emerged in the 1960s as a nationally prominent activist, a radical (when being radical wasn’t necessarily synonymous with being crazy or terroristy like today) and acknowledged member of the Communist Party.  An in-depth knowledge of philosophy, particularly German and French philosophy,  garnered her a teaching job at University of California. Her prominence in that role led to unwanted attention from all corners not least the government and in particular Californian governor in 1969 Ronald Reagan. Still marching to the ‘anti-Red’ beat that the USA had been dancing to for twenty or more so years, Reagan and his merry men had Davis fired from the university on the grounds of her membership to the Communist Party. However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that Davis’s Communist leanings weren’t the only things working against her in their eyes. She also had the audacity to be a BLACK  a WOMAN, a RADICAL and an INTELLECTUAL  and ARTICULATE one at that who had an AFRO so was obviously the Anti-christ incarnate. Sent by the Black Panthers or some such organisation to infiltrate  and brainwash the poor susceptible white youth to create a super army of COMMIE HIPPIES!

What with their free love and their long hair.

Bloody Hippies.

At first their firing of Davis was overruled but in the end they got their way by declaring that their poor sensitivities had been insulted by apparently inflammatory comments made by Davis in speeches she had given.

This is all the setting of the main story on which the documentary focuses. The Marin Country Court incident that led to the massive manhunt for Davis who on August 18th 1970 was included on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, her arrest and charge of aggravated kidnap and murder (with the possibility of punishment by death) and  the trial and eventual acquittal.

That paragraph made it sound like The Fugitive and it felt like it while watching. I went with a friend and we both had looks of incredulity the whole time. Something like this:

All joking aside, this was an incredibly well-made documentary. The thriller effect I was describing above wasn’t due to flashy editing that many documentaries I’ve noticed have come to rely on as of late. The feeling that they have to dress up the subject matter or story to make it more exciting or sensational (I’m looking at you Beware Mr Baker, The Imposter etc). There are no such gimmicks in Free Angela Davis.. It’s all about the story itself being so sensational that it needs no added dressing. Despite knowing the outcome, I still found myself caught up in the story. I feel this is a testament to the editing. There are no time for lapses, the story is told with a sense of urgency but not at the expense of detail. Well for the most part. My qualms about the film will come later.

It also helps that the woman herself is so compelling.  I was dazzled by her eloquence and the fact that despite going through all of this, while it would have been so easy to be retaliatory, Davis appears to keep her priorities in check. What was happening to her was bigger than herself. It wasn’t really about her. She had become the face of anti establishment. The face and voice of many who dared to question how America treated its citizens. With a steadfast belief that her rightness would eventually triumph and set her free, her determination and poise is startling. Apart from the likes of Edgar Hoover, Reagan and Nixon (whom the latter can be heard having a hard on for her demise still after she is acquitted) Davis garnered support from a fractured American nation and the world and more importantly an all white jury that eventually acquitted her.

The film is well researched and I was awed by the amount of original footage the filmmakers were able to obtain. The film’s style is similar to that of Black Power Mixtape and Senna which relies on footage to set the scene and tell the story. In addition, we get to see Angela Davis of today reflecting on what happened to her and how it set the course of her life and the causes she chooses to fight for.

My only real criticism of the film is the lack of footage or insight into what prison was like for Davis. I say this after having seen Black Power Mixtape and finding that some of the interviews conducting with Angela while she was in prison were some of the most powerful of Mixtape is not even present in Free Angela Davis. There is no mention of the hunger strike she went on and apart from a voiceover which briefly expels on her solitary confinement there is not much else about her treatment in prison, which is quite startling considering her interests over the last few years, decades even have been about prisons and their inhabitants. This part of the film I felt unnecessarily relied on reenactments, while there is actual footage available.

But then again that might have something to do with rights to the footage being an issue. Especially when two major films sharing similar subject matter come out so closely together.

Overall this is a fascinating documentary about a remarkable woman. It works like Mixtape in that it is a good introductory film for those wanting to learn more about social history and documentary filmmaking. It worked for me on a personal level because it made me want to discover more about the woman herself. This doesn’t necessarily work as a personal homage to Angela Davis like say Mamma Africa about Miriam Makeba. But that’s because the latter is a celebration of a woman’s life while the former is a look at the social and political period in time through the experiences of one woman. If nothing else it’s a good thriller documentary. It succeeds in entertaining as well as informing. What more could you want from a documentary?

It’s a fitting addition to the pieces written and spoken about Davis who still is the iconic face and voice of the Civil Right’s Movement of the 1970s. Why else would it be her profile on the cover of Black Power Mixtape, despite never being an official member of the party and not say Stanley Carmichael? That’s because Angela Davis is the kind of figure that you might not share all her politics but you can respect them because damn it she’s earned it!

Where can you catch this film?

I believe it’s due out on DVD in the near future.

Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth

Dir. Pratibha Parma

I’d thought I’d add a little about this TV documentary I saw on BBC4 about the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Colour Purple.

I’ve read the book and seen the film (and like a lot of people had issues with some of the latter, which even Steven Spielberg acknowledges) but again didn’t know too much about the author. And while this isn’t necessarily a great documentary (the ending is particularly so soft focussed and saccharine I thought that Oprah Winfrey’s ‘O’ Network had a hand in its production) it does introduce some interesting points about her titular book and its relationship to the film and all the controversies surrounding it’s production. Not only was there controversy about the choice of director, there was also outrage upon its release about the depiction of African-American families and in particular African-American men.  It was particularly fascinating to see the unwillingness and downright stubborn ways the film was boycotted for asking black communities and men in particular to  look introspectively  at oneself in the mirror and acknowledge the ugliness in the misogyny wrapped up in the masculine psyche and it’s wider destructive impact.  The cries of betrayal and attempts to silence and boycott the likes of Alice Walker upon its release gave an insight into how vulnerable  supposed united ‘black’ community is.

It was also interesting to see the kind of person Alice Walker was. I kind of saw her as a person before her time. Accepting of her sexual fluidity she was one of the first female black authors to include gay relationships in her books and to make it more mainstream, which can be seen by the success of The Colour Purple. Her and her husband were also one of the first interracial marriages in a still fractious South. Her milestones were big, leading the way for others like her.

The documentary still is a little inconsistent. The pace and tone starts off well, exploring walker’s birth in a shack on a cotton field.  I especially enjoyed the parts when Alice Walker was on screen herself talking about her upbringing and obvious awe and appreciation for her mother who was forever determined that her children would not work the fields but get an education. Like Angela Davis, she’s articulate and eloquent. However, the film also seems disjointed in topic never quite deciding on what it wants to focus on, The Colour Purple or Alice Walker? Her literary success or her sexuality? Her work in context with the black experience or her work in context with the gay experience? I have no problem with touching on all these subjects but there has to be some logical cohesion and I think that was what was missing.

The filmmaker Pratibha Parma is a prominent feminist and gay rights filmmaker and that is where in this documentary her strengths lie. Outside of this the film loses confidence which I feel is detrimental to the subject matter and the film as a whole. Parma seems unwilling or uncomfortable fully exploring the crux of The Colour Purple and Alice Walker’s experiences of which she drew upon to write her most successful novel, the exploration of how violent race relations in the US affected family dynamics within the black household. This is given a glance before the filmmaker moves back to what interests her more, Alice Walker’s gay relationships later in life. I would be fine with that if that is what the film was being sold on. But it isn’t, it’s blurb is about the author’s birth and ascension to one of the America’s most important writers of the twentieth century focussing in particular on the acclaimed The Colour Purple and her subsequent work as a human right’s activist.

I’d still recommend the documentary but I get the sense that I’d learn more about Alice Walker from herself.

Read her books. And The Colour Purple‘s great.