Black Rebels: Navigating the Cultural Divide

Tessa Boerman

A Divided Past

Many films, including the cinéma-vérité documentary Baldwin’s Nigger about the writer James Baldwin, tell the stories of black people who have taken the liberty of closing the social and cultural divide. The price they pay for this, however, is often high, because they face incomprehension or even resistance to the idea that a different perspective, ‘another reality’ exists. The social divide – often literally comprising separate worlds – is reflected in the film industry as well, and has had its effect on it in many ways.

Freedom is what one is after. And as it cannot, I suppose, be given, then it obviously must be taken. And there are many ways to take it.

– James Baldwin (Baldwin’s Nigger, Horace Ové, 1969)

Ever since the early days of cinema there have been attempts to close that divide. Just how painfully slow such a process can be is perhaps best illustrated by an iconic film that is charged with an explicit political and social ideology: The Birth of a Nation. This widely praised film by D.W. Griffith from 1915, based on the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, led to fierce protests from the black American Civil Rights movement. It wasn’t just a question of the film’s racist portrayal (it largely focuses on docile and sexually aggressive black men), but also its glorification and legitimisation of violence against black people. The protests were in vain: the film continued to be distributed, thus becoming part of film history and Western cultural heritage.

The Cultural Divide

The present has its roots in the past, and although we cannot deny those roots, we can put them in a different frame of reference. Artist and composer DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid made a visual remix of D.W. Griffith's film, entitled Rebirth of a Nation, rooted in an artistic practice that Amiri Baraka describes as “the changing same”. In the year 2017 it is still necessary to protest against the restricted portrayal and exclusion of black people in the film industry and the fact that black lives are apparently inferior. #OscarsSoWhite and Black Lives Matter have now come to the notice of international public opinion. These issues are relevant not only in the United States but throughout the African diaspora, and are also addressed within the international film industry.

Reason enough for IFFR to highlight this development in Perspectives. IFFR has always focused on global developments and the most distant corners of cinema, but we do not want to lose sight of what is closer at hand. IFFR is not only drawing attention to the racial divide, but also sees a need for the whole film industry to reflect on how women and LGBTQIA people are represented within the context of the Black Rebels theme.

Resistance Against Division

This programme includes a wide variety of films that try to bridge the differences – sometimes with a hand affably extended (Bayard & Me), sometimes with biting humour (Atlanta) and at other times with an outspoken statement (Hustlers Convention). The themes are also very diverse and appeal to broad social involvement. Some might even realise that most difficult and beautiful of accomplishments for a film: creating empathy.

Two films have incomparably succeeded in showing the suffering that accompanies exclusion: Killer of Sheep and Moonlight. Restoring human dignity to those who have been denied it is a form of resistance that leaves few unmoved. While such films are interesting, innovative and relevant, they also have social and political urgency. Because, however great the divide between them, the fate of the one remains inextricably linked to that of the other. Again, James Baldwin eloquently expresses this interconnectedness: “If I am not safe, you are not safe.”

Minding the Gap

This programme, however, is not only about black people who resist but also about black filmmakers who are navigating the film industry to us, the audience. The strategies they conceive in order to tell their stories are countless, ingenious and often born of necessity. The L.A. Rebellion film movement from UCLA that started in the late 1960s, to which filmmaker Charles Burnett belongs, radically distinguished itself in perspective, themes and aesthetics from the white middle-class student majority there. Multimedia artist Keith Piper (Robot Bodies) founded the BLK Art Group that became known for “its boldly political stance, producing dynamic conceptual art that offered a series of inventive critiques on the state of inter-communal, class and gender relations in the UK”. Twenty-three–year-old Brazilian Yasmin Thayná worked for three years with sixty people on the set of her debut film, KBELA. She went on to create AFROFLIX, a black digital platform.

Such identity politics strategies always provoke debate, which (temporarily) emphasises the divide, but that is inevitable in this process. To question a norm or inequality, you have to describe it and define the different positions. This is the fate of all emancipation movements that challenge traditions and power structures. During the four-hour talk show Black Rebels: Minding the Gap at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, we will dive deeply into this divide in the hope of emerging wiser.