Berlin Before the Pandemic
I am here in Berlin for six months to follow my lifelong desire to write and research family history. I had in mind going into a sort of inner exile and returning August 1 to work for the election at home, but had no notion of going into self-isolation for six months!
I thought I would take breaks to go to theater, concerts, museums and see movies…I made it to the last day of museums, going to the Neues Museum to see the Egyptian collection which included photographs taken around 1900 of an expedition to Nubia, since flooded by the Aswan Dam, and of the famous bust of the most beautiful woman in the world, Nefretiti. We heard the guard tell another that the museums would be closed as of Saturday.
I went to the Arsenal Cinema at Potsdamer Platz to see the first of a series of films on African Americans in the USA called Blacklight. I was looking forward to being reminded of those days in the 60s when I was being educated in race relations.
I had just spent 1963–1964 in Paris where we followed the traces of James Baldwin’s stay there and discussed racism in USA with Africans and African Americans in exile. I returned from Paris after JFK’s assassination determined to do my part to help solve the Civil Rights problem. I was eager to see and remember my fervor of those days. So many of the other films in this series were also landmarks in my own psycho-social development and I was looking forward to seeing them here, in Berlin, a place where 100 years ago my own family was experiencing liberation, integration and then…degradation.
The series began with Take This Hammer, a 1963 doc made for KQED, public television of San Francisco with James Baldwin.
See it here. This is an eye-opening reminder of what the black experience was and is today for so many.
Things remain unchanged in too many ways today. But you don’t hear someone as articulate as James Baldwin talk of it, of white so-called Christianity, nor of the people expressing their anger, the Black Muslims (this was cut from the original version that aired), of how the North mirrors the South but hides behind a facade of liberal sophistication.
To send your email vote in support of Take this Hammer’s nomination to the National Film Registry, please visit this web page at the Library of Congress’s web site: http://www.loc.gov/film/vote.html.
Please note: Copyright to Take this Hammer (the Director’s Cut) is held by WNET. All rights reserved. WNET is the premier public media provider of the New York metropolitan area and parent of public television stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21. Take this Hammer (the Director’s Cut) was originally produced by KQED for National Educational Television (NET) — the predecessor of WNET — and was never televised. After 15 minutes of footage was cut from the original version, a 44 minute edit first aired on February 4th 1964 at 7:30pm, on KQED Ch.9 in the Bay Area. This shorter broadcast edit was remastered by Monaco Digital Labs in 2009 and may also be viewed in DIVA.
KQED’s mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he’s driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For Service’s Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on discovering: “The real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” He declares: “There is no moral distance … between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. There is no moral distance … between President Kennedy and Bull Connor because the same machine put them both in power. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.”
Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview Hunters Point and Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: “There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now.” The TV Archive would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the merits of this film and for his determination that it be preserved and remastered for posterity.
In the film’s very opening scene, Famios Bell (aka Jackie Bell) says to Orville Luster: “I’ll tell you about San Francisco. The white man, he’s not taking advantage of you out in public, like they’re doing down in Birmingham, but he’s killing you with that pencil and paper, brother!” Famios’ family moved to Bayview in 1943 and he eventually worked for almost 40 years as a federal employee before retiring. When interviewed about his meeting with Baldwin by Dutch filmmaker Caroline Bins in 2012, he recalled: “I asked him [Baldwin] what’s it like to be a great writer? … He told me you have to study. You have to become articulate and you have to care. These things I remember, and he also told me that we would have a Black president one day. That sticks in my mind more than anything.” Famios went on to play an active role in his community, coaching basketball and mentoring youth, and this is just one example of how Baldwin’s 1963 visit had a positive impact on the neighborhood.
Director Richard O. Moore was interviewed in 2012 by the TV Archive, and discussed the film production of Take this Hammer and working with Baldwin in The Making of Take this Hammer. As Moore notes, 15 minutes were cut from his original version by order of KQED’s Board of Directors, some of whom felt the film cast San Francisco’s race relations in an overly negative way. One board member stated that: “I believe we would all agree that it is not the function of KQED to produce inflammatory, distorted, sacrilegious, extremist programming under the name of educational television. I believe this program is all of these.” The 59 minute Director’s Cut was found in August 2013, as a result of information which came to light during the Moore interview and is preserved at San Francisco State University. Movette Film Transfer of San Francisco remastered this 16mm positive film print in August 2013 in 2K resolution (2048x1556 pixels), using a Kinetta film scanner. A low-res video screener was made publicly available for the first time ever from San Francisco State’s Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA), in August 2013.
In March and April of 2014, the TV Archive worked with BAFTA Award winning sound editor John Nutt on a digital restoration of Take this Hammer’s optical soundtrack, to improve sound quality. A screener featuring this audio restoration, synchronized with the 2K picture was uploaded to DIVA in April 2014. Sound editor John Nutt’s explanation of this audio reiteration — together with a sample comparison between audio quality of the original optical soundtrack and the digitally restored soundtrack — are also available in DIVA.
Also note that KQED produced an edition of their Profile, Bay Area TV show on July 11th 1963, at 9:00pm on Ch.9, titled “Is San Francisco Another Birmingham?” This is listed on p.37 of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper from that day. As Take this Hammer was produced during the spring of 1963, it seems reasonable to speculate that this program was produced in direct response to Baldwin’s hypothesis in Take this Hammer that: “There is no moral distance … between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham.” But we are unable to find any copy of this program in our collections. If anyone has leads relating to the possible whereabouts of a copy of this Profile show, please contact the TV Archive. Another citation we found stated that this program was hosted by Caspar W. Weinberger.
Black Light
Black Light is based on the retrospective of international black film curated by Greg de Cuir Jr, which was presented at last year’s Locarno Film Festival featuring a selection heavily focused on American cinema that spans the arc from the late 10s of the 20th century to the year 2000. This can only begin to illustrate the enormous diversity of the cinematic examination of being black, it is to be understood as a proposal that must inevitably remain unfinished. To what extent can the films created in very different contexts be summarized under one heading? It’s not about the “simple representation of a black body behind or in front of the camera” (de Cuir), but about common forms of experience and shared history that include racism, self-empowerment, and questions of representation.
Arsenal was planning on welcoming Greg de Cuir Jr on the first two evenings of the retrospective. On the second evening, he was to discuss with filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, who is currently a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. However, on account of the pandemic, he returned the day before to Locarno.
His statement: “There were a few basic principles that I followed. On the one hand, I wanted to make an international selection and at the same time the series was to provide a historical overview. I knew I wanted to leave Africa out. Africa is a subject that deserves an independent retrospective. It deserves a close look and its own special, clever and thoughtful approach. Instead, I wanted to focus on the descendants who were forced to travel the world to survive and their own place, roots. I also knew that I wanted to focus specifically on the 20th century. It was supposed to be a real retro, looking back and thinking back, about how we got where we are today, and how what the past tells us about our present and maybe even our future. And what is still very important: the series should reveal a collage of different styles, genres, political and aesthetic approaches. I wanted the different works to relate to each other and set contrasts at the same time, that they form a dialogue. ”(Greg de Cuir Jr in ray film magazine)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, USA 1971, March 10, introduction: Greg de Cuir Jr) A pimp saves a Black Panther from police violence and kills two racist cops, whereupon a chase begins. The allies in Sweetback’s adventurous escape and at the same time in his political awareness: prostitutes, the ghetto community and a group of Hell’s Angels. Writer, producer, editor, director and lead actor Melvin Van Peebles used this with the comedy Watermelon Man (1970) — the story of a white racist who wakes up one morning as a black man — in Hollywood to make money on the streets of Los Angeles to shoot an independent black action film. An angry, polemical mixture of black power, sex and the fight against “the Man”, “rated X by an all-white jury”, how the posters announced effective advertising. “The mother of all Blaxploitation films and still the benchmark of the genre: Much more radical, intensive and original than the commercialized follow-up works, which quickly became a surprise, presents itself as a true independent film. ”(Christoph Huber). I loved this film which spellt liberation for me and spurred us on to become more daring in our defiance of racial mores.
Take This Hammer (Richard O. Moore, USA 1964, March 11 , followed by a conversation between Greg de Cuir Jr and Kevin Jerome Everson) The television production of the channel KQED follows James Baldwin in 1963 during a visit to San Francisco and shows him in conversation with the African-American population, who is also faced with diverse discrimination in supposedly progressive California. Baldwin’s interest was “the real situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” That and his keen analysis of the circumstances led to the station shortening the almost one-hour document by 15 minutes. It has only been available as a Director’s Cut since 2014.
Still/Here (Christopher Harris, USA 2000, March 11, introduction: Greg de Cuir Jr) “We walk down the street and we see all these houses. And all these houses have some kind of brick. ”The artist Christopher Harris chooses a cinematic form that hovers between an essayistic city symphony and experimental film to capture the changes in his hometown of St. Louis. Started as a student project and shot on 16 mm film material, he filmed in the northern part of St. Louis, where the working class and the poorer part of the African American population lived when the film was made. Neglected buildings, peeling advertisements on billboards, abandoned and dilapidated cinema halls, churches, through the roofs of which trees make their way out: Harris’ deeply poetic film is a beacon of urban desolation. See the trailer here.
The Blood of Jesus (Spencer Williams, USA 1942, 12.3.) A large train of African-American believers goes singing and in a festive step to a riverbank to carry out the baptism of some members of the community. Among them is the pious Martha, who is unhappily married to a thief and poacher who does not want to know anything about the faith. Shortly after her return from baptism, an accident occurs in which Martha is seriously injured. As her body wrestles with death, her soul comes to a crossroads where she has to choose between the temptations of hell and heaven. From 1915 to the 1950s, a large number of so-called “race films” with black cast and for a black audience were created outside of Hollywood. These films were usually produced and directed by white filmmakers The Blood of Jesus, on the other hand, was a project by the African American actor, director and entrepreneur Spencer Williams, which with its hypnotic gospel music and breathtaking picture ideas became an outstanding success at the box office and inspired many later African American filmmakers.
Drylongso (USA 1998, March 12th) Cauleen Smith ‘s 16 mm debut film portrays the young art student Pica, who falls behind in a photography course. Instead, she focuses on a project for photographic documentation of black men, which she sees as an “endangered species” due to police and judicial violence. She also struggles with the difficult relationship with her mother, but also gets to know an ally: Tobi, who pretends to be a man on the street in order to escape harassment and her violent ex-boyfriend. In the form of everyday encounters and events, the film tells of the big issues — love, death, relationships between the sexes — and lives from the close observation of the African-American community in the California Bay Area.
She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, USA 1986, March 14 & 29). The self-confident Nola Darling refuses to meet the expectations of those around her — including that of choosing one of her three lovers. Brooklyn, which has not yet been censored, is the setting for a heroine who refuses to write ascriptions and insists on radical self-determination, who directly addresses the camera and who can sometimes shine in color in the grainy black and white world. Spike Lee’s breakthrough as a director marks the beginning of a new independent African American cinema in the United States. Realized with a minimal budget of only $ 175,000 and with the participation of friends and family members, he grossed ten million. I agreed whole heartedly with this surprising and outspoken woman’s point of view when I saw it in New York City where Spike Lee was a common commentator at IFP meetings in those early days of indie films.
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, USA / GB 1991, March 13 & 21). The film takes place in the late 19th century on the islands off the coast of South Carolina. This is where the Gullah people live — descendants of former slaves of West African origin who were at home in colonies along America’s lower Atlantic coast. The family members meet one last time before most of them leave for the mainland. At the center of the film — photographed by Arthur Jafa, one of the most important cameramen of black US cinema — are the women as keepers of the African cultural heritage. The non-linear plot ties in with the griot style of West African oral culture. “The griot appears at a birth, wedding or funeral and tells the family story for several days, whereby his narratives begin at the periphery and thread themselves in and out, out and in. I have decided, Daughters of the Dust to tell according to this tradition. ”(Julie Dash). This female directed film was seminal and it was tragic that Julie Dash was not brought into making more movies immediately. Considering the enormous pride of the Gullah people this film portrays one of the finest African American ethnic group today.
The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, Jamaica 1972, March 14 & 27) “You can get it if you really want”: The reggae star Jimmy Cliff embodies Ivanhoe Martin, a young Jamaican from the country who is looking for work in the slums of the capital Kingston is coming. After he was pulled off as a bicycle repairer and musician, he finally gained money and fame as a marijuana dealer and copkiller. The inspiration for the film was the life of the Jamaican outlaw “Rhyging”, who moved to Kingston in the 1940s and became a hero of the masses through police shootings. The director Perry Henzell created a wonderfully lively, cheeky, colorful film, which he himself wanted to understand as an expression of Jamaican self-image. The Harder They Come was the “Midnight Movie”especially in the USA to a cult film. The soundtrack by Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, the Maytals, Melodians and others helped reggae achieve an international breakthrough. The joy we felt at this hero’s victory brought us into a new space, a new understanding of the breadth of the African diaspora. I do have to admit, however, that for a long time I thought Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley were the same person (Apologies, but I fell back into a role of spectator rather than a role player by the time Bob Marley came on the scene.)
Black Orpheus / Orfeo Negro (Marcel Camus, Brazil / F / I 1959, March 15 & 19) In the middle of preparations for the carnival, the young Euridice arrives in Rio de Janeiro and meets the tram conductor Orfeu, who will take part in the carnival as a guitar player for a samba school. Soon Euridice and Orfeu meet for the second time and fall in love. Then a figure emerges from the wild carnival bustle, which is disguised as death and henceforth pursues Euridice. In 1956, the Brazilian writer Vinícius de Moraes wrote his play “Orfeu da Conceição” in a free modification of the ancient myth of the singer Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, whom he tries to save from the underworld. French director Marcel Camus used it to create one of the most famous cinematic documents of Afro-Brazilian culture. Black Orpheus became world famous. When I was a sophomore in Berkeley in the 60s, samba and this film were still the rage. We danced in the street all night long on weekends and the 33 ⅓ rpm soundtrack of this album that I loved so much was stolen from my house.
La Permission/ The Story of a Three-Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, F 1966, March 16 & 27). The young black US soldier Turner is stationed in France. During a three-day walk he meets a French woman and spends the weekend with her. “With a screenplay that was supported by the CNC with $ 60,000 and filmed in Paris and Étretat for six weeks on a budget of $ 200,000, Melvin Van Peebles’ first feature film takes a counter-intuitive approach to racism. Instead of dealing with economic and social injustices or police persecution, La Permission/ The Story of a Three-Day Pass develops a situation in which his protagonist is gradually filled with happiness. But at every moment and through every channel (language, gesture, imagination …) misunderstandings, misinterpretations, missteps and prejudices come into play that not only exist between people, but also within the psyche. This permanent disunity of the ego with itself, the ego and the world, fills the image and the soundtrack with duplications, overlays, symmetrical and asymmetrical echoes that testify to the genius of cinema when it comes to understanding the affective resonances of a conflict that penetrates, structures and goes beyond its actors. ”(Nicole Brenez)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, USA 1982, March 17th & 23rd.) The New York philosophy professor Sarah works on ecstasy in art. Her husband Victor (played by director Bill Gunn) has just sold a picture to a museum as a painter and wants to spend the summer in Upstate New York despite the fact that Sarah needs access to a library for her work. He shows his enthusiasm for the village structures, but also for the women, who returns the favor by taking on a role in a student’s film. The light-heartedness and subtlety of Eric Rohmer’s comedy about the love affairs of a black middle-class couple was Kathleen Collins’ first and last feature film — she died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. When he appeared, he received little attention and was not distributed in the United States.
White Dog (Samuel Fuller, USA 1982, March 18) On a night drive, actress Julie Sawyer sees a white dog lying on the road, who appears to be injured, and takes it in. One day she discovers that he is a so-called “white dog”, a dog that is designed to kill black people. The animal trainer Keys takes on the task of freeing the dog from its learned hatred. Samuel Fuller’s career was already fading away when he detoured to direct White Dog who adapted a novel by Romain Gary. The film became an unmistakable Samuel Fuller work: a highly concentrated narrative, dynamic, sometimes brutally direct images, gripping and oppressive in its teaching message. The exceptional work, whose lucid plea for tolerance and forgiveness is also very touching, was bizarrely misunderstood as racist in part when it was released, so that the film received its well-deserved appreciation only years later. Watch the trailer here. I have yet to see this landmark film whose director Sam Fuller was forced into exile in France as a result of insults he received accusing him of racism. Today his widow Christa, the German born actress who met him in Paris, and their daughter Samantha work tirelessly to keep his name and accomplishments alive. Sam Fuller is one of the most important independent filmmakers in American history.
Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, USA 1919, March 20, on the wing: Eunice Martins) A young woman moves to the south of the USA and becomes a teacher in an underfunded school. When she travels to Boston to collect donations, she meets a doctor and a white philanthropist who support her cause. “Oscar Micheaux’s bold, powerful melodrama from 1919 — the oldest surviving feature film by a black American director — unfolds the immense political dimensions of intimate romantic crises. With a brisk and sharp-edged style, Micheaux creates a broad panorama of black society and portrays an engineer with an international career, a private investigator with influential friends, an exploitative gangster, committed educators — and the appalling environment of violent racial discrimination, which he relentlessly and cruelly puts in the picture. In addition to his disgust at the hateful rhetoric and murderous tyranny of the white Southerners, Micheaux shows particular satirical disgust at a black preacher who offers heaven to his community as a reward for unconditional submission. Micheaux’s narrative technique is as daring as his subject, with flashbacks and insets that expand the story. ”(Richard Brody) I have heard about Oscar Micheaux throughout my entire film career and have have yet to see a film by him. I am so disappointed not to be able to see this in Berlin!
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, USA 1978, March 20 & 25). In the mid / late 1970s, black filmmakers studied at the California film school UCLA, who were looking for new pictures beyond white Hollywood, but also Blaxploitation films, for African-American To represent living environments. As a cameraman and director, Charles Burnett was the central figure in the so-called “LA Rebellion”. His debut film shows in grainy black and white and with poetry and dedication vignettes from the life of the sensitive dreamer Stan, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and child and whose job in the slaughterhouse is increasingly affecting him. Moments of simple joy, a dance with his wife or a cup of coffee let Stan forget the harsh reality for a short time. A “heroic demystification” (David E. James) of the working class. Director Charles Barnett and I went to UCLA at the same time and have a continuous friendship.
Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, USA 1959, March 21 & 26). The aging white criminal David Burke has the perfect plan: a bank robbery that really can’t go wrong. As an accomplice, he looks for the black nightclub musician Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), who urgently needs to pay off gambling debts, and the white ex-convict Earle Slater, who threatens to sabotage everything with his distrust of Johnny. The film noir, directed by Hollywood veteran Robert Wise, with its portrayal of morally complex characters, proved to be the ideal vehicle to address racism, social fears and tensions. Harry Belafonte produced the film with his own company HarBel Productions, which aimed to represent multi-layered black characters in Hollywood. I never heard of this film and yet Robert Wise lived across the hall from my stepfather and his wife always wanted us to have lunch together. And in 1959, Harry Belafonte was my favorite singer.
A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, USA 1989, March 22 & 30) tells of the gradual political awareness of a white man in South Africa in 1976. Ben (Donald Sutherland) leads a comfortable life with his family as a history teacher, completely shielded from the reality of his black Compatriots. When the son of his gardener Gordon was brutally beaten up by the police and finally murdered in prison after a student demonstration, he still believed in the correctness of the system. It is only when Gordon also disappears without a trace that his worldview cracks and he realizes that South Africa’s judicial system is a farce. Euzhan Palcy, born in Martinique and trained in Paris, was the first black director of a Hollywood film. Of course we all saw this. Producer Paula Weinstein got Marlon Brando; fought to get So. African actors cast. This was a major accomplishment for a film about South Africa, directed and produced by women.The first black woman to direct a Hollywood film says she was turned down repeatedly for projects because her ideas were “too black”, even after Marlon Brando earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in her film about apartheid, A Dry White Season.
Ganja & Hess Bill Gunn, USA 1973, March 24 & 28) The anthropologist Hess Green (Duane Jones, the main character from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead) researches the ancient African culture of the Myrthians, who are a people of blood drinkers. One day, his psychologically unstable assistant (played by director Bill Gunn himself) wounded Green with a dagger, which is said to have served the Myrthians for their ceremonies, and then kills himself. The next day, Green’s wound healed, but now he feels obsessed with thirst for blood. When he meets Ganja, the assistant’s wife, they become lovers. An independent production company commissioned theater director Bill Gunn to provide them with a vampire horror film as part of the success of the first Blaxploitation films. Gunn, meanwhile, created a dream-filled, hypnotic and mysterious film, experimentally assembled from the first minute, in which the vampire myth turns into an allegory. His original version was celebrated at the premiere in Cannes, but since he flopped at the US box office, the producers defaced him in numerous alternative cut versions. We show the original version of this bold film poem, reconstructed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, USA 1963, March 28 & 31). New Yorker Shirley Clarke is considered a pioneer of independent American cinema with her interest in non-linear narrative structures and documentary aesthetics. In The Cool World, she tells in straightforward imagery of 14-year-old Duke, a member of a youthful street gang in Harlem, who has made it his point to get a gun to become the leader of his gang. Harlem’s raw energy transforms Clarke into an immediate cinematic experience with a jazz soundtrack by Dizzy Gillespie, which in its sequence of everyday events does not become a social reportage despite the depiction of destroyed families, drug addiction, difficult living conditions, violence and marginalization. (al / gv) This was a seminal movie based on a seminal book. Eye opening in its reality.
