The Criterion Channel Presents: Black Panthers (1968)

 

Just over a year ago, I began this series with a look at Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, and now once more we have to discuss a movie about race, and an especially important one at this moment in time. Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers is technically a short film, at just half an hour, but it conveys a lot for that run-time: namely in convictions and message. Observing the 1968 Oakland protest by the Black Panther Party of the arrest of co-founder Huey P. Newton (arrested for allegedly shooting a police officer), the film interviews or covers dozens of demonstrators, including Eldritch and Kathleen Cleaver, and Newton himself, explicitly documenting who they are and what they want.

Varda, coming from a culture where the Black Panthers had no presence, is deeply fascinated by their movement and incredibly sympathetic -which she doesn’t hide at all, having her narrator make definitive statements like “the Oakland police, well known for its brutality, never misses the chance to harass the Black Panthers, to search them, to trap them, to enter their houses without warrants, and even to shoot them.” The film works to discredit stereotypes of the Black Panthers and make clear what they are fighting for, drawing attention to things such as their communal activities and physical style -clear tributes to African traditions long suppressed by white patriarchy. One interviewee, a seeming lieutenant in the party outlines the now famous Ten-Point Program, including demands for full employment, the end of gentrification, exemption from military service, and an end to police brutality -police are frequently referred to in the movie, as they were in the organization, as ‘pigs’. And in his own segments from police custody, Newton is shown to be calm and reasonable in spite of the torture he’d undergone behind bars -making the later reveal of his sentencing that much more painfully resonating, as predictable as it is even without the historical knowledge.

The visual language and editing that Varda employs too is quite striking. The way she frames political speeches in the background with demonstrators head-on in the foreground was a popular, almost cliché technique of the French New Wave, but one that holds new meaning in this context. She also juxtaposes Newton talking about reading Chairman Mao with several protesters carrying little red communist manifestos, a speech about the importance of arming black people with militia-dressed leaders; yet strings together footage of normal people at the rally -women and children especially, to humanize them and subtly comment on the feminism of the movement. Kathleen Cleaver gets one of the longest conversations and a favourite part of the film for me is a teenage activist explaining their methods of community outreach.

Near the end of the film the narrator breaks any guise of objectivity: “It is because they are an endangered minority that the Black Panthers have to affirm themselves violently and declare war on their immediate enemy: the police. Their war cries frighten and exasperate the white races, who consider them fascists, forgetting that they are much less dangerous than the police, and much less fascist.” Shortly after, the final interview is conducted with a visiting white Texan, an avatar for his own race, who doesn’t care to understand what the Black Panthers are really protesting for. It’s haunting and sad that fifty years later, this is still the case.

Criterion Recommendation: Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Another movie about a culture of white supremacy, Boots Riley’s brilliant anti-capitalist satire is one of the sharpest, most unique, and inventive films of the last few years. Following Lakeith Stanfield as a telemarketer climbing the corporate ladder on his ability to mimic a white voice, the film highlights the intersection of race and class inequity and the insidiousness of a system that profits off of them both through a heightened reality and sense of social satire that is downright Swiftian. As it promotes the idea of organized labour and propels its protagonist into ever darker circumstances, its’ direction and atmosphere is wonderfully stylized and eccentric, up to and even after the best and most bonkers movie twist since perhaps The Sixth Sense itself. No other movie is like it, and Criterion would be bereft not to consider it.

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