Siah
20-09-04, 11:46
Creative activism
The Third International Black Panther Film Festival provided a rare opportunity for politics and imagination to intermingle, writes Ammiel Alcalay*
Much of the global media's attention on the anti-war movement and dissent in the United States has focussed on a very small range of opinion and experience, usually discussing whether or not American citizens support or do not support the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq, or how people feel about the erosion of what are generally called civil liberties. Much less attention gets paid to the core of long-time activists, former or current political prisoners, and younger grass-roots community activists for whom things like US Middle East policies and the introduction of the Patriot Act are simply extensions, expansions and continuities of long standing issues that continue to disenfranchise poor, working class, and largely black and Latino communities. The Third International Black Panther Film Festival (www.pantherfilmfest.com), held at City College, Columbia University, and the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York from 31 July to 4 August, provided an all-too-rare opportunity for activism and creativity to meet a wider public, where issues, activists and art could all be showcased together. With charismatic Hollywood star and activist Danny Glover serving as honorary chair, the festival managed to combine both larger and smaller productions into a cohesive whole. While the scope of the festival, like the thrust of the Black Panther Party itself, was certainly international, the feeling was very local and immediate.
As Kathleen Cleaver, one of the primary organisers of the festival, put it: "Demonstrations against the war in Iraq were key to a greater public acknowledgement of a war that hadn't ever really stopped. I got the sense from people at this year's festival that their decision to come was made as a conscious political act, and this was somewhat different from the previous festivals."
A long time activist who formed part of the core group of the Black Panther Party when she served in the capacity of communications secretary from 1967 to 1971 and now a law professor, Cleaver also spoke about how she and other former Panthers and activists like writer, director and performer Jamal Joseph, one of the New York 21 (a group of Panthers indicted in 1969 in raids targeting the party's New York leadership), decided to embark upon the creation of an annual film festival.
"The huge difference between my generation and younger people now is that we had a global context for our struggle -- the US was involved in a war that they were losing in Vietnam, and this followed an era of decolonisation and national liberation movements that we formed a part of."
Cleaver went on to speak of how the relentless repression and disinformation campaigns that the Panthers and other movements faced through the FBI's covert activities, known as COINTELPRO (the Counter Intelligence Program), have now become standard procedure through the criminalisation of whole segments of the population, expansion of the prison- industrial complex, the Homeland Security Act, and the Patriot Act. The complete distortion and co-optation of the imagery, content and ideology of movements from the 1960s and later (like the Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and many others), along with the step by step consolidation and conglomeration of publishing and the media, have led to a real lack of widely and readily available sources of self-representation by these groups. Ironically, the global spread of rap and hip-hop culture has often made younger people in Latin America, the Caribbean or Africa more aware of some of the iconic figures of these liberation movements than their American counterparts. At the same time, the current political climate has led to a resurgence of activism among younger people in the United States, from the world of hip hop music culture to community workers fighting and organising against police brutality; this, in turn, has led to a greater awareness of past movements and a need for more information about them.
All of these factors led Cleaver, along with others involved like the prolific and widely recognised documentary filmmaker St Clair Bourne, to focus on the crucial issue of representation through film. As former secretary of communications for the Panthers, Cleaver recalled that "I was the person anyone who wanted to take photographs, do interviews, or film the Panthers was referred to. I realised I had a vast inventory of references -- after the death of Eldridge Cleaver and the memorial that we held for him in New York in 1999, many former Panthers began to reconcile themselves with each other and a growing network of support for political prisoners began to develop after such a long period of false accusations, lingering repression, isolation, hiding, exile and imprisonment. Representations of the Panthers were politically motivated, and we were written off in the media as thugs or criminals to justify the destruction of the party by the state. I thought it was definitely time to start doing something again with all that material, and that's how the festival came into being."
This year's festival certainly displayed the diversity of this experience. In a full schedule spanning four days of programming, with films, performances, and discussions, the audience got to see images and hear voices that have generally been presented, if at all, alone or out of context. Here, however, immediate connections could be made between the exile of figures like Assata Shakur (as depicted in the Cuban-made film Eyes of the Rainbow by Gloria Rolando) or Pete and Charlotte O'Neal (in Cassandra Herman and Katy Shrout's American Exile, a film depicting the lives and activities of these former Panthers in Tanzania), and repression at home, represented most vividly in John Valdez's Passin' It On and Tanya Cuevas-Martinez's Sun Up to Sun Down: No More Prisons.
Passin' It On concentrates on the remarkable story of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, another member of the New York 21. While many people around the world may recognise the names of certain long-term political prisoners from Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, particularly given the emphasis on human rights as an element of US public policy over the past decade, the name Dhoruba Bin Wahad, unfortunately, will probably not elicit much recognition. The film was shot following Dhoruba's release after 19 years in prison when, after a long and protracted struggle, he and his lawyers were able to prove in court that the FBI and the New York City police department had collaborated in a counter intelligence operation to frame him for the killing of two police officers. Weaving interviews and archival footage of New York in the 1940s and 50s, where Dhoruba grew up in the South Bronx, and shots of him walking and driving through the same neighbourhoods in the 1990s, the film evokes a bittersweet tale of resistance and testimony.
Less of a narrative and more of an organising tool, Tanya Cuevas-Martinez's Sun Up to Sun Down: No More Prisons, followed by a short film done by Denis Flores of Cop Watch, a group of community activists from the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement (http://www.mxgm.org), captured the spirit and intention of the festival's activist agenda. Depicting the important Prison Moratorim Project (http:// www.nomoreprisons.org), Sun Up to Sun Down succinctly captured the truly horrifying human and statistical debacle that the ever growing prison-industrial complex has become in the United States. Sharply edited and packed with information, the film was presented by Kate Kyung Ji Rhee, one of the founders of the Moratorium Project. The gritty short by Denis Flores depicting kids on a Brooklyn street being shaken down by the police went even further into the realm of activism since, as one of the subjects of the film who had been beaten up by the police while filming the incident pointed out, such films had very little to do with art or aesthetics since the group uses them as evidence in court. A Alike, a poignant fiction film in this same sequence by Randall Dottin, a student of Jamal Joseph's, depicts two brothers -- one, a corporate success story, is on his way to pick up the other, just released from prison. In an incident with highway police their identities are suddenly reversed and the brothers are able to reconcile their bitter differences as they realise that, at least in the eyes of the law, they're both black males and it makes no difference whether one is a success or not.
Screenings included films that have had wider and, in some cases, even commercial distribution. These included Spike Lee's A Huey P Newton Story; Sam Green and Bill Siegel's recent The Weather Underground, a film focussing on members of that group in the context of other movements like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society; Isaac Julien's Baadasssss Cinema, an irreverent and acutely informed documentary on what came to be called the "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s; Jens Meurer's Public Enemy, looking at the current activities of former Panthers in a wide historical framework, particularly founding chairman Bobby Seale, in a wide historical framework and Raoul Peck's Lumumba, a film that got widespread recognition when it was released. Peck himself was present and was given an award in recognition of his achievements.
When asked about the high points of this year's festival, Kathleen Cleaver mentioned the appearance of Fred Hampton, Jr, from Chicago, during an evening featuring some of the most important names in radical hip hop, like M1 of Dead Prez. The son of Fred Hampton, Sr, a Black Panther assassinated in Chicago in 1969 and one of the most powerful figures of his generation, Fred Jr was as yet unborn at the time of the assassination. Released in 2001, after nine years of imprisonment under false charges, Fred Hampton Jr has followed in his father's footsteps as a true voice of political activism. At the closing reception for the festival, hosted by the Studio Museum of Harlem to present the recently released photo book, Black Panthers 1968 by Ruth Marion-Baruch and Pirkle Jones (Greybull Press, 2002), Danny Glover spoke about growing up in San Francisco and the growth of his political consciousness in the 1960s. As a key member of the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College (which went on a nine month strike in 1968), Glover spoke of the intersection of creativity, politics and the counter culture -- above all, he spoke of the pervasive influence of the Panthers, through their message, their aesthetics, and their actions. While the New York Times chose to write a major piece on the gentrification of Harlem the week following the festival. The Third International Black Panther Film Festival left no doubt that it was considering this historical neighbourhood from a completely different angle.
* Ammiel Alcalay is a writer and translator. His books include After Jews & Arabs, Memories of Our Future, and From the Warring Factions; he teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
The Third International Black Panther Film Festival provided a rare opportunity for politics and imagination to intermingle, writes Ammiel Alcalay*
Much of the global media's attention on the anti-war movement and dissent in the United States has focussed on a very small range of opinion and experience, usually discussing whether or not American citizens support or do not support the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq, or how people feel about the erosion of what are generally called civil liberties. Much less attention gets paid to the core of long-time activists, former or current political prisoners, and younger grass-roots community activists for whom things like US Middle East policies and the introduction of the Patriot Act are simply extensions, expansions and continuities of long standing issues that continue to disenfranchise poor, working class, and largely black and Latino communities. The Third International Black Panther Film Festival (www.pantherfilmfest.com), held at City College, Columbia University, and the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York from 31 July to 4 August, provided an all-too-rare opportunity for activism and creativity to meet a wider public, where issues, activists and art could all be showcased together. With charismatic Hollywood star and activist Danny Glover serving as honorary chair, the festival managed to combine both larger and smaller productions into a cohesive whole. While the scope of the festival, like the thrust of the Black Panther Party itself, was certainly international, the feeling was very local and immediate.
As Kathleen Cleaver, one of the primary organisers of the festival, put it: "Demonstrations against the war in Iraq were key to a greater public acknowledgement of a war that hadn't ever really stopped. I got the sense from people at this year's festival that their decision to come was made as a conscious political act, and this was somewhat different from the previous festivals."
A long time activist who formed part of the core group of the Black Panther Party when she served in the capacity of communications secretary from 1967 to 1971 and now a law professor, Cleaver also spoke about how she and other former Panthers and activists like writer, director and performer Jamal Joseph, one of the New York 21 (a group of Panthers indicted in 1969 in raids targeting the party's New York leadership), decided to embark upon the creation of an annual film festival.
"The huge difference between my generation and younger people now is that we had a global context for our struggle -- the US was involved in a war that they were losing in Vietnam, and this followed an era of decolonisation and national liberation movements that we formed a part of."
Cleaver went on to speak of how the relentless repression and disinformation campaigns that the Panthers and other movements faced through the FBI's covert activities, known as COINTELPRO (the Counter Intelligence Program), have now become standard procedure through the criminalisation of whole segments of the population, expansion of the prison- industrial complex, the Homeland Security Act, and the Patriot Act. The complete distortion and co-optation of the imagery, content and ideology of movements from the 1960s and later (like the Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and many others), along with the step by step consolidation and conglomeration of publishing and the media, have led to a real lack of widely and readily available sources of self-representation by these groups. Ironically, the global spread of rap and hip-hop culture has often made younger people in Latin America, the Caribbean or Africa more aware of some of the iconic figures of these liberation movements than their American counterparts. At the same time, the current political climate has led to a resurgence of activism among younger people in the United States, from the world of hip hop music culture to community workers fighting and organising against police brutality; this, in turn, has led to a greater awareness of past movements and a need for more information about them.
All of these factors led Cleaver, along with others involved like the prolific and widely recognised documentary filmmaker St Clair Bourne, to focus on the crucial issue of representation through film. As former secretary of communications for the Panthers, Cleaver recalled that "I was the person anyone who wanted to take photographs, do interviews, or film the Panthers was referred to. I realised I had a vast inventory of references -- after the death of Eldridge Cleaver and the memorial that we held for him in New York in 1999, many former Panthers began to reconcile themselves with each other and a growing network of support for political prisoners began to develop after such a long period of false accusations, lingering repression, isolation, hiding, exile and imprisonment. Representations of the Panthers were politically motivated, and we were written off in the media as thugs or criminals to justify the destruction of the party by the state. I thought it was definitely time to start doing something again with all that material, and that's how the festival came into being."
This year's festival certainly displayed the diversity of this experience. In a full schedule spanning four days of programming, with films, performances, and discussions, the audience got to see images and hear voices that have generally been presented, if at all, alone or out of context. Here, however, immediate connections could be made between the exile of figures like Assata Shakur (as depicted in the Cuban-made film Eyes of the Rainbow by Gloria Rolando) or Pete and Charlotte O'Neal (in Cassandra Herman and Katy Shrout's American Exile, a film depicting the lives and activities of these former Panthers in Tanzania), and repression at home, represented most vividly in John Valdez's Passin' It On and Tanya Cuevas-Martinez's Sun Up to Sun Down: No More Prisons.
Passin' It On concentrates on the remarkable story of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, another member of the New York 21. While many people around the world may recognise the names of certain long-term political prisoners from Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, particularly given the emphasis on human rights as an element of US public policy over the past decade, the name Dhoruba Bin Wahad, unfortunately, will probably not elicit much recognition. The film was shot following Dhoruba's release after 19 years in prison when, after a long and protracted struggle, he and his lawyers were able to prove in court that the FBI and the New York City police department had collaborated in a counter intelligence operation to frame him for the killing of two police officers. Weaving interviews and archival footage of New York in the 1940s and 50s, where Dhoruba grew up in the South Bronx, and shots of him walking and driving through the same neighbourhoods in the 1990s, the film evokes a bittersweet tale of resistance and testimony.
Less of a narrative and more of an organising tool, Tanya Cuevas-Martinez's Sun Up to Sun Down: No More Prisons, followed by a short film done by Denis Flores of Cop Watch, a group of community activists from the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement (http://www.mxgm.org), captured the spirit and intention of the festival's activist agenda. Depicting the important Prison Moratorim Project (http:// www.nomoreprisons.org), Sun Up to Sun Down succinctly captured the truly horrifying human and statistical debacle that the ever growing prison-industrial complex has become in the United States. Sharply edited and packed with information, the film was presented by Kate Kyung Ji Rhee, one of the founders of the Moratorium Project. The gritty short by Denis Flores depicting kids on a Brooklyn street being shaken down by the police went even further into the realm of activism since, as one of the subjects of the film who had been beaten up by the police while filming the incident pointed out, such films had very little to do with art or aesthetics since the group uses them as evidence in court. A Alike, a poignant fiction film in this same sequence by Randall Dottin, a student of Jamal Joseph's, depicts two brothers -- one, a corporate success story, is on his way to pick up the other, just released from prison. In an incident with highway police their identities are suddenly reversed and the brothers are able to reconcile their bitter differences as they realise that, at least in the eyes of the law, they're both black males and it makes no difference whether one is a success or not.
Screenings included films that have had wider and, in some cases, even commercial distribution. These included Spike Lee's A Huey P Newton Story; Sam Green and Bill Siegel's recent The Weather Underground, a film focussing on members of that group in the context of other movements like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society; Isaac Julien's Baadasssss Cinema, an irreverent and acutely informed documentary on what came to be called the "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s; Jens Meurer's Public Enemy, looking at the current activities of former Panthers in a wide historical framework, particularly founding chairman Bobby Seale, in a wide historical framework and Raoul Peck's Lumumba, a film that got widespread recognition when it was released. Peck himself was present and was given an award in recognition of his achievements.
When asked about the high points of this year's festival, Kathleen Cleaver mentioned the appearance of Fred Hampton, Jr, from Chicago, during an evening featuring some of the most important names in radical hip hop, like M1 of Dead Prez. The son of Fred Hampton, Sr, a Black Panther assassinated in Chicago in 1969 and one of the most powerful figures of his generation, Fred Jr was as yet unborn at the time of the assassination. Released in 2001, after nine years of imprisonment under false charges, Fred Hampton Jr has followed in his father's footsteps as a true voice of political activism. At the closing reception for the festival, hosted by the Studio Museum of Harlem to present the recently released photo book, Black Panthers 1968 by Ruth Marion-Baruch and Pirkle Jones (Greybull Press, 2002), Danny Glover spoke about growing up in San Francisco and the growth of his political consciousness in the 1960s. As a key member of the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College (which went on a nine month strike in 1968), Glover spoke of the intersection of creativity, politics and the counter culture -- above all, he spoke of the pervasive influence of the Panthers, through their message, their aesthetics, and their actions. While the New York Times chose to write a major piece on the gentrification of Harlem the week following the festival. The Third International Black Panther Film Festival left no doubt that it was considering this historical neighbourhood from a completely different angle.
* Ammiel Alcalay is a writer and translator. His books include After Jews & Arabs, Memories of Our Future, and From the Warring Factions; he teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.