PAFF 2012: DARK GIRLS



On the "set" of Dark Girls.

In the b(l)ackground

By Ed Rampell

Bill Duke is best known to audiences for appearing in highly commercial  action pix, such as Ah-nold Schwarzenegger's two 1980s hits, Commando and Predator, plus Action Jackson, as well as in 1970s TV crime fighting series like Kojak, Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch. The 6'4" shaved head African-American actor is less known as one of Hollywood's working directors, not only of many television programs, but of features, such as the Whoopi Goldberg Sister Act sequel, the made-for-TV movie about the Black Panthers' forerunners, Deacons For Defense, plus 1993's The Cemetery Club. In the latter, Duke raised eyebrows by breaking the mold and directing a mostly Caucasian and female cast led by Olympia Dukakis and Ellen Burstyn.

Now the surprisingly soft spoken Duke is shattering celluloid stereotypes again by co-directing the hard hitting, eye opening documentary Dark Girls, about "colorism" -- not only within the African-American community, but among non-blacks here and peoples around the world. Colorism is a sort of preferential judgment system based solely on skin color and tone, the caliber of hair (how straight is it?) and eye color -- as opposed to assessing individuals on what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the contents of one’s character.”

In particular, as the title suggests, Duke's doc looks at how this phenomenon affects females of color, although it is the first in a trilogy to include Yellow Brick Road (about the "high yellow"/"mulatto" phenomenon of the perception of lighter skinned people) and What is a Man. Dark Girls' interviewees include a number of extremely insightful psychologists, as well as children, teens, adults and elders impacted by colorism, such as African-American women are the least married demographic in the USA by far. Most of the documentary’s subjects are black; many of the onscreen victims of colorism are full of anguish, especially as this form of racism often comes from others of African ancestry. Comic Michael Coylar scores some pithy points about the color barrier couched in wit, while The Help actress Viola Davis insists upon not remaining helpless while racial scorn is heaped upon her.

One of the recurring interviewees is a lighter skinned mom who frets over having a darker daughter who denies her own Negritude and refuses to identify as being black. However, this mother seems completely oblivious to what appears to be her own hair straightening and dying blonde of her locks -- what message does this send to her little girl?

Like Bed Stuy-born Chris Rock’s 2009 directorial debut, Good Hair, Duke fearlessly takes on sensitive subject matter -- call him the “Duke of Curl.” When asked why Duke was "airing blacks' dirty laundry" he replied: "Because it's stinking up the house." Along with co-director D. Channsin Berry, Duke belies cultural cliches and goes where angels fear to tread, by tackling a touchy subject few would deal with (although Spike Lee boldly did in his controversial 1988 musical School Daze). Duke’s well-made nonfiction film anticipates and deals with a lot of my “what about” thoughts, such as, for example, the fact that while Thailand is full of dark skinned people, only the lighter skinned Asians appear on television.

However, I would have liked a brief look at Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking book about the psychopathology of colonialism, Black Skins, White Masks – especially since Fanon himself was a psychiatrist, as are many of this film’s talking heads. Plus, the doc is totally devoid of any sort of class analysis of colorism -- just as plantation masters benefited by perceived divisions between house and field hands, today’s divided working class profits our corporate overlords. Ever since the Roman Empire, divide and conquer has been the name of the oppression game. Nevertheless, Dark Girls is a major, must see work.

The screening of Dark Girls I attended was completely sold out, and was followed by an extremely lively Q&A with Duke in person.



PAFF 2012: TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE

Toussaint Louverture (Jimmy Jean-Louis) in Toussaint Louverture.

Rise above

By Ed Rampell

Every once in a while a movie comes along that sweeps audiences off of their feet. Toussaint Louverture is one of these breathtaking movies. This two-part, three hour-plus saga about the leader of the Haitian liberation struggle, Toussaint Louverture (Jimmy Jean-Louis) is in the same league, and has the epic sweep of classic biopics, such as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Warren Beatty’s Reds, Sir Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi as well as the recent feature about another Western Hemisphere leader, Lula, The Son of Brazil.

In a sense, Toussaint Louverture has been long in the making. By the 1930s, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who made revolutionary classics such as 1925’s Battleship Potemkin, was interested in making a film called Black Majesty featuring Toussaint’s co-leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which is outlined in Vladimir Nizhny’s book Lessons With Eisenstein. Eisenstein had wanted the indomitable Paul Robeson to play Dessalines (or one of his comrades) -- can you imagine how electrifying this work would have been? In any case, it was not to be.

Nor (so far!) has Danny Glover’s projected movie about the Haitian Revolution, which was supposed to be a collaboration with the film industry of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Toussaint has been depicted in a handful of short, documentary and feature films, notably in director Jean Negulesco’s 1952 Haitian Revolution drama Lydia Bailey, starring Anne Francis and Dale Robertson, with Trinidad-born Ken Renard (a big and little screen veteran who appeared in the South Seas set TV series Adventures in Paradise and with John Wayne in 1969’s True Grit) as Toussaint. The Haitian Revolution also inspired Gillo Pontecorvo’s (Battle of Algiers) classic about Third World liberation struggles called Burn! (Marlon Brando once told Larry King Burn! was the most important movie he’d ever acted in).

In any case, French TV director/co-writer Philippe Niang finally pulled it off with the action packed Toussaint Louverture. This made-for-TV movie looks great. It has lush production values and superb period costumes, which enhance its ambiance of authenticity. It was not shot at the actual prison where Toussaint was held (which I coincidentally visited last August at Le Doubs) but in the south of France, while the Caribbean sequences were lensed at Martinique. The film’s trajectory as it follows the title character’s revolutionary evolution from slave to the “New Spartacus,” general and governor of the “world’s first Black republic,” as Haiti is called, has the ring of truth. Haitians at the PAFF premiere told me it was “90 percent accurate.” The politics are also sharp and complex, full of contradictions, political infighting and faction fights. The cause also, alas, took its toll on Toussaint’s private life and family, especially on his wife Suzanne (Aïssa Maïga).

But Toussaint comes across at all times as an extraordinary, dignified individual -- the real deal, who is at the same time made of flesh and blood: No statue is he. This is in no small measure because Haiti-born actor Jean-Louis stars in the title role. He is stellar, delivering an Oscar-worthy performance that required great presence as well as acting skill, as Toussaint ages during this biopic that spans his tumultuous yet glorious life.

PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2011: OVERVIEW

Clint Dyer puts the SUS in suspect.

Plenty to fix for 20

By Ed Rampell

I’ve been reviewing the Pan African Film Festival for around a decade and have usually overlooked its various bureaucratic and logistical snafus in my generally positive reports. But despite my years of coverage, this February I was denied a press pass to attend all of the screenings and received a number of mixed signals regarding my covering the film festival. Nevertheless I was admitted to the films I wanted to see during the festival, which ran Feb. 16-23, and invited to some parties and other special events.

However, factoring in the distance I’d have to travel to the Culver Plaza Theatre, the rising cost of gas, the fact that it’s very difficult to sell stories about this highly specialized event and the repeat hassles I kept having with PAFF bureaucracy, I reached the tipping point and went for one day only. 

My reaction was not extraordinary either. One of my editors had stopped going to PAFF altogether long ago because of the bureaucratic headaches and rigmarole so you might wonder why this movie masochist even bothered at all. The reason is simple: This black-themed film fete opens a window onto specialty cinema that is often otherwise unavailable to Angelenos. To be sure, PAFF screens commercial flicks, too, such as the romcom 35 and Ticking co-starring Tamala Jones of TV’s Castle, which kicked off this year’s fest with an opening night screening that was also its L.A. premiere, while the comedy DWB: Dating While Black had its world premiere at the festival and was its closing night film. But where else can you see indies and docs such as Shaft or Sidney Poitier: The Emergence of Black Masculinity in Comic Books or Mountains That Take Wing – Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation?

Another one of those hard to see documentaries was The Black Mozart in Cuba, a sort of cinematic triple whammy: It was made by filmmakers from Guadeloupe, is a biopic about Joseph Boulogne and offers a revealing, positive look at Cuba. According to Steve James’ documentary, the highly accomplished Boulogne was not only a great classical musician, but also a superb fencer, ladies man and participant in the French Revolution. Who knew? James sheds light on a Black Islander little known and remembered outside of Guadeloupe although, as the doc shows, Boulogne is held in high esteem in that other Caribbean isle, revolutionary Cuba. Hopefully, this highly informative and entertaining doc will help restore Boulogne to his rightful place in history; his colorful life is the stuff that Hollywood movies are made of (well, that is, perhaps, if the hero were white.).

Also having its L.A. premiere at PAFF was The Test, an educational documentary about a program to test for and combat AIDs and malaria in a Kenyan village. While this very conventional doc had lots of information, it was an odd choice to be on a double bill with the upbeat The Black Mozart in Cuba, as it dealt with extremely downbeat subject matter.

SUS is a U.K.-film based on Barrie Keefe’s play set on election eve, 1979 -- the day that the empire struck back, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s Prime Minister. This feature opens cinematically with a montage of the Black Power movement and news footage of the era, but most of the rest of this movie (except for a few flashbacks), written for the screen by the drama’s playwright, is pretty stagey, although well-acted. Nevertheless, SUS is a powerful, harrowing tale based on a true story about a black sus-pect (Clint Dyer) from a Caribbean island who is taken into custody and interrogated in a holding room by two brutal pro-Thatcher racist cops. The movie is a metaphor for the rise of Britain’s “Iron Lady” and her rightwing regime, which empowered police to take off the gloves when dealing with minorities. Director Robert Heath’s gripping picture is another post-9/11 film dealing with the theme of torture, and well worth seeing.

Films such as The Black Mozart in Cuba and SUS are what make PAFF worthwhile and indispensable. However, if festivals are vehicles and films and filmmakers are passengers, the latter are ill served by drivers who don’t know the directions to destinations. Unnecessarily alienating people who have barrels of ink at their disposal is never a wise strategy. But worse than this, thwarting reviewers from covering films does a grave disservice to artists who work so hard to bring their work to the public. Movies and moviemakers deserve better. Hopefully these snafus will be worked out in time for PAFF’s 20th anniversary.