The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2010)

In my excavation of NYC alternative cinema culture, I try to visit as many different theaters as I can. I read about The Black Power Mixtapes and decided to go watch it at IFC center, a very intimate movie theater downtown on Manhattan, Greenwich village/West village. It was extremely eerie to sit down with a handful of other people to see a film in which dry Swedish journalists comment on the black power movemet.The film is very entertaining to watch; the collage style works to perfection, and so does the combination of images and music (use of a song by The Roots was a good move). It is also very interesting to see the black power movement interpreted from an unconventional angle. I guess that it must have striked American viewers as even more unconventional, me being fairly acquainted with the genre of politically critical Swedish journalism from the late sixties, early seventies, including its eerie mix of Enlightenment project and political debate.

The title of the film indicates that this is not intended as a comprehensive account of the black power movement. Indeed, the film is very fragmented, and does not give any systematic context in terms of how racism in the sixties differs or is similar to racism in contemporary USA. Neither do we get any firm idea as to the development of the black power movement, radicalization and internal differences. What is very strikingly showed, however, is the quite radical differences within the movement as to those who proclaimed anti-violence and those, for whom violence was not a very straightforward question. In one of the brilliant scenes of the film, an interviewer talks to Angela Davis, who is arrested for supposedly having had something to with the killings of a few police officers. The Swedish interviewer asks in a characteristically dry & well-meaning voice, whether Angel Davis is for or against violence. Davis gets quite angry, and tries to explain in what ways this question expresses a mind-boggling naivite. Davis presence exudes dignity, frustration but also a forceful need to get her words across, to express herself as clearly as she can. It is a stunning moment of getting to hear an earnest person speaking her mind in a very serious way. It's one of those scenes that if you've seen it, you'll never forget it.

More than anything else, The Black Power mixtape gives a complex picture of violence in a turbulent time. Not only does it delives snapshots of the black power movement, it also shows archive material in which Swedish tv journalists try to convey the reality of black ghettos. In one scene, we see a Swedsih tourist bus worming its way up to Harlem. The tourist guide talks to the tourists about how dangerous the area is (anno 1970), that drug dealing is a common view and that people are taking "fixar eller vad det nu heter". Later in the movie, it becomes clear that Swedish media of that time was blamed by American media houses for being anti-American and presenting a dark and negative image of the US and A.

Even though this film lacks certain things that would have made it better (more context), it is a brilliant way to approach a historical movement that has bearings for how contemporary racism is to be understood.