Wild At Heart
There is a lot of history and documentation of the struggle of black culture here in this country. This can be seen in Detroit with the Charles Wright Museum and Tuskegee Airmen Museum to name just a few. I have seen many exhibits and documentaries over the last decade so to see something different is interesting.
This comes in a documentary from Sweden, assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson, which uses documentary footage taken from an 8 year section of time when the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak. Most of the footage has never been aired before, esp in this country, and it is interesting to see how another country views us. We start the documentary with a white middle aged man in Floridsa telling the crew how wonderful America is because of our freedoms and then juxtapose that with interviews of black Americans stating how they have no freedom. It just shows how two people living so close to one another can have totally different views of society.
The documentary goes on looking at various figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver as well as some of the people involved in the Black Panther party. My favorite parts include interesting footage with famed activist Angela Davis, a very powerful black woman, from prison and seeing Stokely Carmichael, one of the best speakers for the black cause, interviewing his mom in her living room. You don’t see much footage of Carmichael when he is not giving intense speeches so it’s nice to see him in a more natural setting.
The movie is not perfect though it does give a glimpse of what was going on in every year of the title and it does tend to gloss over a lot, but it does a good job on bringing some images of the era we have not seen before. It might get a bit preachy at times when talking about economic issues or how drugs helped play a part in the diminishment of the protest movement in the black communities, but by bringing in new material, we can overlook that and add this to the neverending landscape of what the black power movement in this country was all about.
Overall, this presents a nice addition to work already available to the public and anyone interested in racial issues will get a few things out of this documentary. It is currently playing at the Main Art Theatre starting this Friday so go see it.
My grade is an A-
10/21/11
Wild At Heart movie review - Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
