written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

The image above by Gordon Parks is one I always drew enormous strength from. In my early twenties it hung on my bedroom wall, above my writing desk. It’s an example of an image overwhelming the power of its original source (or inspiration) and more effectively expressing its meaning. I think Invisible Man is a stunning work, despite how overrated and overlong it may be. It has one of the greatest opening and closing passages in all of literature and its form and style itself was a supreme example of an American tragicomedy; a literal Black comedy that has remained as elusive as it is now perfunctory and expected to discuss. In fact the book is so great, it has actually become…invisible.

Ellison’s first ten pages and closing 500 words are examples of the greatest writing in the English language and one of the most stunning portraits of existential angst, political uncertainty and racial consciousness ever created. And it works because the political is personal and it’s intertwined with the entropy on the rise and the bleakness of living. There is a great deal of pain and anxiety. And while its virtuosity is unmatched, Richard Wright — a slightly better artist perhaps, but lesser craftsman — unintentionally outdoes Ellison in his novel The Outsider. It puts all of Wright’s previous fiction to shame as his audience now is solely the marginalized, the alienated Black intellectual, the dispossessed neurotic clinging to the outskirts, bobbing between acceptable mores, morality, ideas, and challenges. It may be in sync with Dostoevsky’s underground man as Ellison’s unnamed hero is — as it digs into the angst of being alive in a decaying, meaningless society — and not merely the horror of being a “Black” victim. Violence in society is a result of racism. For Wright, even Ellison, in spite of his blues laments for African-American, the Black person is humanity. To not identify with the Black person is to be cut off from the soul. But Wright’s antihero Cross Damon is a murderer like Raskolnikov, a kind of ever demented Hamlet. Ellison’s Invisible Man seeks refuge in inaction, essentially, carving out a way of living separate from society.

Both ideas are as haunting and searching and philosophical as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Godard, etc. Baraka never mentions him, but Wright’s darker works like this preclude his own existential and then revolutionary terror apparent in his early four remarkable one-act plays. Both, along with Baldwin and Ellison, transmit the blues. But each in their own way. I wish we had just this small variation in our popular Black filmmakers. Or…in the expression of our popular actors. It’s a shame we hold them to such debatable criteria like the Academy Awards or the New York Times or IndieWire. The variables and talents exceed such pat and easy categories and standards. Their touchstones are more complex and fascinating. Such actors do exist, but they are underground. (It’s your job to find them!)

The Blues is Black existential angst. The singers don’t have to remind you of that. One day our dramatic arts will catch up. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attack racism. On the contrary. We should seek to eradicate it but through our own lens. Ways that are personal and not palatable to the oppressor class. It certainly doesn’t include asking for permission or being “given” a chance from Hollywood or Broadway. When we understand this we will advance in the arts, therefore culturally, and obviously politically.

When I used to look at Parks’ photo, I took great joy in the alliance the picture contained. I understood this man. I, too, had decided to live underground. As an artist there is great power in such a decision. Activists too. Certainly, Harriet Tubman knew the possibilities of being underground. Even languages and words that existed below the surface were once filled with a kind of love and power we are unlikely ever to see again — above ground.

Sometimes I feel this way about acting and our Black Hollywood actors.

Why do Black actors participate in movies that end up killing their subjects cinematically (i.e. destroying their intellectual impact or cultural gravity), if their characters are based on Historical figures or “famous artists,” or important athletes? Why do we feel we must impress white people or prove something to them? And in these films, in a bizarre twist, why do we feel it is ok if we give less than? That Whitney Houston or James Brown don’t deserve the same complicated, charismatic and theatrical interpolations that we endow Johnny Cash, Chet Baker, and Judy Garland with? Political figures are an altogether different story, most historically “important” figures pale on the screen and stage. Usually because those crafting them don’t really care about their contributions as human beings, they care about their popularity, which translates to financial opportunity.

Actors, out of the tradition many of us have been reared in, have a certain obsession with respect to the lives of certain characters in history while equating them with the majesty of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions or the Greek myths. Galvanized by Paul Muni’s stylized performance in 1932, Al Pacino molded his bizarre, yet compelling, Tony Montana character for Scarface as if mounting a production of Macbeth or Richard III, a role he actually studied and workshopped for several years, crystallized in his 1996 documentary. His Serpico, a decade earlier, is based on an actual living person but was granted this same Shakespearean intensity.

Actors from Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffmann to Daniel Day-Lewis and Denzel Washington to Kristen Stewart have painstakingly given us intellectually intriguing, if not always soulful, portraits of individuals they found interesting. I would not compare Streep’s robotic performance as Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to Chadwick Boseman’s poetically subdued Jackie Robinson (42) or Day-Lewis’ Lincoln to Forest Whitaker’s Charlie Parker (Bird), but those films could, in good taste, go head-to-head with one another, ultimately falling on the side of which actor you simply liked best or have more affinity with. We pretend that actors are just linked to movies we like — but that’s not true. We like them in a particular role and sometimes that role is even more interesting than the movie itself. Some believe you can’t separate the performance from the movie, but I disagree. Some directors lose their way with a film, it becomes a runaway train, with a script that never had much power to begin with, and so they focus on the construction of the actor’s performance. You will notice the more popular an actor becomes in Hollywood, for some reason, the worse the script is and the vehicle aspect of the movie is obvious. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, it is at least more honest than pretending that a movie is “important” when sometimes all a director and editor needs to do is creatively exhibit the behavior and interaction of two actors, which can result in fine entertainment if not powerful art.

Singers, like actors, can be judged on their raw talent — as well as their personas and what their styles mean to you. If they’re not particularly eloquent or remain mysterious, even if it’s unintentional (Greta Garbo) — their spirits become meaning itself. James Baldwin in his brilliant and underrated The Devil Finds Work, recalls how a friend of his observed that Henry Fonda’s walk alone meant something to him and likened Fonda’s gait to that of a Black man. It’s an exquisitely strange statement, but carries power. For whatever reason, the walk meant something to the man and was above all else. It has nothing to do with “the story” or plot, etc. Like a grand painting or a dancer, the traditional actor should technically be critiqued on their presentation, physicality, behavioral choices, tenor of the voice, the use of their enunciation, their cadence. Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography that he was heavily inspired to phrase musically the way he heard Orson Welles and Frank Sinatra use their voices.

Actors carry a lot of meanings beyond their characters. My grandmother liked Bette Davis. I didn’t understand why until I was older. Davis’ entire style and power on screen — as a woman, as a self-possessed creature — said it all, expressed enough for my grandmother to admire, identify with, or simply be moved by. Legions of actors from the 1930s up until the 1970’s — two entire generations — were picked and chosen by the common person to reflect or represent an aspect of their own personality or desires. What was it that led my grandmother, a Black woman from Venezuela and Trinidad — to identify with an American white movie star? Because she could see herself in Davis.

Identification is what moves you in art (or entertainment) and representation goes far beyond the color of our skin. It is about the content of character. (For the skeptics: ask yourself if members of the White oppressor class have the “privilege” to listen and identify with the Blues, as Janis Joplin or Stevie Ray Vaughn have, why is it so bizarre for Blacks to “get something” out of a white artist? Why the need to pretend we are being denied something…when, if it’s Black artists we want — there are a multitude of them waiting for your call.) We are not imaginative, self-loving or bold enough to think beyond race in 2023. We’re being held hostage by the cops in our heads that insist on diversity and representation in purely visual and symbolic avatars or token figureheads at corporations, instead of celebrating the character or personas of our actors. I don’t know about you but there was a huge difference between what Jimmy Walker had to offer and Esther Rolle. Both were Black, but I think I know who I would identify with. And it doesn’t bother me one iota that she was a woman.

“Women,” “Trans,” “Black,” “LatinX” — these are easy categories that we have given to the enemy in order to actually use against us. Art has become usurped, entertainment ghettoized, and identity weaponized against us. Like Marcel Duchamp, we should be leaping to challenge our way of defining ourselves and existence in art — on our own terms. Many of the definitions and categories we enable serve only the interest of the establishment.

We are not asking and confronting the hard questions: “The movie has more Black actors.” What does that really imply? If I hire more women in my office, what does that say? Shouldn’t the question, in the very least, be “What sort of Woman is it?” or “What type of Black person is there? A miserable Marxist? An empathetic Catholic?

What we are avoiding, for fear of offending, is specificity. What sort of Black person is the character? Is he educated and bookish from Newark or artistic and impoverished in New Orleans? What’s his politics? His desires? The actor’s kernel is the society’s boogeyman. Stanislavski himself would be rolling over in his grave, his system of acting has not garnered more empathy in society it has merely engendered sociopaths with incredible entertainment industry prowess. Today, everyone’s an actor. And everyone is Black or LGBTQ and all of this generalizing is destroying not only the individual but our understanding of art. Currently our society is afraid of the particular, choosing to believe everyone is the same — all white women are “Karens,” all Black men are deviants, rapists, or…demented creatives like Kanye West — unable to handle financial resources he has at his disposal and therefore a perennially damaged child, escalating and embodying the American psychosis, but all the while doing absolutely nothing to help his own people, while emboldening the media empire’s that have made a fortune demonizing Black people. I only wish there was a talented left-wing Black pop star who was intelligent and had the temerity to destroy the masks, while going insane. Someone who cared about Black people and not existing in the medium of whiteness, on display as many Black celebrities crave. A unique idea or embodiment of who we want. We say “Gays” as if all gay people have the same politics and “Black” in the same sense. These are all generalized ways of dodging a bullet.

It is no longer enough for us to accept “Black.” We now need to be more distinct. Black people are the most diverse people on the planet. But you wouldn’t know that from Hollywood movies or most Western cinema, and I include all standard narrative arthouse movies in this. Because most of the “Black” people who inhabit these films all share either the same ideology or are possibly one of three types. That’s it. If Jews had only Woody Allen or Jonah Hill to perceive themselves in, they would go insane. Black actors — especially well paid ones — have gone along with the white entertainment establishment’s modus operandi to further homogenize and categorize people: we are making it easier now, more than ever, to give white people what they want, present European and Asian immigrants with the stereotypes they have always been fed, and to flatter Black Americans who know about “hood” life. What started in a circus tent has returned. The carnival is slightly different, but it’s still a freak show.

Audiences project what they want to see and believe and be, at times, onto movie actors. (In theater, you may choose your favorite actor — but it’s more like a sports match, you may like them just based on their presence, on screen there is a fantastical element. Different, but yet the same.) The competent stage actor gives themselves, unfettered, and with passion — and you appreciate them in a secular way. At times, the admiration borders on the religious; the ritual is singular, never to be repeated and more akin to a church procession as opposed to an amusement or dreamy window into another plane of life. The mysterious “aura” of a work that cannot be reproduced (as Walter Benjamin posited) is so incredible and special that it is one of the only real places art can exist. The more we focus on reaching “masses,” the more a work of art loses its power. Theater is where the flowers flow, the worms grow… cinema is where the birds fly, eyes in the sky.

In an age that posits full solidarity with the world’s oppressed (an oxymoron in an ever increasingly capitalistic world), — the Hollywood Black actor has become something of a representational tool and hollow figure- head of “importance” and “social justice” in a double world that seeks to annihilate or in the very least — castrate the Black actor or performing artist, curtailing any actual positive or revolutionary impact and paying them substantial amounts of money to do…either do nothing, constantly celebrate the past, or glorify the worst parts of life. Because of cinema’s history as a ruling class tool, and certainly Fascist instrument, Hollywood prefers the adorable minstrels or buffoons or shallow folk who are somewhere between God-fearing and mentally warped ingrate; a kind of monster unto themselves and therefore, always, to the motion picture camera.

In 2007, Will Smith was the biggest star in Germany. Smith has been the biggest movie star in Europe since the late 1990s. Less an actor than a kind of robust jester (albeit a gently intelligent one as there’s an actual heart and soul in there when he wants to be human), Smith’s tomfoolery on screen is an extension of his “Fresh Prince” antics of the 1980s and a genuine search to be taken seriously. All sources of amusement in the family are damaged. And when your lovingly “stupid” cousin Hal, who always made funny faces and threw himself down stairs just to make you laugh seeks to graduate, he must prove himself. What this means is that Black Hal must now prove he is serious and worthy of not money — but respect. And while your respect is important, it is the white ruling class’s money that absolves, anoints and hopefully separates him from you forever.

He now no longer willfully stumbles down stairs. He seeks to dive into a set of “stares” that require enormous gravity and maturity. But the stare is not to decimate, disturb or boor into the soul. It’s to posture and preen…on the stairs.

All the buffoon needs is a camera in his face, ridiculous situations and even sillier dialogue will replace all stares and stairs to earn him a rightful place in the white man’s cultural arsenal. Because the Black actor in 2023 is neither artist nor entertainer. He’s a tool. A tool who doesn’t want money. He wants the establishment’s acknowledgement, he wants the white man’s Academy Award. And for this he will give himself up, sell out, buy in, do whatever he needs to.

We claim we’re better or more just, but at the end of the day maybe we are more like Faust than we believe. Giving up your soul isn’t the worst thing (not if it’s to make great music) but to do it for money or status in the eyes of your oppressor, at the risk of the health of your own people, is the worst thing imaginable. Those who don’t readily go along with this program however are kept in line, marginalized, blacklisted or…rendered invisible. Not “unseen,” but tamed one might say. You notice the talent simmering, but it is absolutely not allowed to boil. And because of this, that great miraculous egg is never quite ready for us to eat. And so, we acknowledge its existence, but consider it invisible as it has no impact on our health. We don’t end up getting the protein we need. This is where all the popular arts collide and get drained, as if in a strainer. We are eventually served something that is obviously lacking something and we begin to prefer this instead of the nutrients we may be denied.

Jeffrey Wright

Jeffrey Wright may be Gen X’s greatest unsung screen actor. Along with Phllip Seymour Hoffman, he came to both elevate and continue a tradition in American screen acting. He is certainly the best Black character actor to emanate out of the 1990’s; chomping at the heels of Forest Whitaker and the megastar Larry Fishburne, possessing a brilliance no less underused as the intense Giancarlo Esposito or the offbeat Roger Guenveur-Smith. With the exception of Fishburne and Whitaker, all three have been either poorly written for and used, at times awfully directed, and are usually — intimidating to casting directors, Black and white, and certainly causing great insecurity in film directors. Their self-possession, unbridled behavioral choices — causes consternation to directors and producers who are unsure if they can “tame” such actors on set, so they are often given roles that don’t contribute anything, leaving their artistic potential off-screen. Paul Schrader said in the 1970s he knew it was important to work with the best possible actors and directors and editors and cinematographers as possible, despite how difficult they may be. Somehow mainstream Black filmmakers out of Spike Lee’s shadow have forgotten this and the white ones have other things on their mind.

Excellence, mercurial, offbeat, jagged, neurotic actors have always had a hard time in Hollywood. Especially the Black ones (Ron O’Neal and Christopher St. John are just two that come to mind).

Francis Ford Coppola always believed in Fishburne, Scorsese was wise to cast Forest Whitaker in The Color Of Money (in Pauline Kael’s review she had the right instinct to single out the three minutes he was on screen, foreshadowing what he would become). Whitaker is something of a curiosity. Although he became mainstream and less menacing or puzzling to audiences, his lazy eye always casts a spell on screen, it is as if he acts from an off-centered place. His command in The Crying Game, Diary of a Hitman, and even his comedic turn with Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam kept his talent and screen charm front and center. He makes interesting choices in certain roles, less intriguing “professional” choices, but so what. No one has had a stranger trajectory than Robert De Niro so there is nothing to fear with my tribesmen mentioned in this article. Andre Braugher, Esposito, and Guenveur-Smith kept a fire burning on the margins of Hollywood; Whitaker became an establishment darling only second to Denzel’s persona as a “oscar winning” actor blah blah blah…and with that he soon became, well, uninteresting. As if he became “invisible” to those who originally admired him. He lost his early fans, gained new ones. This happens all the time.

Jeffrey Wright however never did anything to deserve his inconspicuousness. He didn’t fawn, nor offend. He didn’t win an award for playing a Black man who is so ignorant he thinks the gas in his stomach is a heart attack, he didn’t do a soft-shoe for anyone. What he did was impress his fellow actors, he left an indelible mark on his peers and even his idols — Samuel L. Jackson, to his credit, praised his Basquiat performance, Al Pacino once claimed that seeing Topdog/Underdog was like the manifestation of a new kind of acting; a year later they did endless rehearsals together in Mike Nichols’ Angels in America. (In fact, watch his acceptance speech in 2004 when he won a Golden Globe. It is revealing now to know how this would impact the trajectory of his professional work in Hollywood. He certainly was not kissing any behind.)

But while Guenveur-Smith had his own solo theater works to use as his main source of expression (it doesn’t matter that no one knows how to use him, I think his last screen presence that had any weight was in Kasi Lemmons’ very good Eve’s Bayou, ironically also the only film where I see Sam Jackson acting with some soul, a humanity reaching out to other Black peoples instead of “cool White producers”) his A Huey P. Newton Story was possibly the greatest single theatrical experience of my life in the 1990’s. Topping Al Pacino in Oscar Wilde’s Salome at Circle in the Square, Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray’s own solo pieces, Robert Lindsey in Cyrano de Bergerac, and even Jeffrey Wright in his Broadway debut as Belize Angels in America. Belize was a role he himself worked hard to develop and pushed Kushner to fully embrace other, more deeper points-of-view. He made Belize a complex individual, not a cardboard Black homo-stereotype we are all accustomed to. His proud gay man had a bite. He was flamboyant and deadly. His wit was sharp and his smaller parts — cast as fantastical, hallucinatory figures in Harper’s drug-fueled visions, were weird, but charming in that enigmatic way he almost cosmically communicates to us, without giving himself away, leaving us instead with a strange aura. This aura is everything, it is what you respond to with certain performers, especially when you can’t describe it.

Belize was a true collaboration in the sense of character development. Guenveur-Smith’s Huey gave me chills, no doubt, but Wright’s Belize, just a few years before, became interstellar because of the zeitgeist and it was a turning point in the culture when a play or single performance could still have a momentous impact before we got swallowed up into the new millennium’s right-wing terrorist hysteria. Works like A Huey P. Newton Story and Angels in America will never ever happen again in commercial theater (Broadway or Off-) and the reason, besides the right wing swing of the Liberal states, is purely because of the technology we are engaged in and how we now regard performing, theater, what is art. The internet changed our very perceptions (and souls). But we’ll get deeper into Wright’s Belize performance in the second installment of this article when we look at Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Angels, which premiered in 2003.

Jeffrey Wright is a kind of riddle; a mysterious energy that expands with time. If Giancarlo Esposito can be fierce and igniting (School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Fresh, etc) and Guenveur-Smith edgy, Wright is…more like twisted clay, than a still life. His volatility may not explode or leap as with Esposito, his strangeness is not as affected as Guenveur -Smith’s. His slow burn gaze and reception to everything around him is seen in his eyes, and often the way he holds himself. There is something magically impenetrable about his face and acting — that what he gets off his chest comes through so delicately like poetry.

Again, Guenveur-Smith’s poetry is on stage for sure, never translated to the screen (to this day I cannot watch his performance in Do the Right Thing, for example, and he was absolutely belittled the way Spike used him in Malcolm X); Wright’s impact in theater was no less powerful: I mentioned Topdog/Underdog but his Fool to Ron Liebman’s King Lear — a strange creation altogether on the heels of their Broadway collaboration in Angels — was thoroughly absorbing and funky but it seems that while he became the “bigger “ Hollywood actor financially than Esposito and Guenveur -Smith, he suffers more artistically.

Wright is the ONLY American actor of my generation who at one moment in time, circa 1992–1999, represented the best of American stage and film acting. Like Phillip Seymour-Hoffman, another actor whose majority of films I did not like but whose talent I deeply admired, although he is overrated where Wright is underrated. Jeffrey represented the last of a certain type of actor who was bound to the stage first and foremost and willing to serve only the author/the role. Although I have personal problems with the theories and constrictions imposed onto actors in the name of “tradition”, I respect any artist’s devotion to their craft or their art as it is representative of their entire existence.

When I first saw Wright in painter Julian Schnabel’s mediocre Basquiat, I was instantly blown away. And other than the trite surfboard imagery Schnabel tried to use as a convention and foreshadowing of Basquiat’s short intense life (several people chortled at this when it was shown in NYC, in those days New Yorkers had no problem defusing corny expressions or silly techniques) — otherwise, however, there was a hush throughout the entire audience. Now, I had never experienced this in a new movie that was in a theater. I had seen it in classics that were re-released, but the only other time I can say I might have experienced the transcendent hush in a movie theater was when I saw The Crying Game. Also, James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Seeing that cast alone in a claustrophobic environment was thrilling. I still get chills thinking about Jack Lemmon’s plea (“my daughter…?”) to the reptilian Kevin Spacey at the end of the film. Other than that, most of my favorite movie acting experiences were on home video or television, which is why I am not against streaming like so many cinema purists. What I am against is bad directing, writing, and mainly acting. It needs to be reclaimed.

Acting can only exist as an art if we extricate it from the clutches of Hollywood. Performance art is the life-blood of creativity, sans literary or musical ambition. It is the return to childhood, to primitive imagination and the vitality of mind-body-spirit expression.

Acting on stage or film does not need a fiscal sponsor nor permission from any authoritative system. It can be its own thing (Smith, Bogosian, Gray, even Anna Deavere Smith prove this) but…it is rare in any sense, especially cinema, when a performance unfurls and creeps up on you with so much vulnerability, magnetism, and charm.

Wright did me in when, as a heroin-addicted Basquiat, looked at himself in the mirror and proceeded to squeeze out the lesions and acne forming from the drug and could only whimper and leer hatefully at his own reflection. It was classic Actors Studio Private Moment acting, which is often hard to imbue on screen or left out altogether (Schnabel was right to leave this in and he helped give us more time to be affected by Wright). I was so mesmerized by his performance, I went back the following week to see it again. Jeffrey Wright was the Black actor I had been waiting for on screen. His brilliance as the tortured painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, his ability to make us empathize with him, his slightly hesitant and mannered way of speaking, his curious cocked-head, his incredible body language…this was nothing I’d seen before. Not from the generation of actors I grew up with. But it must be noted: it’s this brilliance, this sort of over-electric acting, that terrifies the white Acting establishment and ShowBiz world. When you have a Jeffrey Wright in that sphere, you have to have directors who understand him. Unfortunately, he has not found a real collaborator outside of Wes Anderson, who deeply admires and adores Wright. Wright has done two pictures with Anderson and his feelings towards Anderson are reciprocal.

It dismays me that Anderson is noted as the premier Wright director. He was the centerpiece of The French Dispatch and is a marvel in Asteroid City. But there is so much kitsch around him, it destroys his stretch towards absurdity. Anderson is cheeky and tangy and colorful like a handful of mints. It’s sweet even when it’s sour. But his movies are just ironic advertising campaigns. Usually for nothing. But he attracts some very talented actors who are willing participants in his odes to…irony and culture. And for an actor as tremendous as Wright, it is baffling. I am sure it’s fun working with Anderson and after all if a filmmaker writes and offers you something unique, if not necessarily meaty, it certainly makes sense to jump with both feet. But I find it slightly embarrassing. It’s like taking a five-star home cooked meal into a candy store.

Acting, directing, and filmmaking are the last strangleholds for the white man. We beat him (if you care about that sort of thing) in all the other arts, including visual arts. People may not be rich and famous, but there’s no way a David Hockney can go against a Faith Ringgold. Impossible. If you look at pop music you will see how while it is much more even, in fact, the scale is still titled more in our favor. Righteously. With the legacy of the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Ike & Tina, Miles Davis, Etta James, Robert Johnson, Aretha, Otis Redding, NWA, Earth, Wind, & Fire, Richie Havens, Taj Mahal, the Motown canon, etc — you’d have no problem stepping aside. But in cinema, in theater — because images and behavior are the vital element here — the white fascistic order must make it clear what they will tolerate and won’t. That’s why you seldom see invigorating performances from Black actors, in interesting roles, in interesting ways. And that’s why the conspiracy to modulate, curate, and contain the impact of Jeffrey Wright has been clear to everyone who knows how brilliant he is. Don’t you ever wonder why it seems as if the most boring and sparkless actors get hired and turned into stars? How does a talent like Jeffrey Wright get paid millions to be invisible in a movie like James Bond? I have seen No Time to Die and Casino Royale and don’t remember him at all. How is that possible?

Easy. Especially when you are being erased. We will explore how this erasure works, why Wes Anderson has kept Jeffrey Wright alive artistically, what the big blockbusters gained from him and what he lost, and prepare for his much anticipated film, based on the Percival Everett novel, Erasure directed by first time director Cord Jefferson. It is a role and theme worthy of Wright, and I will expand on this in the next installment of this article.

And remember if you can’t make films or plays yourself, support those that do.

— END OF PART ONE —

Although Lorraine was a girlfriend. . . we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution — real girls’ talk. . . Lorraine was most definitely an intellectual and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle. . . Lorraine started off my political education, and through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men. — Nina Simone, 1968

Nina Simone as Portrait of Protest Artist who suffers for our (Black folks’) sins…And who, like all of us, must pay the piper — when we put truth and artistry before industry and “game playing.”

For decades, there has been a laissez-faire approach to the presentation of African American icons on the silver screen. More specifically, a nonchalantly reckless representation of some of our most vital and impactful figures in recent history. From MLK to Fred Hampton to Billie Holiday to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr to Charlie Parker to Nina Simone to James Brown, no other group has had so many of its biggest and brightest stars or trailblazers presented on onscreen — and with such passion and tactlessness — as Black people from America.

If I sound paranoid, it’s because I have been made to feel, since I was a child, that the rendering of “Black heroes” in motion pictures requires less thought, talent, and rigor than the expressions of the most mediocre white Americans (Jake LaMotta, Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, Henry Hill, etc.) who were relayed with more passion and at times brilliance — than their subjects may have even deserved.

While I do believe human beings deserve to be rendered with the grandeur and respect usually only reserved for celebrities, presidents, and royalty, especially in colonized lands, I cannot in good conscience, as a writer with the soul of an actor, pretend that the journey and the sweat it takes to express the living soul of an extraordinary human being is greater or more important than the lives of the very ordinary joe, who will go nameless and may end up in a potter’s field. Alice Walker, in her greatest cultural achievement, committed the most righteous act when she made sure that Zora Neale Hurston had a proper gravestone. She celebrated the life and the work of a special human being in that one act alone. An act that could be considered a work of art, itself, unfortunately.

An effective way to embolden or destroy an understanding of history, especially Black American history, is to warp, destroy or kill the persona of a revolutionary Black figure — in activism or arts — through motion pictures. Replacing truth with annihilation at 24 frames per second. This lends itself to documentary films as much as it does to fictional ones. The result is an exhaustive assassination, and we become willing participants in a gruesome crime: a lynching.

Liz Garbus committed such an atrocity, simultaneously, as Cynthia Mort and Zoe Saldaña did with their biopic Nina in 2016 — when both parties put Nina Simone in their cross hairs.

Saldaña, in a pathetic acknowledgment in 2020, admitted she should never have played the role and several people over a decade ago were up in arms after seeing the actress in early set photos don an afro wig and dark makeup. Fans and critics alike witnessed the car crash the movie had become. I take that back: car crashes can be the result of real humans trying not to kill or destroy. This movie, a catastrophe, displayed an actress way out of her depth, a script without an iota of blood, and direction that was tepid, unsure, and without conviction. We don’t need apologies, we need better film artists.

If Barbra Streisand divides her critics and fans with something like a Yentl — the performance still had weight and gravity. You may not like it, but you can still recognize the talent. I didn’t particularly care for Dee Rees’ Bessie, but Queen Latifah gave the movie a core that transcended any limitations of the movie itself — audiences can always appreciate Latifah’s prowess on screen. She also has something to say about life. We all know Saldaña and director Mort were not enraptured with Nina Simone, nor her music. Being an ardent fan is not enough. If Saldaña had portrayed Simone the way Gary Busey had given us his Buddy Holly or as dignified as Jessica Lange gave us Patsy Cline, it would have meant something — despite the atrocious directing. But boxed into a corner — criticized for darkening her skin and wearing a prosthetic nose — on a sinking island, she had nowhere to turn, no one to pray to. She should have done the noble thing and quit. She should have declared on day one “I can’t do this….I know I can’t do this.” But she didn’t. And we have to live knowing people will always stumble upon that film without having others to watch or compare it to. At least one could get into an argument about the virtues of Berry Gordy’s Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross’ Billie Holiday versus Lee Daniels’ The United States Vs. Billie Holiday, with Andra Day, written by Suzan Lori Parks.

Why did Saldaña commit this grave error? Who, in their right mind, thought for one moment also that Nina Simone could benefit from a biopic? No one even thought about Jim Morrison until Oliver Stone presented us with his version of Jim in his 1991 The Doors, with a superb, if not underrated performance, by Val Kilmer, who studied Jim as a character — and rallied for the part.

We (Black artists) seem to not do this. The Stockholm Syndrome takes root and it is deep. Our relationship to Hollywood is Pavlovian and it has to stop. We deserve better cinematic renditions and portraits of all those we hold dear. I remember Paul Mooney once said that we kill our stars all the time while white folks would never allow for that to happen to a Judy Garland or Dolly Parton or a Frank Sinatra. I will pursue this tension between actors and historical figures in cinema, specifically Black actors in motion pictures elsewhere. But the question to ask now here is: What possesses us to also allow white filmmakers to colonize our minds with their own visions of who they feel our heroes should be, behave, and represent?

Last week I watched Liz Garbus’ 2015 What Happened, Miss Simone? documentary. Although a non-fiction film, the problem of interpretation and context and that dreaded word “representation” still come into play. And in a documentary, the portraiture is even bolder — because the subject is coming to you straight from the director, not being filtered or choreographed through a performing artist.

A successful hit at Sundance, John Legend even performed after its first screening (as if that grants it any power). The poster said “HER STORY. HER VOICE.” Maybe. But it’s not the story or the voice of Nina Simone. It’s someone’s idea and interpretation, yes but it’s not Simone’s voice. The timing of this wretched picture could not have been any better available for streaming in 2016 for counterrevolutionaries, conservatives, or the neo-Liberals who want to convince Black people that it’s “entertainment, not art” that our own people want. I’m getting very tired of the exploitation of Protest Artists and the rabid excoriation of their majestic extremities, their profound mercurialism, and their tortured truth telling. Because it is torture to tell the truth. Some of the greatest artists, popular and unknown, have had to make a lot of difficult decisions and a lot of these decisions have to do with integrity, dignity, one’s personal relationship to money or status (both?), and personal accountability.

Liz Garbus committed a cinematic assassination by warping the meaning of Nina Simone’s art and life into a garish tabloid-riddled Lifetime network-style documentary about the underbelly of Simone’s life, while spending less than a total of 25 minutes (out of 111 min.) analyzing and investigating her incredible skill as a musician, songwriter, vocalist, and intellectual. A radical left-wing artist and singular musician whose talent, politics, aesthetic, and tastes were all one. And yet there’s no understanding of this, no exploration of why Simone’s musical abilities were so impactful and different and how being a Black Marxist-Leninist also helped to frame her approach to performing, playing the piano, writing, etc.

Garbus had no interest in honoring the communist bent of Simone, she made her out to be an apologist, a petrified prodigal son who returns into the good graces of the establishment after shedding her revolutionary skin and intake of Hansberry & H. Rap Brown in favor of “well monitored” psychotropic drugs and irresponsible, but well meaning, “good” white folks who helped her find her way back.

For many years I had been warned to not watch the documentary, especially after Tonya Steele’s on-point Shadow And Act review. But I am crazy, or I like being abused. Oh no, sorry — according to Garbus, Nina’s daughter Lisa and ex-husband, Andrew Stroud (an NYPD sergeant, of all things!) — it was Simone who enjoyed being abused! Excuse me (yes, the film is that perverse and racist).

The fact that the lone major Black male figure in Simone’s life was an abusive cop reads like a lost chapter of the fantasies a lot of the white Media (“the Black pathology racket” as Ishmael Reeds calls it): when in doubt always reveal the lurid and the sinister behavior of Black people. And always make clear, more like a threat than a warning: if the rebellious Black artist doesn’t atone for their sin of being singular and preaching truth — they will be destroyed.

This is a healthy debate because it focuses on two subjects: the Interpretation of a Black Revolutionary Artist and the Problem of Documentary Filmmaking — as far as aesthetic and ideological constructs are concerned. Garbus commits the greatest sin a non-fiction filmmaker can commit: she exploits instead of bearing witness.
She’s more interested in maligning Simone’s imagination and creative beauty and warping the Black female warrior — than she is in divulging “truth.”

It was appalling to see Simone’s daughter contribute to the freak show in those interviews I and was deeply offended at the amount of time Garbus gave to Simone’s ex-cop husband. We see Dick Gregory praise Nina Simone for five minutes. We see her ex for nearly twenty minutes throughout, overall, and what do I most remember? Him casually smacking the hell out of her and cutting her with his ring. It would have been quite something had the director really wanted to get into the hell Nina was living, but when she showed the husband and daughter claiming that Nina enjoyed being abused — I said to myself: “Okay, we’ve now descended into a lower ring of hell.”

As the film went on, it got increasingly lurid — I felt nasty watching it. I feel bad for her daughter — I feel for anyone who was abused or has been involved in an abusive relationship, but I was very offended by the tenor of the movie and the last third where we see Nina’s demise and then re-ascent. It left me miserable. Angry. I imagined the same producers and director doing yet another movie on Ali and it having contain that same strange-comfortably racist-patronizing tone. “Oh, Ali was a big mouth in his youth, blah blah blah…but look at the old devil now. Ha ha. He can’t talk out NOW, can he??” That’s the white racist refrain I kept hearing in my head; I felt that the director actually enjoyed Nina’s harrowing troubles because she felt that Nina had to “do some maturing.”

And Nina’s mental illness diagnosis disturbs me, because of course they never really get into it. It would have been intrepid to broach the terror of manic depression or Bipolar disorder. Mania and vision are inextricably linked with genius and artists clutched by the pangs of such a brutal depressive disorder. Simone had more in common with Van Gogh than we may ever realize, only because no one is genuinely interested in how bipolar disorder plays out in the Black artistic genius. There is a very strong connection between Sly Stone and Donny Hathaway and the high priestess Nina. But it’s more fun for filmmakers to show us how we will end up if we are brilliant and radical, emotionally unstable and held hostage by a desire for liberation in every way. They want to show us what our third acts will look like, how we will deteriorate. There is no analysis or context. Garbus would have done a very courageous thing had she interwoven Simone’s political radicalism with her artistic revolution and her growing manic depression. She could have shed light on Fanon’s writings and put them in tandem with Hansberry’s cancer, Baldwin’s growing Christian rage and Simone’s seeing that post 1965 — there was nowhere to go but up…and out. The fire had been set and it would not stop spreading.

Garbus, like most of the filmmakers on this planet, has no personal and artistic interest in Nina Simone, nor any political alliance. Artists like Simone are mere capitalist properties, reduced to what white executives spend on her, how much her records or original compositions generated, etc. Black artists, even our geniuses, are not regarded as anything other than curiosities, fiscal experiments.

White archivists have very little devotion to the artistic journeys or goals of such artists. They can’t quantify their impact or influence or meaning outside of spreadsheets or controversy. You’re just another Black woman, you dumb bitch. One who loves her shiftless and abusive Black men, a woman whose voice and energy many appreciate, even admire — but just another Black freak, really. Another artist who just can’t help herself or her own people in any concrete way. But I suppose we should at least acknowledge you in some shiny corporate way, cause your own people won’t…we’ll fund you a little bit longer, but only to assure us you’re just an amusement.

Garbus spends no time on Nina’s arranging abilities, the majestic covers she did (her versions of Dylan, The Beatles, George Harrison, the Celtic folk song “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair,” etc.) the composing of her songs “To Be Young Gifted & Black,” or “Mississippi Goddamn,” her power and uniqueness as a pianist (and vocalist, who goes in and out of tune better than any other recording artist of the 20th century) or her approach to recording and her abilities as a band leader. I find this incredibly strange since she is now considered to be one of the most prolific recording artists ever and one of the most referenced and utilized artists now in movies, social media, and what have you.

What about Simone’s influence on other artists? Her incredible intellectual and emotional collaborations with Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin we all seem to promote on Instagram, yet we do very little analysis on that trio; her enormous impact on rock bands (John Lennon cited Nina’s vocal style and emotional rendering when contributing the lines “I love you, I loooooove you” to the middle eight of McCartney’s “Michelle” ballad on the Beatles Rubber Soul album; later his “Revolution” in 1968 inspired Simone to adapt the song and re-write as a response to the Beatles song, iterating a Black radical point-of-view) or just what about her extraordinary musical notions, ambitions and experience as a classical musician? She, like Miles Davis, attended Juilliard and left to pursue her own ideas about musical construction, classical ideas, etc. When I studied acting at Juilliard, I embraced her sweaty and “non-polished” approach to classical works. I thought it was important for actors to do the same. If Garbus had any real interest in Simone’s artistic impact — she would have explored all of this. But Black artists do not engender the same respect from filmmakers as their white peers do.

There are, finally, some dignified documentaries and meditations on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong — as artists and honoring their brilliance as artistic geniuses. However, the dramatic film on Miles Davis by Don Cheadle was abysmal. Judy Garland gets a decent and spunky rendering from director Rupert Goold and Cheadle gives us a joke. Not a cartoon, but a joke. When we do this to our own selves it actually emboldens white filmmakers to not treat our work or subjects as holy. And as far as life stories go, there is always a rush for the lurid and the shameful and the embarrassing.

We deserve complexity, not imposed racist visions of who we are. Our artists deserve better.

And Simone’s entire trajectory was complex.

Well, why don’t we ask what really happened to the artistic truthtellers of the 1960’s?

Lenny Bruce was destroyed by the government, Baldwin receded into himself, staying more in France before eventually teaching at City College (he needed a stable income!!), and drugs overwhelmed just about everyone. The 1970’s saw a fractured split — the different modes of Black art or radical politics not only went mainstream, but it created a very stern underground that, for the first time since perhaps the one or two years of Baraka’s Black Arts House in Harlem and the Beats in the 1950’s was created entirely for an audience of converts. It wasn’t interested in “winning over” anybody. This was healthy. Even mainstream directors like Godard went “crazy” and alienated his audience, getting more radical politically and aesthetically.

As Hendrix died and Sly Stone began to deteriorate, Lorraine Hansberry’s Marxism had finally awakened in Amiri Baraka, who increasingly wrote dialectical plays and was rarely published post 1973 due to his rabid conversion to Communism, and performers and satirists like Richard Pryor redefined stand-up comedy with the militancy and radical self-love Nina Simone inspired. But the seventies were deeply troubling and difficult for Nina: the record industry refused to support her increasing radicalism and eventually she was persona non grata. Even Black people abandoned her.

Artists failures are our life lessons. Their triumphs are ours as well but their travails and struggles are like parables to be learned from.

The classic example is Billie Holiday: great instincts in music, terrible instincts in life. So what? Ingmar Bergman said, “I can live in my art but not my life.” Like a savant, some artists can create bold and brilliant work, yet haven’t the slightest idea how to dress themselves or buy a dozen eggs.

Then, you have the artist whom society must make an example out of. And with those artists, you enter a hall of mirrors that reflects more than the images of the artist — it reveals the endless vistas of society’s contempt for the artist. Especially if that society is a racist establishment.

I hate all establishments. But the racists ones are the worst. And what’s the most hypocritical one of all?

The filmmaking establishment.

Liz Garbus, a well-regarded director with numerous festival wins and accolades, knows this establishment well. She’s a very clever, comfortably funded passive aggressive, disgruntled Liberal-white faux feminist-who would do quite well holding a rod of electro-shock treatments as much as she would a camera: because she knows they both can kill.

Had I not known who Simone was I would be perplexed about what made her truly a genius or even a remarkable artist. I think that may be what angers me the most.

I am tired of white filmmakers, in particular, trying to usurp and contort the reflection of our artists.

The movie is “well made,” whatever that means. If archival footage and polished sequences are enough for you, big deal. It’s easy to do that. Even easier to give Black people more horror stories, and the world at large more atrocious myths to chew on.

What Happened, Miss Simone? has no soul and is about as hollow as a cello. In the case of the cello, it need be: for the echoes and vibrations of the strings must be collected and spun back in order to generate beauty and truth. But for film, it is a death-knell. Perhaps some intrepid young filmmaker will respond to this movie, as if Nina Simone were still alive, and they will begin their movie by focusing the camera on the real problem and thereby call the film “What Happened, Miss Garbus?”

by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Sexy and Smart: There is no greater threat than a talented Black person who is both physically and mentally attractive. Especially if it’s a woman. It may not be a popular sentiment, but fact does not take the temperature of the room. It is the room. A great deal of men recoil at how intelligence drips and festers off certain women. Eartha Kitt was one of those women.

As peculiar as this may sound, the hothead consumerist and energetically racist 1950’s — despite their savagery and viciousness in America — was a time when popular artists could be taken seriously. As serious as any philosopher, activist or scientist.

The cultural representatives are always relevant but rarely are they as mysterious, honest and insightful as Eartha Kitt.

In a haunting interview with Studs Terkel on July 10, 1962, Kitt arrives at the hypothesis that the value of a human being is far more important and pertinent than economic status, ambition to be rich, and obsession with fame or power. She very astutely and miraculously weaves an anecdote worthy of one of Christ’s parables about hardship, the American mind, the hollowness of riches and status. Only a performer in tune with herself and the society around her could make such a simple and honest observation and have it sparkle with a kind of biblical resonance. Her recollections of her mother alone are deeply chilling and moving. When Terkel compassionately asks how she burst out of her appalling childhood circumstances, the nuance in Kitt’s voice will give you chills as he soberly declares what became of the creature who abused her…

(As an actor/performer — her “sense memory” keeps her tender like a raw nerve, or an exposed wound. James Dean bit off the tips of his fingers to keep his feelings sensitive. Kitt simply had to rely on her life experiences. Her emotional recall was in full effect before she had ever heard or read Stanislavski!)

Listening to old recordings of Studs Terkel’s marvelous (and sorely missed) Chicago talk show is like re-entering the room of a long lost relative…

(Check out the Studs Terkel WFMT Radio archive — it is fantastic!)

And you realize how hollow, juvenile, corporate, and sterile nearly every interview with a celebrity is nowadays. Either they’re puffed up to be provocative, dancing around a serious issue, or trying to ignore the fact that what they do is not all that interesting. They seldom mention what they observe about life, the poverty and injustice around them, art, human nature, confidence, the complexity of family, or have a five minute discourse on culture or folk art, etc — in a casual, yet engaged way.

Kitt is remarkably cognizant and yet isn’t afraid of a meander; she is vulnerable, has no problem discussing her life, even psycho-analyzing facets of it — but it never comes off as a display or narcissistic reflection. She is giving more than she is getting (from us, not Studs) and that is all beautifully apparent. Funky, feminist, and funny — she was grounded (like her namesake suggests) but full of a wonder that could levitate a room. The interview abounds with examples of Kitt’s introspection, lust for life, obstacles with women who fear her, acting with Orson Welles, and the soul-sapping culture Capitalism breeds…

Without any further ado, courtesy of the Studs Terkel radio archive (link is at the bottom of the article) — I present you Ms. Earth Kitt, as some of you have never seen her before.

Enjoy these excerpts from her July 10, 1962 interview with the great Studs Terkel:

Discussing “Uskudara”, a Turkish folk song she helped popularize; not singing it like a gypsy but in her own inimitable way:

…Yes… it was the little town of Uskudara that this song is about…many people when I first made this record, they did not know that there was such a thing as a Turkish language, and I got a lot of fan mail, and when it was played on the air, the stations received a lot of questions as to what kind of language was this? Was it a language that I made up, or was it real? And as a result of this particular record, for the first time in the history of America, they put a Turkish folk song in the American school books. So as a result, I have been made an honorary ambassador-ess to Turkey.

On the perverseness of consumerism & capitalism:

I don’t think that another Cadillac car or another Frigidaire in the house is going to make anyone any more happy. As a matter fact, these are the things that complicate your life. But this is the way we’re educated, particularly in America, you see, because of our economic situation. If we did not live on borrowed time, we — I don’t think the country would survive, because of our economy, the way it’s set up. Therefore, you have to have Madison Avenue to constantly tell the people that they should buy, buy, buy, buy, never pay. But just keep buying, because this is the only way to maintain happiness. Because the way to maintain happiness — is not for the individual, but for the country itself.

… it’s very strange to me to find that people think of status in the “How much money you have in your pocket?” sense, because…this is probably one of the only countries that…people can leave school at the age of 14 and turn out to be multibillionaires at the age of 32?

In 1955 Kitt and Albert Einstein met and had a two hour conversation. It was quite a big deal, they admired each other immensely and discussed science, art, and the vitalities of life. Kitt later said Einstein helped her get over her depression as she was suffering from serious suicidal ideation in the mid 1950s.

On Albert Einstein & Devotion and Money:

Yes. I wanted to meet him (Einstein) because I thought that he was one of the most fascinating people of our time. And I want to have a contact with someone like this, that maybe in the hope that some of his knowledge and some of his sensitivity that he had about him would rub off on me, and to have a greater understanding of, of why a man would be a mathematician to such a great extent and devote himself to science the way he did. Because you don’t find that many devoted people today. You go back to show business. I keep telling myself that, “Why, why am I such a — why am I so insane? Why do I work as hard as I do?” And so, so many other people come along and [snaps fingers] like this, you know, they are the ones that are making the fortunes. But then I stop and realize that I’m not in this business to make money. I’m in it because I like it, and this is my way of expressing myself. And, uh, it just happens that I make money at it, too. But my first concern is not the money.

And this jewel, this poetic insight, reads like a wondrous aphorism:

And what is so different about a man (Albert Einstein in this case) who devotes himself to something that he can never gain a tremendous amount of wealth out of monetarily? There must be something else behind that man that motivates his devotion, and I found it: it was the values of himself as a human being. And this is what I felt when I was sitting and talking to him. This is what I came away with, that kind of wonderful, beautiful spiritual feeling that you get from so very, very few people. And this is the thing that I constantly look for in people. And I find myself looking for it more and more every day.

ON ORSON WELLES AND PLAYING HELEN in “Faust”:

Eartha Kitt: I remember once, I guess, I was trying to find out who I was myself and…Because the part of Helen of Troy takes on —

Studs Terkel: This was in Orson Welles’ “Faust”?

Eartha Kitt: Yes.

Studs Terkel: This was where, in Paris?

Eartha Kitt: Yes. And when I was given the part, I asked him, “How old is Helen of Troy? And what kind of woman is she? What kind of experiences has she had?” According to his interpretation of her, he said, “Why do you think I chose you, Eartha?” He says, “Because you are all the women.” And I said, “Well, how old a woman is she?”

And he said, “She is two thousand years old.”

Her summation of Welles, her distillation of his problematic genius is expressed succinctly in her analysis of the crude mediocrity that show business often enables…(even more palpable and applicable to today’s era!)

He (Orson) was very interesting to work with. As a matter of fact, he is probably one of the, at that time to me, he was one of the strongest, most wonderful personalities of our time, and I think that he would have gone on to be even more strong and more wonderful and more of a genius than he was at the time, but people did not understand it, because I think here again we are afraid of individuals, and if you are an individual, you know you’re sort of an outcast. It’s like having talent today. Talent is no longer an asset to a person. It is now a hindrance because of the vast amount of monies that are being made by people with no talent. And it may be harsh of me to be saying this, but it happens to be, in my opinion, terribly true. And there’s so many people who realize this, so we don’t do anything about it. You know, like we don’t do a thing about a lot of things that we feel something should be done about. As a result, the business has been sort of turned over to teenagers who haven’t matured and haven’t gotten any sense of values as yet except the monetary things in life, and here we are.

On India and Poverty vs Wealth:

Earth Kitt: When you come in to see the Taj Mahal — that’s beautiful gates! Outside of it, there is a lake, sort of a, well, I don’t know if it’s a lake or not, but it’s…like a little tiny river that runs through: This is where they throw all the dead bodies. This is where all the poor people are running around in rags and they’re dirty and they’re begging, and oh, life is absolutely miserable. They have nothing. And you walk through these gates and you find one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture and construction in the world.

Studs Terkel: So here you have the incongruity, or the two extremes.

Eartha Kitt: That’s right.

Studs Terkel: The poverty of today and the architecture of centuries ago.

Eartha Kitt: Yes, and the thing about it is all of that money was spent on a monument to the dead…Sad, isn’t it?

Studs Terkel: So you think monuments to the living would be kind of in order, don’t you?

Eartha Kitt: Well, I do think that people should be more concerned about those who are running around the Taj Mahal starving to death. And I often wonder what they do with the money that you pay in order to get in to see the Taj Mahal, if that goes to the poor or not. I don’t know. I have to think about that.

audio: Direct Link to Studs Terkel interview

video:

(this article originally appeared in The Luminal’s blog Wavlengths on their website: https://www.luminaltheater.org/wavelengths/2023/5/8/when-black-performers-were-exquisitely-conscious-amp-eloquent-eartha-kitt)

Watch this special inter-generational exchange following the 2022 Thuh Juneteenth Film Festival’s screening of KILLER OF SHEEP with LA Rebellion filmmakers Charles Burnett, Ben Caldwell, and Alile Sharon Larkin; hosted by Jacob Nadir, founder of Thuh Film Festival and blog contributor to The Luminal Theater.

This video was recorded on June 19, 2022.

The Thuh Juneteenth Film Festival was sponsored by Thuh Film Festival and Be Reel Black Cinema Club.

A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: “I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.

— Russian fable about capitalism used masterfully by both Orson Welles and Wendell Harris, two of the great masters of Cinema in the 20th Century

Funnier than Woody, more conscious than Spike, stranger than Jarmusch, and as funky as a mangled sofa in a burned-out basement. “Chameleon Street” is a masterpiece — the comedy Fanon would have made had he been a filmmaker. Wendell Harris, Jr. inspired many, but received a cold shoulder after his Sundance win in 1989. And we all know why: Harris is a majestic cinematic talent on par with Orson Welles. Put anyone else of his generation or the succeeding one beside him and they all pale in comparison.

Maxx Pinkins: You introduced me to Chameleon Street a number of years ago.

Dennis Leroy Kangalee: Did I?

Maxx Pinkins: Yes…

DLK: It’s the best film of the 1990s. It closed the 1980s but was really a line in the sand for the opening of that next decade. I remember seeing it on VHS shortly it won Sundance in 1989. It was like a message from another planet. From those first startling moments it was not only a remarkable picture, but a spiritual experience. I shared it with my friends, those who didn’t get it — I dropped. And then I would watch it alone, the way I had Citizen Kane.

Maxx Pinkins: It is a touchstone film for me, much as your film As an Act of Protest is. I have mixed feelings about them. I view them as a source of inspiration, a reminder of what a Black independent filmmaker can attain given the right amount of determination. I also view them with some trepidation, because I am humbled by their force and power. But more than both of these, I love and enjoy watching them as films and I regret being born in a world where such artistry fails to be given its due.

DLK: That’s humbling. And astute because we both agree that Wendell Harris is our Orson Welles.

Maxx Pinkins: Many of us feel this way. He’s our Orson not simply because he too quotes the “Scorpion & and the Frog” fable Welles used in Mr. Arkadin (just as Spielberg re-appropriated Wendell’s Chameleon Street in the masterful Catch Me if You Can), but because of their shared artistic temperament as expressed in their vision.

DLK: Yes. And both triple threats. They prove my theory that the best American dramatic pictures are made by actor-writer-directors.

Pinkins: Yes, and concerned with the relationship between truth/fiction, Wendell offers us a delightful interpretation of Douglas Street, weaving real art through the mendacious audacity of a con man. What could be more American, what could be more Wellesian?

DLK: I love that impulse to blur and continually blur; what is truth in life and in film; what is “true story,” what is a documentary versus a narrative…it’s all interesting to me because all cinema — if edited especially — is fiction. It’s all art. It’s the majestic mischievousness of F for Fake, for example, which covers them both; you can imagine Wendell having made that film as well…Chameleon’s a twisted, winding tale, its hall of mirrors feeling is only one an actor-director could make. I used to watch Chameleon Street & David Mamet’s House of Games, back-to-back like some bizarre double feature; a double-sided A single spinning on the jukebox about America and its con games; capitalism & racism pulsating through its veins…those films taught me a lot about life. And how systems are constructed.

The con artist is the elite of all criminals, he is the most intriguing. He uses his mind. He’s also one of the hardest to relay in a movie because not only is his own mask transparent for the audience, we have to believe that he could truly survive on his wits alone. It’s a kind of tour de force for any actor and a marvelous challenge for a director.

No one understands the confidence game better than an actor — except maybe a religious leader or politician — and absolutely no one brings it to great use as an actor in a movie — other than an auteur who sees the world from an actor’s perspective. That already divides the line between them and born-in-the-bone montage artists like Eisenstein or Godard and that tradition that gives us Hitchcock or what is regarded as the standards of filmmaking.

Pinkins: Welles and Wendell are the artist as narrator of his own story, master and slave to his own fate. Magician, Jester, Lover, King, and ultimately Hanged Man. They’re emblems of boldness and ambition, innovation and improvisation, grandeur and gravitas.

DLK: Yes. And an added reason why they were simply too much for the establishment. Forget about their ideologies, it was their imagination. And imagination — for the artist — is the political meaning. That’s where the radicalism resides. And they paid dearly for it.

Harris may be the film universe’s Satchel Paige! We claim we want “Black excellence” and whatnot and yet every single brilliant Black filmmaker in this country has been maligned. The white world has their Christs as well but at least Cassavetes (Shadows, Woman Under the Influence) could work as an actor, and Elaine May was given more money for Ishtar than Wendell Harris will ever see (not that anyone should have millions of dollars for a motion picture, I am vehemently against that!) and someone like Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) — who was always a bit of an outsider — at least had insider friends. Wendell’s a loner. Period. And he was simply disrespected. Simple as that, there’s no mystery and its indefensible.

One day someone will mine all of this history, there is something there…Why is it that a writer like Henry Dumas was so good that Ralph Ellison was so intimidated that he shunned him, that Toni Morrison copped from him (benevolently)…and the publishing and Black Literati left him to be shot by white cops in a subway station. There should be an enormous guilt that Wendell Harris was not supported and enabled to make the pictures I know he wanted to. Wendell has been used as a kind of whipping boy, a warning from the White Movie Establishment to the Black auteurs from outer space or in the gutter: if you use your mind and your talent like a rapier, we will crush you. Wendell’s writing alone is brilliant. You’re a screenwriter yourself, what are your thoughts on the Chameleon Street script?

Pinkins: His screenplay is revolutionary in its biting critique of the white dominated social structure. And to this day, not a single film exhibits as many displays of…wit and dazzling verbal takedowns of racism as Chameleon Street. This is real satire, worthy of Oscar Wilde, as offhanded as Joe Orton.

DLK: Good point. It’s Charles Wright, classic Pryor in its world-weary consciousness. As self-satisfied sometimes as Dick Gregory’s best barbs. A kind of tidy encapsulation of the Black urbane comedic rancor. It’s bookish, savvy. Chris Rock and even Chappelle, sorry to say, would lose their way eventually because the gaze never wavers: he is speaking specifically to the Black person who’s just lost his job. This specificity becomes universal. That’s the power of art. As opposed to flattering an audience, which a lot of comics do and most movies in general do, regardless of genre. Comedy is a deadly serious artform, tragedy demands grandeur and the capacity for big feelings and ideas, satire must be unsatisfied and pugnacious. If comedy is about acceptance, satire is about destruction of the status quo. And often it can just come from the barb of a witty mind…

Pinkins: If Black satire is what you’re into, you can’t do much better than Chameleon Street.

DLK: And despite their talents, the Wayans and Spike Lee just didn’t do it for me. That didn’t make me very popular as a kid, people had a hard time relating to me and I to them. I didn’t care about high-tops and Brooklyn and doing Da’ Butt. I always got the impression they were biding time until they could prove their ability to be as venal in their capitalist zeal as much as anyone.

But this strange cinema of Harris was for the oddballs and the outsiders, the kids who stood askance at the zeitgeist, who were outside it as much as they were outside the society that they might have comfortably grown-up in. Spike’s early films were rife posturing and grievances, they were clever Black expressions emitted less from an enclave than Madison Avenue. It was more mugging for the camera with a sort of fey Buppie Nationalism that irritated me. I didn’t like or bond with his humor. And his preaching seemed disingenuous. I like preaching. But there are very few preachers who do it well. The same goes for satire and filmmaking.

Wendell Harris has more in common with Preston Sturges and the Sex Pistols than he does with Spike Lee. And it’s our loss that the mainstream welcomed Spike with open arms, but they made their decision and there was no way a filmmaker more talented than Spike was going to be on the covers of magazines and certainly not one with a droll, sharp sense of humor. Harris is like a razor. Imagine if the New Yorker printed his stories or thoughts; imagine if he had been able to compete against Jarmusch…or wrote for the actors Spike had in his stable. It would have been astounding! The only satiric filmmakers I seriously include in Harris’ orbit are Kathleen Collins (Losing Ground), who as a wit could give Woody Allen a serious run for his money, and Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle) And again, Collins and Townsend both were marginalized. It’s something I harp on because it’s disconcerting to me. Almost as much as the annoyance of how people mis-read films or judge them for their production values. One critic I remember was obsessed with how low budget the film looked. That’s what I love about the real independent-minded films! They are rich in talent, not window dressing.

Chameleon Street makes lemons out of everything and stretches the rubber until it snaps. His aesthetic is gritty and theatrical. It also impresses itself within the tentacles of Black artistic traditions aesthetically and politically (hip-hop for example developed out of a beat and a cardboard box, poetry and the desire to express something…now it’s as moribund as any other shiny car in the world.) The acting alone is remarkable, the alien, knowing style…when it works, it’s dead on. It doesn’t matter that it’s uneven.

Pinkins: If the film suffers in its acting it is simply because the rest of the cast struggles to keep pace with Harris’ loquaciousness and, with the exception of Anthony Ennis, appreciate the subtlety of his humor. But Wendell liberates the monotonousness of the weaker performances with the dynamism of his editing, and cuts through dryer moments with his use of voiceover…

DLK: His voice — alluring, dreamy, and stately…

The editing of the film is aggressive — like it’s trying to climb up a mountain (its rhythm is contagious) and the surrealistic sketches are like intervals of both divine kookiness and majestic absurdism. The funky interjections of Douglas Street roaring over his back to the camera is sublime (an homage to [Haile] Gerima’s Ashes and Embers; the intellectual acumen of both leading characters is similar, different only in context and tenor).

Pinkins: And we go one step further in our acclaim of Wendell. Critic Andrew Sarris emphasized the way in which Welles’ work concerns itself with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people. But with Wendell and with Street, to find that one is young, gifted, and Black is to be thrown into an existential maelstrom, to have extraordinary feelings as an extraordinary person. Or perhaps to have extraordinary feelings as an ontological-non-person. No wonder Hollywood was confounded by Chameleon Street and Wendell’s talent. The same fate awaited him as did Welles — a work of art so successfully realized that everything after would always pale in comparison.

Wendell Harris, we salute you.

this article originally appeared on WAVELENGTHS, the film blog of The Luminal Theater

In the first of a series of “critical conversation” pieces, artist-writers Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Maxx Pinkins distill their reactions to Jordan Peele’s film “NOPE” in a succinct and honest slice of criticism.

Maxx Pinkins: The first time I saw the film was in IMAX at the TCL in Hollywood. As I walked out, I caught up to an older Black couple and asked them what they thought of it. The woman responded bemusedly, “I have no idea what the hell I just saw, but I know people on the internet will be posting their theories soon, so I’ll be looking online.” Her male companion offered no follow-up. Even though the woman failed to make any meaning out of the movie, she understood its cultural significance: reaction videos.

Dennis Leroy Kangalee: Yes, which is what movies in all over are becoming. That’s why I’ll take Sammy Davis Jr., “Sanford and Son” and Robert Townsend at his weakest any day over a ‘Jordan Peele’. I simply don’t get what the fuss is, but I suppose every generation has red herrings. But, alas, as young people tell me “It isn’t made for you, Kangalee!” Whatever that means.

Pinkins: From youtubers, and hidden messages and symbols explained and deciphered by acolytes of the Room 237 brand of film criticism. In the NYTimes, A.O. Scott says “the main target of Nope’s critique is also the principal of its affection,” drawing the concluding that “the moral of Nope is ‘look away,’ but you can’t take your eyes off it.” Scott would have us believe that “look away” can be considered a moral.

DLK: Red herrings. Oblique metaphors. Hollow symbols. Film school tropes and industry techniques with a “Black” assertion? What does that even mean??

Why can’t “woke” filmmakers and their generation simply say what they feel, want and think directly? (Because they don’t relate to or appreciate acting, behavior or the capacity for cinema to simply render mystery.)

Pinkins: The sovereignties, the authorities, the world-mights of darkness, the spiritual forces of wickedness (Ephesians 6:12), they would have us look away from their evil deeds, rather than document them as evidence with our cell phones. But then we should give the devil his due, for they themselves do not look at what they are doing. Or maybe they just don’t know how to see.

The eye functions as an observer. And all films deal with spectacle, as all dance deals in touch and all poetry deals in sound. But the films that best use spectacle as theme offer more than shallow observations, rather, they point out the inherent difficulties with the act of observing itself. The troubles caused by observing passively or without first extracting the beams from our own eyes (Matthew 7:5). In “Minority Report” Spielberg shows the ways that sight can deceive, because of our existing biases and our unwillingness to look hard and long at the truth. In the work of Godard, the act of seeing always comes with a moral obligation, the inner response to outer darkness.

DLK: Why can’t “important” socially conscious films just rely on strong staging, acting, and dialogue? Isn’t cinema already allegorical enough (as opposed to theater which at least contains living blood, sweat and tears)? I have never liked Jordan Peele’s films. I simply don’t relate to them aesthetically. I feel the same way about lots of filmmakers who stuff their films with disingenuous allusions and “deep” references. I think poetically, but not symbolically. I never have. Which is what irritates people about my own criticisms or approach to art while it aligns with others. I like Hitchcock and Kubrick. But I don’t decode them like millions of people do. I see more meanings in an actor’s performance than a filmmaker’s puzzle.

Another thing I despise is puzzles. I don’t want a puzzle. I want chills. I want a poem or movie or song to just give me a unique feeling, it may affirm my sensibilities or not. Who cares. I don’t find politics, human relationships, or what people do to each other abstract. To me they are clear as day. And that is both deep and accessible to anyone. I think the task is finding authentic ways of rendering that.

Pinkins: There is a fundamental fallacy in Peele’s emphasis of “seeing” when it comes to Black people. What can Peele show us, or what can we see that we don’t already know and fully understand? In an era of police murder documented by amateur filmmakers, what significance does Peele make of a Black man who owns a whole ranch of land, and has inherited a family business going back several generations, trying to take a picture of the sky in order to gain a profit by it?

Had Peele directed his critique at his own prejudices rather than at the guilty conscience of an industry he willfully exploits to enable his work, we might learn something about the contradictions of ambition and aspiration for a Black man in America. But Peele only shows, he doesn’t tell.

DLK: I think young artists are compelled to be overly concerned with meanings and profundity. I was at 21. But Peele nor his critics are 21. One has to grow up! If you think symbolically, so be it. Be who you are. And then the bullshit detector won’t go off!

Pinkins: This merely shows the Obama effect. People have had their senses dulled, by the dazzling display of rhetoric and the clean image of our first Black president and first lady. This has seemingly obviated any meaningful discussions about race.

Worse, it has obscured any potential clarity such an event might offer. It numbed us, and now that the effects have worn off, we still have no more information than we did before. Racism exists, but what can be done? Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?

DLK: If Peele’s goal is to patronize and flatter millennials, in general, and White Liberals, in specific, he is doing a phenomenal job. Nope is a good title. As I say “Hope is Nope with more hair.” And the emperor here is not wearing any clothes or hair. In fact, there is no emperor. Peele is talented and cynical and is brand unto himself.

Pinkins: Nope functions less as an allegory of Hollywood or race or cinema, which would require substantive symbols and evocative abstractions, but rather as a romantic expression of concrete freedom. Which terrifies far more than Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde.

The message of Peele’s film and his success in Hollywood makes a far more chilling and complex meaning than the images in Nope. Namely, “Nothing, not your race, your gender, your sexual orientation should prevent you from pursuing your goals, even if your goals have no positive effect on the objective world other than getting rich.”

DLK: It would be nice however if he would just make films that are admittedly enabling the master’s house as opposed to this “fugazi” political consciousness that millennials seem to champion. It’s not Hollywood’s job to free us. That’s our job. And the job of artists. Stop looking under stones that were handed to you. You have a garden of your own.

Pinkins: Yes, social commentary and cultural critique become irrelevant when personal ambition acquires validation. In a nutshell: Freedom From Accountability.

A more appropriate quote to open the film would have been the opening remarks from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, the whole is vanity.” The book concludes by saying “God shall bring every deed into judgment concerning all that is obscured, whether good or whether evil.”

May the Lord show mercy on Peele.