Black Panthers

While Agnes Varda was in California shooting "Uncle Yanco", she made this short documentary about a rally to free Huey Newton after he had been jailed, as the documentary tells us, a shoot-out with the police that ended with ten people injured and one cop dead.

Mme. Varda shoots and edits this as an anthropological study, with only Back people speaking; indeed, you have to look carefully to spot a Caucasian in the background. Having grown up in this era, I note that it's a useful corrective to the usual coverage of events like this, in which one heard White people talking about the racial divide and how to deal with it.

Since Agnès Varda died recently, I decided to watch two of her short documentaries filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area. One is "Uncle Yanco", about her relative in Sausalito. But the more important one is "Black Panthers". This half-hour doc focuses on a Black Panther rally in Oakland in August, 1968. The main purpose of the rally is to call for the release of Huey Newton, in jail on charges of killing a cop. But the rally touches on a number of other things: police brutality towards the black community, the Vietnam War, and calls for worldwide unity against imperialism. In fact, one interviewee lays out several demands that the black community is making in its call for justice (freedom, decent housing, well-paying jobs, good education, etc). There's also an interview with Newton in jail, where he details the horrible treatment that he experiences.

Contrary to what a lot of people like to say, the Black Power Movement was not about "hating white people". It was about teaching the black community to defend itself and recognize the beauty in, among other things, natural hair. The Black Lives Matter movement is the heir to this.

Definitely watch this doc.

I've been deeply impressed by earlier work by Varda; when this happens with me the filmmaker's whole journey becomes a lifelong project. I have several of these running, open-ended affairs with creative, alert souls who I know I can always turn to for a far- reaching view.

This is a small snapshot, but no less part of the journey. It's among a few political films she did at the same time as Godard and others, with Vietnam booming in the distance.

It's a look at a rally party of the Black Panthers at the time of Huey Newton's trial for the murder of a policeman, but there's nothing more they can offer Varda's camera than sloganeering and Varda had no more time to devote into it, perhaps not the inclination to probe more and inquire. Possibly she was interested in no more than this glimpse in passing.

It says something that she was there of course, yet she also makes it a point to ask some of the rapt faces if they know Huey didn't do it; they don't, but they're fervent just the same, it's all part of a war being waged on them, Huey is a prisoner of that war, he must go free, or else.

There's a much more sobering history prior to and as we move away from that day, based on what little I know; the obsession with territory and tribal law, and on the other hand police abuse and a youthful life without prospects that would turn Southcentral LA into Beirut, but you have to remind yourself that this is all simmering behind the ideology and parades, the image barely able to contain a life that would soon spill from it.

Politics are thin, but maybe it is all here anyway for you to deepen? Politics aside, the glimpse is worthwhile. It's a day in that life, that place, that furor about injustice.

In 1968 the Black Panther Party (BPP) was at its most active and probably its height of popularity. This very brief documentary has several interviews/speeches which give a quick glimpse into what the BPP was demanding. There is footage of Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton (one of the founders of the BPP). Kathleen and Stokely are two very well-spoken civil rights activists, or freedom fighters if you dare, and that is evident in this short documentary. At the time of this documentary Huey P. Newton, , was locked up for getting into a shootout with police. There is a little commentary from the documentarian, Agnes Varda, but just about everything else comes from the mouths of the Panthers themselves.

Bless Agnès Varda for making this short documentary, and for the most part simply allowing members of the Black Panthers to state their views and explain the motivation behind the Black Power movement. The issues are the same as those faced today by the community, and it certainly resonates to hear them speak of stopping the police from killing black people, or of incarceration as being stilted against minorities. The film was made around the time of the Huey Newton trial, and after governor Ronald Reagan had hypocritically overturned California's open carry law once black people started taking advantage of it. Mostly it consists of footage of people at rallies to "Free Huey!," interviews with leaders like Newton and Stokely Carmichael, and comments from supporters. It also includes great commentary from Kathleen Cleaver explaining the significance of black women wearing their hair naturally, in afros.

The film is a snapshot in time during the summer of 1968 which made it fascinating to me, but I wish it had been longer and more fleshed out. It probably should have also asked a critical question or two about the movement looking to Mao Zedong as a role model, given the brutality of his regime and the millions he killed. On the other hand, millions of black people had (and have) died in the system they were in with its widespread racism, so one can understand searching for an alternative, and becoming as assertive as they did when progress didn't just gradually happen. I loved how Varda provided a few moments of gentle narration, explaining to audiences the reasons for what seemed like a dangerous and possibly violent movement. This is well worth a half hour, and something to reflect on over half a century later.