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[Film culture]

Black screen
Race matters at the Brattle and the HFA

BY GERALD PEARY

So long, Marianne Lampke and Connie White, and take with you the gratitude of the Boston community for years of wonderful, imaginative repertoire programming at the Brattle. There’s no reason to expect anything but more swell cinema from the admirable new staff: directors Ned Hinkle and Ivy Moylan and associate director Leslie Brown. These are young, energetic people with great film taste, and we can sample their æsthetic at work in their first schedule, the current one for March and April.

I’m especially excited about the Tuesday-night line-up, “Beyond Blaxploitation: 75 Years of African-American Filmmaking,” which includes the hardboiled detective film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970; March 27), Marlon Riggs’s gay experimental Tongues Untied (1991; April 3), Oscar Micheaux’s silent classic Body and Soul (1925; April 10), and a new 35mm print of the hilarious Melvin Van Peebles comedy Watermelon Man (1970; April 17). This last is the movie in which the horrified white racist discovers he’s changed skin color when he spots a mirror reflection of his newly acquired black bottom!

This coming Tuesday there’s another unusual revival: The Learning Tree (1969), director Gordon Parks’s adaptation of his 1963 autobiographical novel about his poor-and-black boyhood in a tiny Kansas plains town. The book and the movie are set in the 1920s, but the funny old Model T’s and the characters attending William S. Hart and Charlie Chaplin silents seem anomalous items: everything about the story smacks of the 1950s, where institutional racism is starting to crack and the African-American characters are experiencing a rising consciousness that will explode in the 1960s.

At the story’s center two neighborhood boys of color are responding to the racially oppressive world in which they live. Fifteen-year-old Newton (Kyle Johnson), Parks as a youth, is a good kid with a caring if impoverished churchgoing family; he studies hard at school, has white friends, and plans to go to college. Marcus (Alex Clarke) is the bastard son of a trashy alcoholic father, and he’s a chronic lawbreaker; he even accuses the African-American minister who’s praying for his soul of being an Uncle Tom.

This gentle tale is mostly on the side of Newton, its incipient version of an integrationist civil-rights participant. But Parks, who experienced a good deal of racism on his way to becoming a renowned photographer for Life, also extends an olive branch to the lonely, beaten-up Marcus, whose vigilant (and violent) separatism makes him a prime candidate for militant Black Power. There’s rage in this kindly story; Parks would move on to direct Shaft (1970).

Which is better, novel or movie? The book by a long shot, a lovely, simple piece of writing that seemed, when it came out, an African-American alternative to To Kill a Mockingbird. The Learning Tree on film is a sincere but stilted affair that’s not especially well acted by its cast of little-knowns, with Kyle Johnson too stiff and passive as Newton.

SOMETIMES IT’S A ROAD between two South African shantytowns that the eponymous aging lovers of Boesman and Lena (2000; at the Harvard Film Archive March 16 through 21) hobble down together; sometimes it’s the Road of Life. When it’s the latter, this screen version of the Athol Fugard play slides into Beckettland. Boesman (Danny Glover) and Lena (Angela Bassett) become like Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, forgetting where they’ve been that morning, uncertain where they’ll end up at night, amnesiac about everything except the truth that hardship seems to return and return. Instead of God, there’s déjà vu in this bleak, minimal landscape lorded over by a branchless tree.

But Boesman and Lena is also a drama of social consciousness, grounded in the horrors of apartheid, with these indigent blacks as South African racist victims. Filmmaker John Berry opens up the one-set Fugard play to flashbacks, even a sedate, happy one in which the protagonists (the movie was shot around Cape Town) are youthful and sensual and Lena spends her day dancing away in the sun. But today’s day is another story: it begins with the now-feeble duo getting kicked out of a town, their squatter dwelling knocked over by vigilante white-man bulldozers.

Finally, Boesman and Lena is about moral issues. The couple have been booted from the city because of a bunch of shattered empty bottles that are no longer redeemable by the white employers. In front of these whites, Boesman blamed Lena for the deed and beat her up. Later in the day, Lena presses Boesman to fess up: he was the bottle breaker!

I’m not sure that Fugard’s sometimes histrionic play should have been brought to screen, but Glover and Bassett give it a valiant try. They’re wonderful actors, and only when you see them young in flashback do you realize how much of their decrepitude is a performance. And kudos to American expatriate director John Berry, a blacklist victim whose last work (he died at the end of the filming) concluded a half-century-long career of stirring political consciousness that began with John Garfield’s He Ran All the Way (1951).

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: March 15-22, 2001





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