by Steve Light
 |
| Naoko Haruta, Life #133: 'Africa #3', acrylic on canvas, 43" x 67" (110cm x 170cm) |
The 2nd Century Greek Neo-Platonic philosopher,
Plotinus, wrote that the project of thinking, which is to say the project
of philosophy, must always reflect to
timiotaton (the most important). The 20th Century Russian philosopher
Lev Shestov and the 20th Century French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch were
able to make this kind of substantiality, this most important, resonate at the center of supreme philosophical and
ethico-philosophical adventures. Every year at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival this to timiotaton, this most important, can
be found if not in abundance then certainly more than in any other film
festival. It is to this kind of
superlative declaration to which I inevitably, necessarily, and happily give myself at the conclusion each
year of this festival! Cannes,
Sundance, New York, Berlin, Venice, Los Angeles...but then our epoch is one in
which the film festival, like the biennale in the world of art, has become de
rigeur for every city but, precisely, in the constricting context of reified
globalism, prestige, self-promotion, and Capital, which is to say precisely in
the context where the most important will not be found.
War Witch or Rebelle is a short feature, written and directed by Kim
Nguyen. Like Tyson Conteh and
Arthur Pratt's Family at the 2010 Pan
African Film Festival, Kathy
Busby's My Purple Fur Coat at the
2005 festival, like Xelinda Yancy's Time
Out and like Julius Amedume's The
Phone Call at the 2004 festival, Ms. Nguyen's film brings us a cinematic
diction of rich and sustaining vibratos. In many ways her little film could
be cited as the gem of the 2013 festival just as I would cite the
aforementioned short features as the gems of their years. In fact I can easily say that if the
Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, in a little essay, "The Most Beautiful
Six Minutes in the History of Cinema" (in his book of short essays, Profanations) can cite as his example a
passage in Orson Welles' never-completed film on Don Quixote, then I can well
cite the concluding minute of Conteh/Pratt's nine minute short as "the
most beautiful minute in the history of cinema" although there are
passages, especially in the films of Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu, that could
easily qualify, indeed, easily embody as supreme exemplars and actualities
either the most beautiful minute or the most beautiful six minutes in the history
of cinema.
The Eastern Congo is the setting of
Nguyen's film—the Eastern Congo which hold's the world's richest supply of
coltan, the mineral essential for cell phones and other electronic gadgetry. And because of this, since 1997
wars have raged on and off in the Congo and upwards of five or six million
people—mark this number well—have perished in a holocaust which has yet to
receive its proper name or attention or grief or cessation. And the terrible violence against women
and children which has taken place has gone and continues to go much too little
noticed anywhere in the world. At
the center of Ms. Nguyen's film is a 14 year old Congolese girl who is pregnant
and whose seizing soliloquy consists of confiding in her unborn child. Everything that we should know,
everything that should seize us, everything that should move us at once
aesthetically, ethically, metaphysically and concomitantly in anguish, protest,
and finally in a practice that would alleviate the suffering and blight, that
would put an end to the global indifference which is the other side of
global theft and pillage, everything is in this short feature at once in
its declaratives and in its contextual exclamations and lyricisms. Will Ms. Nguyen's film make it to other
festivals? Will it gain notice and
some kind of distribution? I hope
it will. But it begins here and
this is precisely the supreme virtue of the Los Angeles Pan African Film
Festival.
Alvelyn Sanders’ Foot Soldiers: Class of 1964 is another marvelous and beautiful
exemplar of the substantial. It is
a documentary about the entering class of students at Spelman College in 1964
who gave themselves to the 1960s portion of the Civil Rights and Black
Liberation Movements ("the
Civil Rights Movement" as such begins not in 1960 or in 1955 but
in...1865...or in another way in 1492....) at the height and at the center of
active protest in Atlanta and elsewhere. The summer of 1964 was Freedom Summer. SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee), one of the most
advanced and most radical of the southern civil rights organizations, founded
in April of 1960 under the suggestion and impetus of the indelible and
sagacious veteran of the Black Liberation Movement, Ella Baker. Baker thought
that students who had initiated sit-ins in North Carolina and in Nashville where James Lawson—the
keynote speaker at the SNCC founding convention and then at the 50th
anniversary convention as well—had long carried out workshops for activists in Atlanta, needed to marshal and coordinate their struggle, their
movement, and to do so outside the aegis of any and all elders who might impose
this or that external or authoritarian or heteronomous requirement or
brake. But Freedom Summer, which
from the start was met by the extremities of white supremacist violence,
continued into the fall of 1964 and, thereby, Atlanta, as but one example, knew
the largest upsurge of protest in its history. We know this history and this struggle in broad outlines and
in the names of prominent and profoundly admirable activists, Ruby Doris
Smith-Robinson, Diane Nash, Bob Moses, Fanny Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael,
Mary King, Casey Hayden, Bob Zellner, Dorothy Zellner, Gloria Richardson, Victoria Jackson Gray etc. (see the
2011 volume Hands on the Freedom Plow:
Personal Accounts of the Women of SNCC), but the Civil Rights Movement, the
Black Liberation Movement, as any and all movements, were first and last and
always products of those who peopled it and propelled it en masse and in all
concreteness and duration. The People may exist as abstraction, an
evanescent formalism, but in a movement it is precisely the realm of the most
important. This film tells the
story of the unsung, the unnamed—yes foot soldiers, combatants—without whom
there would not have been a movement at all. This is history in the realm of the substantial, this is
cinema in the realm of the essential and seizing. In every movement there are committed activists who are
always relatively small in relation to the larger population, but no group of
activists can ever initiate an activity of duration unless there are those who
make the slogan, join, a historically
determinant expression and magnitude. This film gives us all of this. We learn of the actions of a number of women who at the time were 18,
17, 16 years old. We hear their
voices at the time and now in historical and biographical reflection, we hear
and learn about what they did, what they have become, how they remember and how
their experiences endured and grew.
This is one more strength of the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival—its roster
of documentary excellence. I would
readily declare that the subjects treated by the kinds of documentaries
shown at the festival are more vital and important than at any other festival. Quickly and just to cite several examples among scores and
scores of superb films I can think
of biographical films in previous years about Clora Bryant, Oscar Brown Jr.,
Robert Williams, and Cecil Taylor. Historical films about holocausts
in Namibia and in the Congo in the opening decade of the 20th Century as well
as about Sophiatown, a suburb of
Johannesburg which was at the center of black South Africa's musical cultures
and also a place where black and white would mingle freely, and which was
suppressed, shutdown, and destroyed—razed to the ground—by the South African
government in the 1950s. Work by Gloria
Rolando, 1912: Breaking the Silence,
which tells the story of the fight for racial justice in Cuba at the beginning
of the 20th Century by Afro-Cubans and of their Partido Independiente de
Color (PIC), which was suppressed in 1912 when the government massacred thousands
of activists either of the PIC or affiliated with it.
This year's central biographical
documentary was also the closing night feature, Shola Lynch's Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. Unlike the women in Foot Soldiers, Angela Davis is a
celebrity and her story is known, although doubtless not to the degree it needs
to be and certainly not always in the socio-political dictums and advocacies
her life story seeks to uphold. I
would have preferred that Foot Soldiers
be given this kind of feature stage and I think its content warranted it both
substantially and commercially (a festival wants to attract a larger audience
by virtue of its feature events and I think Foot
Soldiers could have done that if given a chance). Nonetheless Ms. Lynch's film was salutary in bringing us the
model of a life lived in relation to socio-political and liberationist
commitment, reflection, and courage and all the more because the struggle
against the illegal and illegitimate mass incarceration of black people in the
U.S. and the massive disenfranchisement this carries not just in voting rights
but most importantly in the lived rights of education, familial duration, and
the generalized pursuit of a fulfilled biographical(!) and
socio-intersubjective life, has long been at the center of Angela Davis'
efforts and activist itinerary.
This year one could also see the superb
epic feature, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
which had also been screened at the festival in 2011 and 2012. That this film has not been
picked up for distribution is one more indication of the exclusionist forces at
play in our social and socio-cultural orders. The Haitian
revolution is far more vital in its consequences for our modernity and for the
course of modern history and modern consciousness than is
generally acknowledged. The
propellant of the foreign policies and actions of Jefferson's
presidency is precisely an understanding that this Revolution is an absolute
threat to plutocracy, slavocracy, and aggrandizing accumulation. This understanding is at the basis of
France's policies which are in full display in their 1830s blockade of Haiti
and in the French demand, illegitimate and vicious in every respect, for
"reparations" in relation to the plantations and the country liberated from them, a demand
turning the world and world-historic justice upside down, given that it is
France that owed the now liberated slaves immense—total—reparation for the
entirety of their centuries-long labor and for the genocidal deaths of their
brethren in middle passage or thereafter, labor that had propelled and vastly
enriched France in both its mercantilist and now capitalist instantiations,
accumulations, and "progress". Faced with the ineluctable damage, the ineluctable threat this blockade
posed, Haiti was forced to accede to these "reparations" and the
gigantic monetary demand of the French. Consequently and irrevocably and permanently in debt from the start the
Haitian economy and Haitian wealth and development were ever thereafter and
down to this day hampered internally on the one hand and externally on the
other hand given the continuous harassment by powers such as the U.S. and
France. The U.S. invades Haiti in
1915 and occupies the country till 1939 and continues its interventions in our
contemporary epoch.
Subsequently and in certain
respects the Berlin Conference of 1885 in which European powers "divide up" the African continent can
be seen as the European powers response to the morbidities and hauntings they
all felt because of the Haitian Revolution. Two generations ago the studies of C.L.R. James (see his
classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution) and those of others in kindred
agreement with James were eloquent elaborations and testimonies. But James' study was in its time
isolated, however much it achieved classical status and remains vibrant even
today. Happily in the past
twenty-five years there has been an increase in historical studies and historical
consciousness vis-a-vis the Haitian Revolution and its socio-historical and
socio-existential significance and significations. And I can quickly cite as but several examples Jeremy
Popkin's You Are All Free: The Haitian
Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery, Sibylle Fischer's Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures
of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Peter Hallward's Damning the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, and Paul
Farmer's The Uses of Haiti.
The Haitian Revolution has not been
acknowledged enough in the centrality of its world historicity and in the ways that it has functioned as a primary spur, however
subterranean in this or that instance or realm, not just in relation to global
geopolitical and socio-political trajectories, but also in relation to
historical and philosophical reflection. But there are signs that a fuller and
more extant understanding and appreciation of the animating causalities of the
Haitian Revolution within historical and historiosophical as well as within
epochal consciousness is now underway. Susan Buck-Morss' recent book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution was at the center, albeit at the
unacknowledged center—sign and syntax of a simultaneity of introjection,
willed-forgetfullness, and
repression—of Hegel's philosophy, a philosophy which more than any
other forms the prime-ultimate base of modern philosophical and historical
thought. And in this vein one should also consult the Catalan-French
philosopher Louis Sala-Molins' The Dark
Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment.
Haiti is also the thematic in a sparkling
film by Patricia Benoit, Stones in theSun (or Woch Nan Soley in Haitian
creole). Emigration stories constitute much of the film's narrative. The arc of
such stories lends itself to cinematic transversals. The secret lies in knowing how to avoid the formulaic and
the ready-at-hand. In telling a
story of a Haitian family that has moved to New York, Ms. Benoit has avoided the
traps of prefabrication. Here the
film's cinematic diction gives us life in its qualities of always coming-to-be, life in the entwinements of character and
socio-intelligible action. We are with the characters and not beside them
or outside of them. The
verisimilitudes of existential inflection are immediate in their cinematic
resonance and not merely received or displayed.
Emigration is also the theme of another
splendid and moving film, Moussa Toure's La Pirogue. Here it is a question
of a group of Senegalese who set out in a small fishing boat (precisely a
pirogue) for the European coast. It is a journey we increasingly see in the Mediterranean and in many
other parts of the world given the ravages of globalizing and marauding Capital
and the depredations of the American imperium and its neo-imperialist forays.
But no matter the universalizing qualities of emigration and immigration
stories, these stories and especially in their contemporary contents, contexts,
origins, and details remain too little known and too little understood amongst
the populations of the privileged countries. And to the degree that these stores receive attention it is
too often only in fragmentary, obfuscated, and distorted forms. La
Pirogue is neither fragment nor snapshot, but rather a demonstrative of existential
and historical episode and essence. It is the kind of film that must be seen.
This story of global tumult
and forced and unavoidable migration is also depicted in Sudz Sutherland's, Home Again, which tells us of imprisoned
deportees in Jamaica who make up a prison population larger than Jamaica's
regular prison population. This
narrative has special relevance for us here in the States, given the utterly
condemnable deportation policy of the country during its history and
increasingly in the last twenty years. And since the beginning of the present executive regime there have been
more deportations than under any previous administration, albeit that this
number would have been the same no matter the individual exercising executive
power, given that it is the policy and cumulating policy of the class in power
and not of any particular executive whether Democrat or Republican.
But there is a paramount truth which
cannot be willed away. Humans
migrate—and birds, fish, and insects too, as well as smoke, seeds, sand, etc.
etc. which is to say all matter tout
court whether on this planet or anywhere in the universe, a universe that
itself is migrating (expanding—and now at ever greater velocity) and which has
been migrating from its first moments. Should there be an open border policy globally? Migration as a totalizing phenomenon is
neither an ineluctable good or bad. Doubtless, for many it exists as a necessity and is, therefore, a good
or partial good in the bearing of a must-take-place
else a greater calamity might occur. But migrations are not without repercussions of all kinds. Nonetheless, migrations cannot be stopped—nor
should they be other than in the valence of just global transformations which
would eliminate the depredations of Capital and Imperium and which would,
thereby, reduce the tumult and distress and suffering that lead to migration. But an open border policy globally while clearly the most ethically and
socio-existentially sound and just of policies would in the present context
bring further xenophobic and fascist reactions among portions of every
population. Doubtless,
preliminarily, in any reflection on this question, open borders ought to be the
prevailing regulative idea and goal,
but—and this is what is absolutely crucial and paramount—one principle should
reign supreme both as idea and as instituted policy here and now, on the spot. It is this: everyone who is here is here. I speak in this instance of the U.S., but this principle must apply everywhere. At present the Dominican Republic is in the process of carrying out
deportations of Haitian Dominicans who have either been in the Dominican Republic
or whose families have been in the Dominican Republic for one, two, three, and
more generations. As recently as
2005 there were murderous pogroms and deportations of Haitian-Dominicans and
this was but the continuation of a long history of oppression and
discrimination and of which the pogroms of 1937, instigated by the right wing
dictatorship of Trujillo, number among the worst. Anyone who is anywhere whether newly arrived or not must be
considered as being precisely in that place and of that place. Yes, everyone who is here is here and,
therefore, everyone who is here should exist on the same plane in relation to
available life and socio-juridical mechanism. Doubtless, one can have a bifurcation of citizen and
non-citizen although this distinction can and should be subject to
reflection. Political philosophers
such as Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe have emphasized that this distinction
carries the greater possibility of subsequent equality while the philosopher
Giorgio Agamben has advanced the notion that this distinction will forever bar
a subsequent egalitarian and liberationist outcome. Yet, if this distinction between citizen and non-citizen is
to be maintained it must carry with it an always available and quickly
traversable conduit from the latter to the former. But there should be no bifurcation or hierarchy—this is the
essential meaning of the idea and principle that everyone who is here is
here—at the level of universalist right and universalist socio-juridical
being. Those without papers should
be included in all availabilities, whether health insurance, drivers licenses,
tuition diminutions, etc. etc. If,
for example, a society offers universal health insurance and health care, then
the undocumented population must be included for otherwise the social good in
question loses its claim and status of universality. This principle must and should be applied universally in all
other realms of social being. And
herein lies one more of the truths of the Haitian Revolution, of the Black
Liberation Struggle, of the itineraries and trajectories of the SNCC activists,
of the Freedom Riders, of the participants in Freedom Summer, indeed, of the
itineraries and trajectories of the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival
itself.
_______________________
Steve Light, a basketball point-guard
following upon Nate Archibald, Pete Maravich, and Willie Somerset—and akin as
well to Steve Nash, Chris Paul, Stephen Curry, and Earl Boykins—is also a
philosopher and poet.
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