The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Director: Goran Olsson
Midway into Goran Olsson's remarkable collage of archive footage about the Black Power movement in the US, there's a sequence in which a very conservative editor of the American populist tabloid, TV Guide, criticises the European media - specifically Sweden's - as being inherently 'anti-American' for only zeroing in on the country's 'negative aspects'.
It's one of the film's most auto-referential moments - Olsson is Swedish, and all the footage here is drawn from Swedish television vaults. The comment pinpoints the power of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, as it provides what one of the film's interviewees, the race-relations academic Robin Kelley, describes in a newly recorded voiceover as a perspective both innocent and international.
Such critical distance towards the issue itself is crucial to Mixtape's weight, as Olsson seeks to make sense of that socio-political wave of more than four decades ago through rarely seen images of well-known individuals - such as the sequence in which activist Stokely Carmichael solicits a microphone from a journalist and then has his mother talk about her own anguished views on life in a discrimination-rife America. There is new, explanatory narration from the protagonists, speaking over visuals of themselves from that period. Angela Davis' thoughts of her own detention and trial, for example, provide a new layer of understanding.
Olsson never resorts to showing audio-visual from outside of the eight-year time frame as defined in the film's title. But even with that restricted window the film provides enough for a glimpse into the rise and fall of the movement.
It begins with the divergence between the approaches led by pacifist Martin Luther King Jnr and the more militant Carmichael, goes through the turbulent times of the Vietnam war, and examines the dissipation of the movement as activism is replaced by the emergence of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam on one hand, and by 'a romanticisation' of Harlem and African-American life in general on the other.
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is a very important and revealing milestone about a story which needs to be told again today.
Extras: short documentary, featurette, additional interviews, trailer.