(image courtesy of Universal Studies)
October is Black History Month!
In celebration of Black History Month, the University is holding a 'Film
Marathon', offering staff and students the chance to see three fantastic
films (for a fabulous £3 for all three - or just see the one you want). This
is organised in partnership between the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME)
Staff Network, the Professional Development Unit and Student 'Silver
Screen Society'. Details of times, locations, film titles and reviews are
below. Tickets can be bought on the day, or online through the Silver
Screen Society.
If you'd like any further details please contact Kathy in the Professional
Development Unit at Katharine.Carter@nottingham.ac.uk (tel 0115 84
66773)
Date: Saturday 20th October
Location: Keighton Auditorium, University Park (opposite the main visitor
car park on Cut Through Lane)
Films and times:
1.30pm Sing Your Song (runtime 104 minutes, Certificate 12A)
3.45pm Marley (run time 145 mins, Certificate 15)
7pm Malcolm X (run time 202 mins, Certificate 15)
Film Reviews
Sing Your Song (from Philip French, The Observer 10th June 2012)
This is a skilfully compiled celebratory biography of Harry Belafonte. He
was born into poverty in Harlem in 1927, raised in his father's native
Jamaica, and after serving at sea in the US navy at the end of the second
world war, he worked as a janitor before being drawn into the theatre.
From the late 1940s on he was primarily a singer, becoming sensationally
successful in the 1950s as the "King of Calypso".
This excellent film, eloquently narrated by its octogenarian subject in that
wonderfully husky voice, carefully balances an account of his career in
showbusiness with his 50-year commitment to civil and human rights in
America and around the world, not just for fellow African-Americans but
for Native Americans, Hispanics and people throughout Africa. The two
aspects are of course closely interwoven, for he has courageously used
his popularity and his charismatic presence to challenge the colour bar in
the media, to attract attention to causes he believes in and to recruit his
fellow performers to lend their support. The film's title, which reflects the
way his life is integrated, comes from a piece of advice his hero Paul
Robeson gave the young Belafonte when he dropped in at a folk music
club where Harry was performing. "Get them to sing your song," Robeson
said, "and they'll want to know who you are." For the most part Belafonte
appears to use his power and influence wisely and well, and he emerges
at the end as a man of bravery and probity, a formidable contributor and
witness to his times.
Marley (from Philip French, The Observer 22 April 2012)
His new film, a cinebiography of Bob Marley is the story of a man who
lived an extraordinarily full yet oddly mysterious life and died a world
figure 30 years ago, shortly after reaching the age of 36. It is, however,
told without any reconstructions or impersonations and neither Sidney
Poitier nor Morgan Freeman was called in to deliver a rousing commentary
explaining the man's contradictions, achievements and significance.
The picture begins in West Africa at an old fortress on the Gold Coast
(now Ghana). Through its "Door of No Return" leading to the sea passed
many of the millions of shackled slaves who were shipped across the
Atlantic. This was the journey made by his ancestors that shaped Marley's
life, identity and music and the belief system that drew them together.
He was born in the remote Jamaican village of Nine Mile in 1945 and
Macdonald takes us there in a lyrical aerial shot across the steep, wooded
hill country. His mother, Cedella, was black and 16. His father, Norval
Marley, a white man aged 65, was employed by the forestry commission
to prevent the theft of timber. He rode around the countryside like a
seigneurial Cossack and styled himself Captain, though there's no
evidence he'd held any commissioned rank or served in any war. In the
only known photo of Norval, he's on horseback attempting to look
authoritative and his family refused to recognise Bob when he once called
on them for help.
Macdonald sees Bob as a man who felt rejected by both the black and the
white communities, an outsider who was to find a symbolic home in Africa
through embracing Rastafarianism, a style of personal independence and
social defiance, and a mission to bring people together in a grand
international, inter-racial brotherhood.
Marley grew up in extreme poverty, first in the countryside, then in the
slums of Kingston's Trenchtown, where the first photograph of him was
taken at the age of 12. The documentation of the early life is thin, but
Macdonald is able throughout to draw on the colourful testimony of his
formidable mother, his friends, fellow musicians, a variety of female
companions (Marley had nine or 10 children by six or seven different
women) and later some businessmen, politicians and gangsters.
There are splendid anecdotes about survival, about Bob and his band, the
Wailers, developing a new kind of music that fused local and international
forms into a distinctive form of reggae, and the zig-zagging of a career
that took Marley to the United States, where his mother had relocated, to
Europe and to Africa. Much of what we hear from Jamaican witnesses is
spoken in a beguiling, if sometimes obscure, patois and there are the kind
of contradictions in the individual assessments of his character and the
accounts of the fraught progress of the Wailers that one would expect.
This is Rashomon territory.
But there are compromises and concessions of a different kind that have
come about through the need to secure interviews, musical rights and
other necessary forms of co-operation. These are reflected in the names
of several family members and various close business associates listed in
the credits as producers. Some of these people provide the finest
testimony. Among them are Bob's Cuban-born wife Rita, who worked in
his backing group and recalls seeing stigmata on Haile Selassie's hand
during his triumphant visit to Jamaica; Bob's three children by her
(Cedella, Ziggy and Stephen); the beautiful, spirited Cindy Breakspeare,
his trophy companion and former Miss World who bore him a child but
refused to embrace Rastafarianism; and the laidback British impresario
Chris Blackwell of Island Records.
If Marley ultimately remains something of a mystery (he gave few
interviews and in none was particularly forthcoming), we nevertheless get
a vivid impression of a career that included a brief stint on a Chrysler
production line in Delaware, a long period of apprenticeship as a
composer (initially working with homemade instruments) and a rise to
local and international stardom. Gradually, the dreadlocks, the music and
the cloud of ganja smoke come together to form as recognisable an image
as that of the equally short-lived Che Guevara.
He was, however, altogether less militant than Che, virtually apolitical,
which did not prevent competing forces seeking his allegiance or seeing
him as a valuable symbol for their causes. In 1976, an assassination
attempt in Jamaica drove him into exile. It wasn't, however, a bullet that
did for him but the stud of a boot during a game of his beloved football in
a London park, triggering the melanoma in his foot that eventually
consumed his body.
We hear of a beautiful moment in a wintry Bavarian clinic where Bob's
mother read the Book of Job to the emaciated singer, his dreadlocks lost
to chemotherapy, shortly before he flew across the Atlantic to die in
Miami in May 1981.
Perhaps this impressive, thoughtful portrait should have ended there.
Instead, it concludes with a succession of Marley's hits being sung in a
various languages by cheerful young people on every continent. That's all
a little too "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coca-Cola-ish for my
tastes.
Malcolm X (Wikipedia)
Malcolm X is a 1992 American biographical motion picture about the
African-American figure Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) co-written, coproduced, and directed by Spike Lee. It stars Denzel Washington, Angela
Bassett, Albert Hall,Al Freeman Jr, andDelroy Lindo. Black Panther Partyy
co-founder Bobby Seale, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and future South Africa
president Nelson Mandela have cameo appearances. Spike Lee has a
small role as Shorty, a character based partially on a real-life
acquaintance, Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, a fellow criminal and jazz
trumpeter.
The film dramatizes key events in Malcolm X's life: his criminal career, his
incarceration, his conversion to Islam, his ministry as a member of the
Nation of Islam and his later falling out with the organization, his
marriage to Betty X, his pilgrimage to Mecca and reevaluation of his views
concerning whites, and his assassination on February 21, 1965. Defining
childhood incidents, including his father's death, his mother's mental
illness, and his experiences with racism are dramatized inf flashbacks.
Malcolm X's screenplay, co-credited to Lee and Arnold Perl, is based
largely on Alex Haley's 1965 book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Haley collaborated with Malcolm X on the book beginning in 1963 and
completed it after Malcolm X's death.
Malcolm X was distributed by Warner Bros. and released on November 18,
1992. Denzel Washington won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for
Best Actor and was nominated for an Academy Award Best Actor. In
2010, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National
Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically,
or aesthetically significant".