Look/Listen

One of the abiding strengths of the Black Power movement is its curious durability. Despite the convulsive shifts that the nation’s politics and culture have undergone during the past four decades, Black Power’s criticisms, message, and symbols still resonate with Americans, sympathetic and otherwise. In the current era of Wall Street Occupation and not-so-silent racial dog-whistles, the words of movement luminaries such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis seem to quiver with significance.

It is therefore a fitting moment for the arrival of Swedish filmmaker Göran Ollson’s new documentary feature, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. The film is partly an unearthed historical artifact and partly a cinematic grappling with a revolutionary impulse that remains alive and contentious. The raw material of Mixtape is comprised of newly discovered footage that was originally shot by Swedish television journalists. These reporters journeyed to the United States the late 1960s and early 1970s in an attempt to document the emergent ethos of Black Power. Ollson’s film assembles their footage with other archival materials and then adds voice-over from black activists and artists, who do not narrate so much as sprinkle their impressions and aspirations into the mix.

While novel, Ollson’s collage-like approach never quite overcomes the aridness that bedevils nearly every effort of cinematic historical review, regardless of how enlivening the subject matter. Still, the content of Mixtape is sufficiently absorbing on its own merits to warrant attention. There is an air of surrealism to the proceedings, as the Swedish originators of the film’s footage step into a world of political show trials and Black Panther pancake breakfasts with characteristic Scandinavian reserve. Wide-eyed but hardly naïve, the Swedes seem cognizant of the social and political context of Black Power, and ever-eager to probe at the contradictions in the American experience.

Mixtape offers a wealth of new footage featuring the prominent voices of the movement: not only Carmichael and Davis, but also Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, and other figures in the black nationalist and separatist orbit, such as a young Louis Farrakahn. The Swedish footage offers moments of searing political fury, exemplified by the tearful anger that seeps from Davis during a prison interview. However, there are also scenes of disarming, unguarded intimacy, such as Carmichael tenderly talking with his mother about her early life. In addition, Ollson includes footage of anonymous black citizens speaking candidly about their tribulations and their perspective on the roiling state of 1960s and 1970s America.

What makes Mixtape more than an admirable work of historical preservation is the presence of contemporary voices, which float into the film as though the speaker were sitting alongside the viewer. The filmmaker was able to obtain interviews with several living icons of the civil rights and Black Power movements, such as Davis, Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, and Harry Belafonte. Ollson also taps a selection of black artists from moments past and present—Melvin Van Peebles, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson—who ornament the film their own reminisces, exclamations, and jottings of music.

Although the film’s found imagery will likely rattle viewers, it’s these contemporary voices that vitalize the The Black Power Mixtape, and prevent from resembling a petrified curiosity from another era. The artists who speak in voice-over link the upheavals of the past to their own experiences, and add a drizzle of soul to all the white-hot anger. The resulting film is far from a dazzling art object or a comprehensive treatment of the era, but it is revealing, affecting, and urgent in equal measure.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.