'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

Credit: Sundance Film Festival

“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975”  has a powerful opportunity to teach us something about our American past, but the film, which had its world premiere at Sundance Jan. 21, needed a stronger guiding hand and voice to reach its full potency.

The documentary is crafted around footage shot by Swedish journalists from 1967-1975 as they attempted to understand the Black Experience in America.  The 16mm material, which surfaced 30 years later, and director Goran Olsson uses it as the basis for his 96-minute film.

The footage veers from produced pieces that aired on Swedish television to talking head interviews with blacks about their daily living experiences in places like Harlem, as well as film of civil rights leaders and activists coming to Sweden.

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Most of it concentrates on what were considered the more radical elements of the Black Power movement: Stokely Carmichael’s SNCC,  The Black Panthers and Angela Davis. Their speeches give an illuminating picture for those to young remember of how deeply divisive the country was over racial issues in the last '60s and early '70s.

Olsson presents the footage by year and attempts to give it some context and perspective by bringing in voice overs by some of the people included in the original footage, such as Davis, as well as many current-day conscious hip-hop artists like Talib Kweli or Erykah Badu.

Most of the modern-day voices (we never see most of them) simply affirm the actions of the civil rights leaders we see on screen or, and this is certainly of value in its own way, discuss what they have learned from those who came before them. For example, singer/songwriter John Forte talks about how he embraced some of 
Davis’s writing about her imprisonment while he himself was in prison. Kweli tells a powerful story about how only a few years ago, he was detained by airport security for listening to speeches by Carmichael, who, himself was followed by the FBI. Kweli figures the FBI was spying on him as well, but he points out that 40 years after Carmichael’s height of power, even listening to his often-inflammatory rhetoric could be seen as a dangerous activity by the U.S. government. 

The best voices in the film come from The Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole, who was active in the black power movement. He explains why Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of non-violence was ineffective to him in a passionate way, as well as Robin Kelley, a USC professor of American studies, who, in a very small way, sometimes provides the only voice of dissent in a chorus of praise. The film badly needs some balance from the other side—perhaps a historian who explains why the Black Power movement has largely died out or, even, just someone who believed that what Carmichael was doing may have done more harm than good (other than the obvious government objections).

Olsson lets some of the segments go on for way too long and Davis gets more than her fair share of screen time.

Some of the imagery is startling: little children of Black Panthers singing “pick up your guns” is chilling, while some of the more radical statements about arming yourself to protect yourself from the government shows just how deep these divisions ran in the late ‘60s between blacks and whites (and made me think of the irony of how many of the radical statements espoused by the Black Panthers are now being echoed by the Tea Party).
In fact, a deep, often-understandable, distrust for the government runs throughout the picture, including a segment about Harlem in the ‘70s and the widely held belief that the government provided drugs to the neighborhoods to keep any potential dangerous protesters drugged and incapacitated.

The filmmakers use some music from the day, including, oddly enough, Jackson 5’s “Rockin’ Robin,” but most frequently goes back to  2008’s “Unwritten,” from the Roots and the song’s opening refrain, sung by Mercedes Martinez: “When I think about perfect times I think about yesterday/You can ask me about the future and I don’t know what to say.” It’s catchy, seemingly as a way to tie together chapters: but the past the movie makers are showing is anything but perfect so it comes across as just another odd choice in a movie full of them.