Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy

Director Tracey Moffat

NIGHT CRIES: A RURAL TRAGEDY         B+                                                                       Australia (17 mi) 1990 d: Tracey Moffat

Look at that sunset, Howard!  It’s like the daytime didn't want to end, isn’t it?  It’s like the daytime was gonna put up a big scrap, set the world on fire to keep the night from creeping on.                    —Rosemary Sidney (Rosalind Russell) from Joshua Logan’s PICNIC (1955)

Among the more culturally impactive and critically acclaimed short experimental films, this one, at only seventeen minutes, seethes with an underlying power that reaches out of the frame and literally grabs viewers by the throat, displaying a rare visual assurance and raw, unadulterated drama, likely leaving viewers surprised, yet blown away by the experience.  Feminist assertions run into difficulty when confronted with an Aboriginal filmmaker, adding layers of underlying complexity that might not otherwise be encountered, such as Australia’s history of forced adoption, making this intense mother and daughter experience especially difficult, yet the filmmaker, first and foremost, demands to be viewed through an artist’s lens.  Tracey Moffat may be Australia’s most successful artist, one of the few to have established a global market for her work as a photographer, filmmaker, installation artist and music video director, holding around 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States, and Australia, while at least two of her films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, with this film premiering in the Best Short Film category at Cannes in 1990.  Moffatt has the experience of growing up “between cultures,” born to an Aboriginal mother and a white Irish father, she was adopted by a white working-class family and raised in the Brisbane suburbs, where her birth mother would come visit, reminding her of her Aboriginal identity, yet her life was surrounded by the prevailing European culture, becoming fascinated with Hollywood movies, where among her earliest influences were the black-and-white, everyday photographs appearing in Life magazine in the 1960’s, basically documents of American culture imprinted in snapshots.  Studying film and video at the Queensland College of Art, she’s become an internationally renowned photographer, where her subject matter mirrors her own life, feeding upon themes of childhood memory and adolescent alienation.  While addressing issues of identity and survival through an Indigenous Australian viewpoint, often resorting to a dreamlike imagery, where memory becomes imprinted with trauma and pain, she is reluctant to be thought of as an Indigenous artist, believing she is expressing universal themes of despair, anger and frustration, and ultimately grief.  While she may view the world around her in a photographic sense, it’s perhaps essential to incorporate a more historical view, as the Australian colonial history towards Aboriginals has been abysmal and pathetic, much like the United States policy of segregating natives to “out of the way” reservations or reserves, yet the Australians went further, mandating a curfew from sunset to sunrise in the reserves, while also implementing a government and church policy of assimilation that mandated the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families from 1910 to 1970 (The Stolen Generations - Australians Together), with hopes of “civilizing” them, considered wards of the State, sent to re-education camps where they were raised as Christian whites, forbidden from speaking their native language, with their Native dress, customs, and history purged from their collective memories, not to mention their families, punished severely for non-compliance, with the sole purpose of training them to work in white society, a racist policy literally wrought with the most vile primeval instincts of the human condition.  While there have been a multitude of films depicting the horrors of this ethnic cleaning, including Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), or Warwick Thornton’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country (2017), none have portrayed the trauma quite like this film, which veers into the abstract and avant-garde.   

The first thing that stands out is the degree of artifice, using a hyper-saturated color scheme that places this outside all boundaries of reality, living instead in a world of dreams or myth, set in the vast emptiness of a surreal desert landscape, revealing a troubled relationship that is immediately at odds with each other, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair requiring full-time care and an Aboriginal caretaker who is none too pleased with her role, where the only real action to speak of is wheeling her to the outdoor outhouse to do her business, waiting impatiently, having a smoke, occasionally drenching herself in water from the oppressive heat, dreaming of faraway places, reading a brochure about South Molle Island, where once sacred Aboriginal land has become a tourist resort destination.  This uneasy relationship of co-dependency is at the heart of the film, with photographs on the mantelpiece suggesting this is her adoptive mother, with recurring black and white flashbacks that establish a longstanding relationship, yet what’s most provocative is the aural sound design, including recorded sounds of screaming during a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, forcing viewers to contend with an internalized trauma that largely goes unspoken and unrecognized.  Drawing from a couple of Australian cultural landmarks, the film pays reference to the Charles Chauvel film JEDDA (1955), released in the UK as JEDDA, THE UNCIVILISED, notable for being the first to star two Aboriginal actors in the leading roles, while also the first Australian feature to be shot in color.  Made during a time when it was Australian law to remove Aboriginal children from their homes and place them in white foster families, the film follows the travails of Jedda, an Aboriginal child whose mother died in childbirth while delivering her, raised by a white woman in a white world with no regard for her real ancestry, setting the stage for a tragic intersection of colliding cultures.  Moffat’s poetic work challenges the underlying premise of Chauvel’s film suggesting Aboriginals are primitive, seen wrestling with crocodiles, living in a world that resembles the jungles of King Kong (1933).  The second influence is Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira (Albert Namatjira - Artists Profile - Cooee Art), whose work saturates the coloring and the light of the film (more can be found here:  The Heritage of Namatjira: The watercolourists of Central ...), an assimilated artist who was himself separated from his family at the age of 13 and sent to live in Hermannsburg Mission run by white Lutheran missionaries, becoming the first prominent Aboriginal artist to work in a western idiom.  His western-influenced watercolors of the outback bore a significant difference from the abstract symbols and designs of traditional Aboriginal art, yet his own tragic life reflected the harsh realities of racism, a celebrity selling out exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney during the late 1930’s, becoming the most popular Australian painter of his time, perhaps even in Australian history, earning a sizeable income, but as an Aboriginal he was not allowed to buy property or own a home, so he ended up living in poverty, becoming a subject of public outrage.  Australia eventually passed a law granting him full citizenship in 1957, which allowed him to vote, own land, build a house, and even buy alcohol, which was his ultimate undoing, as while he was allowed to drink, other Aboriginals were not, eventually arrested and charged with supplying alcohol to an Aboriginal person.  This conflict of Aboriginal custom, where everything was expected to be shared, and Australian law, which restricted alcohol solely to one individual, led to his imprisonment, released after a few months for humanitarian reasons, but he died a premature death shortly afterwards at the age of 57.  The irony is not lost that it was his citizenship, issued a full decade before citizenship was granted to the rest of the Indigenous population from the 1967 referendum, that prevented him from living long enough to reap the benefits, as up until 1967, Aboriginals in Australia were not viewed by the government as human and were not even counted in the nationwide Census.    

The film has an unusual opening, featuring Aboriginal singer Jimmy Little dressed in a suit and vest singing a mainstream song about how God will answer our “phone” prayers, a hit record that topped the charts in Australia, Jimmy Little - Royal Telephone [Bandstand 1963] - YouTube (3:02), a song of faith that recognizes the influence of Christianity on Indigenous families.  Little and Namatjira were extremely popular figures that helped change the way Australians perceived Aboriginal people, where it is no accident that Moffat chose two assimilated Indigenous artists to be placed in such prominent positions in her film.  Much like the photogenic sensibility of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) released the following year, both artists understand the deeply affecting quality of photography, where every frame of the film is imbued with the compositional qualities of a still life.  For them, filmmaking is that profound intersection between sound, image, art, history, and personal experience, literally merging them into a unique artform.  Moffat’s choice to present the film in a stagy, theatrical manner is intentional, as the cliché’d Australian film has an obsession with photographing real landscapes, instead exploring themes of being trapped and oppressed by one’s personal experiences, revealing the difficulties involved in transcending these cultural limitations.  The caretaker in the film is played by Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, who is a stand-in for the director, as the film embodies her own cultural separation issues.  A commentary on aging and loss, the contrast between the two individuals is stark, an old, withered white woman (Agnes Hardwick) on the verge of dying, who is toothless and may already be blind, wearing a prosthetic hand, viewed as totally helpless, and her daughter, who clearly doesn’t want to be there, but she is performing her obligatory family duties, reflecting back at earlier times together, where a sullen Aboriginal child is being scrubbed by a white woman and placed in a typical middle class party dress, offering no further comment, allowing the images to speak for themselves, where the singlemost aspect of the experience is unrelenting trauma and pain, which is never explained, yet is inherently revealing, exposing the difficulties of coping with the situation, at first tenderly, but growing more aggressive, offering small hope of any spiritual redemption.  Little is seen again near the end of the film, but his voice is muted, representative of the silence of Indigenous history, while the song is also representative of cultural assimilation, as he’s dressed as a white man, singing words more reflective of white culture, where assimilation is seen as a means for survival, creating a psychological fracture or divide, expressed through a curious montage of audio and visual disorientation, at times resorting to radical choices, where earlier images have been disassembled, as if waiting to be reconstructed and remembered anew, where each frame in the film is haunted by sound.  Other than Little singing the song, there is no dialogue in the film, accentuating the importance of the surreal sound design, moving from the emotional extremes of loving and hating, such as the gleeful hysteria generated from the sound of a whip (contrasted against her mother sleeping, jumping convulsively with each crack of the whip), then moving quickly to the quiet tenderness of washing the old woman’s feet, both quietly humming “Onward Christian Soldiers,” a song associated with missionaries.  The emptiness of the exterior landscape couldn’t be more pronounced, suggesting the emotional disconnect between mother and daughter, where another flashback sequence reveals a startled child at the beach momentarily losing track of her mother, suddenly finding herself all alone, becoming frightened and distraught, sobbing in pain, where Little’s soothing song is shown to be little more than an illusion.  This situation repeats itself at the end, with the daughter lying in a fetal position on the floor reduced to infantile cries of a baby, where a lost emotional connection speaks volumes, leaving one paralyzed in fear.  

Patty Mills Opens Up About Racism and Social Injustice  NBA basketball player describes the effects of racism and growing up black in Australia, August 2020, YouTube (30:13)

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser

Baroness Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter

Director Charlotte Zwerin in the music studio

Thelonious Monk (left to right), with trumpeters Howard McGhee and Roy Eldridge, and Minton’s Playhouse club manager Teddy Hill, September 1947

Acclaimed photographer Art Kane’s iconic 1958 shot in Harlem, despite an early scheduled photo shoot, late-night jazz musicians showed up in pristine attire to pose for the photograph

THELONIOUS MONK:  STRAIGHT, NO CHASER        B+                  

USA  (90 mi)  1988  d:  Charlotte Zwerin

I’m famous.  Ain’t that a bitch.

—Thelonious Monk

From the co-director of the Maysles’ documentary on the Rolling Stones at Altamont, Gimme Shelter (1970), the film is a compilation of pre-existing material following the discovery of a large archive of footage in the 1980’s, including 14 hours of Thelonious Monk concert performances from Atlanta, New York, and Europe, filmed in 1967-68 by Michael and Christian Blackwood under a West German television commission for a one-hour broadcast that aired only in Germany, with the footage languishing in storage for nearly two decades afterwards, described by film producer Bruce Ricker as “the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz.”  Bringing in Zwerin to film some additional material, she received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, though largely financed by executive producer Clint Eastwood through his own production company.  Providing a rare window into the soul of an artist, it contains some of the only footage ever filmed of Monk both onstage and off, exhibiting his quirky personality where he was a prolific composer of 70 songs, the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington’s one thousand, but almost pathologically introverted, fearful of sharing the sheet music with anyone, including his band, who went on tour blind, never seeing the musical arrangements ahead of time, only getting a chance to view the score on the plane flying to Europe where they hastily copied their parts.  Even during rehearsals, other musicians curiously questioned Monk what key or what notes they were expected to play, filling in their notes, where it was an incredibly difficult process to pull specific information out of him, as he was frustratingly uncommunicative, yet during performances he was in total command, playing with a previously unseen ferocity, literally attacking the keys with his fingers, often hitting the same key with multiple fingers, using percussive strikes and angular sounds, keeping his fingers flat, not rounded or bent, where it’s hard not to be impressed with how rhythmically interesting Monk’s solos are, balancing sound and space while also perfecting playing runs and arpeggios, playing with almost mathematical precision, yet defying traditional conventions of Western-European music, becoming something else altogether, claiming “Just because you’re not a drummer doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.”  Note how different the same music sounds when played by other pianists, such as Tommy Flanagan in duo with Barry Harris, making it smoother, more pleasant sounding, and easier for customers to appreciate.  No one played like Monk, who was the real deal, not meant for casual listening, viewed with reverence by other musicians who called him “the high priest of bebop,” where his music was not initially understood by the public, as he was not a commercial draw and didn’t get the recognition of other major jazz artists, refusing to play what the public wanted to hear, or in a style they were accustomed to, instead embarking on entirely new ground.  According to saxophonist Sonny Rollins who rehearsed with Monk while still in high school, “I remember guys would look at his music [charts] and say: ‘We can’t play this’, but by the end of the rehearsal everybody was playing it anyway.”  Taking what he could from all the legendary piano players that came before him, like the Harlem stride style of James P. Johnson and Alberta Simmons, both of whom lived nearby in the same San Juan Hill neighborhood (where the Lincoln Center stands today), incorporating the modern jazz twists of the great band pianists like Fats Waller, Art Tatum, or Bud Powell, and the professionalism of Duke Ellington, yet heavily influenced by the swing era growing up as a teenager in the 30’s, Monk developed a unique style all his own, refusing to sound like any of them, with oddly angled rhythms and spacing, initially viewed as weird and eccentric, not fully embraced, where it took time before his music was taken seriously, inventing atonal chordal progressions, offering something profoundly different.

Monk is an original who is largely self-taught, though he received Julliard training, where his musical education was sitting alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, mentored by Coleman Hawkins along with pianist Mary Lou Williams, who collaborated and befriended the new crop of younger bebop musicians, yet Monk transcended labels, known for the complexity of his compositions and his persistent perfectionism, writing songs that musicians wanted to play, where 'Round Midnight is by far the most covered jazz song written by a jazz artist (with 1,750 versions, according to one recent count, described as the “National Anthem of Jazz”).  Today his compositions reside in a world of high art, taken seriously enough that his music is currently taught in nearly all college music departments and conservatories, recognized as part of the canon of 20th century American music.  Monk had an aversion to talking about his work, allowing the piano to speak for itself, where even the best jazz musicians of the era found his music challenging, often leaving whites in the business, like his manager Harry Colomby, or legendary recording producer Teo Macero, somewhat speechless in his presence, as respect was a given, but he was a difficult man to understand, as evidenced by a rehearsal session with Macero when Monk wanted to hear the playback, but Macero wasn’t recording, still engaged in sound checks — an example of their work together, Oska T. (Live) (Lincoln Center) - YouTube (13:19).  The performance footage identifies each and every song played, most are original compositions, but other standards are thrown into the mix, where over the course of the film viewers develop an appreciation for his style, as we’re continually treated to the best seat in the house, where we’re able to see his feet keeping tempo.  Monk had a peculiar habit of abruptly standing up and twirling around in circles, as if to his own internal rhythm, also occurring in public at crowded airports, causing confused looks, which is a peculiar sight to see.  Using a cinéma vérité style, Zwerin offers interview footage from Monk’s son, T.S. Monk (Toot), a drummer and bandleader in his own right, who reveals intimate details about his father, suggesting early signs of mental illness, as there were times that he grew aloof and distanced to such an extreme degree that he no longer recognized his son, a powerful memory that has not lost any of its impact, especially frightening to a child.  While the severity eventually led to hospitalizations, he was never officially diagnosed with any mental illness syndromes, conditions that went largely undiagnosed in black communities during that era, though his behavior certainly resembles bipolar disorders.  According to his mother, Monk’s wife Nellie, these episodes began in the 50’s, but grew more frequent in the late 60’s, with Monk disappearing from the music scene altogether by the mid 70’s when he simply stopped playing.  Nellie traveled with him on the road, known for her kindness and generosity, bringing along her juices and special remedies, taking care of him while helping him pick out what to wear, though he’s almost always seen in an oversized coat wearing an unusual hat, often resorting to sunglasses.  Like many of the musicians of the era, he was a non-stop smoker, smoking even while playing, incredibly setting the cigarette down on one of the lower keys while he continued playing.  What stands out in this footage is not only the constant presence of abundant sweat dripping off his face, but also the old, beaten-down pianos that Monk used in those dingy clubs, with dirt and scratches all over the wooden frame, hardly the highly polished prototype that musicians use today, where some classical musicians actually have their pianos travel with them on the road. 

While the intimacy with the music and the musicians is astonishing, including tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who seemed to anticipate the same mental wavelength Monk was on, it’s important to realize that Monk was viewed as a rebel, as an outsider who broke all the rules, creating a sonic disturbance no one else has been able to duplicate, which is why his reaction to becoming world famous seemingly overnight is priceless, as it comes out of nowhere.  It doesn’t change who he is or how he views himself, but it certainly changes how others view him, finally getting the recognition he deserves.  According to Monk, “You know anybody could play a composition like Body and Soul and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong.  It’s making it sound right that’s not easy.”  The mainstreaming of Monk in the mid-50’s was part of a larger transformation of the jazz public overall, which seemed to coincide with a 6-month residency of Monk’s band in the summer of 1957 at the Five Spot Jazz Club in the Bowery neighborhood of New York, between the East and West Village, a quartet featuring John Coltrane on tenor sax, which led to an outpouring of critical acclaim, where by the end of the decade the public was embracing his strands of modernism.  A year later with Johnny Griffin replacing Coltrane on sax, Monk was the talk of the town, curiously playing before almost completely white audiences, Misterioso (Live At The Five Spot / August 7, 1958) (10:54).  By 1964, he was one of only four jazz musicians to ever grace the cover of Time magazine, followed by several overseas tours.  Certainly the most bizarre aspect of the film is the presence of the Jazz Baroness, his white patron and friend Baroness Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter, the youngest Rothschild daughter, at the time the wealthiest family in the world, something of a rebellious spirit of her own, fighting for the French Resistance during the war, abandoning her husband and five children, though what may have drawn her to Monk was her own father’s erratic mood swings and eventual suicide.  Befriending many prominent jazz musicians, hosting jam sessions in her swank hotel suite and escorting them to clubs in her Bentley, often interceding on behalf of musicians facing legal problems, she was instrumental in securing the return of Monk’s cabaret card, a regulated license to perform in Manhattan nightclubs after it had been suspended for six years due to questionable drug-related charges, paving the way for his Five Spot appearance.  An aspiring young artist John Cassavetes was in New York during this cultural renaissance, meeting Charlie Mingus who scored his film Shadows (1959), while modeling a character named “the Countess” after the Baronness in Too Late Blues (1961).  However it became something of a scandal when Charlie Parker died in her hotel room in 1955, asked to leave the hotel by the management, relocating to Central Park West, where she was again asked to leave, ending up in a sumptuous estate in Weehawken, New Jersey, overrun by more than 300 cats, seen in all their glory in the film, with a view across the Hudson of the magnificent New York skyline.  It was here that Monk would spend the last six years of his life in seclusion before succumbing to a massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1982, dying prematurely at the age of 64.  His open casket funeral service was filmed for posterity, with both Nellie and the Baroness awkwardly sitting side by side, with Monk's Mood from The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings (7:53) with John Coltrane playing over the footage.  A strong-willed, free-thinking artist and a true originator, he will forever be remembered for going against the grain and asserting his own independence, where this uniquely intimate profile offers him a platform of jazz immortality, with this film selected to the Film Registry in 2017, Complete National Film Registry Listing - Library of Congress.   

13th

 Angela Davis

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich with director Ava DuVernay

Michelle Alexander

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon

President Ronald Reagan

stills from Birth of a Nation (1915)

Angela Davis from a 1972 prison interview

New York Congressman Charles Rangel

Bryan Stevenson, lawyer, social justice activist, and founder, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative

United States Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker

Kalief Browder

The Supreme Court Building, engraved with "Equal Justice Under Law"

Director Ava DuVernay

13^th           A               

USA  (100 mi)  2016  d: Ava DuVernay

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
—The 13^th Amendment, passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, ratified by the states on December 6, 1865

Since the very public police murder of George Floyd and the massive Black Lives Matter protest demonstrations around the world that have followed, this film, more than any other, should be considered mandatory viewing, more relevant now than in the year it was released on cable TV’s Netflix, which was immediately prior to the Trump presidential election.  Described as 150 years in the making, offering context to this current moment in time, this is the definitive film in documenting the shameful history of racism in America, investigating the issue of mass incarceration in the United States in relation to the 13^th Amendment while providing ample evidence of mistreating and criminalizing black men, reframing history from a black perspective that is not taught in schools or contained in history books, yet offering a culturally impactive point of view, as it clearly draws a continuous line and shows how racism has evolved unabated since the Civil War supposedly freed the slaves, offering a disturbing yet highly evocative picture of just how we got here.  Some archival footage is graphically horrifying, like the picture of an elderly gentleman being taunted and harassed simply for walking down the street, repeatedly knocked down by a mob of white attackers, acts that repeat themselves during Trump rallies where he urges his followers to be particularly rough on black protesters, seen being spit on, kicked, and pushed around, with Trump reminiscing how this used to be such common practice “back in the good old days,” like unleashing the dogs in Birmingham, with the director skillfully connecting the past to the present.  Much of this film will feel singed and imprinted on the brain, using recurring rap and hip-hop songs as transitions, tracing the roots to Reconstruction era misuse of the 13^th Amendment, to lynchings and the Jim Crow era, and to the coded language of law and order, which means something entirely different to black and white communities, all affecting the current policies of mass incarceration of black people.  One significant factor the films fails to address is the incarceration of black women, with the numbers rising substantially since the making of the film, while it also stays away from the racial disparities that exist for those prisoners on Death Row.  Former President Obama opens the film by announcing that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population, a statistic that flies in the face of “The land of the free,” where a disproportionate majority of those imprisoned are black.  While there are a wide range of talking points, using interviews with many notable experts, scholars, civil rights leaders, politicians, and activists, as well as prominent opponents, offering a range of opinion that is not over anyone’s head but feels easily understandable despite the complexity of the subject, none are more prominent than Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (2012), whose expertise paints a picture going back to the Civil War, finding a loophole in the 13^th Amendment, as slavery ended for all practical purposes, “except for those convicted of a crime.”  The Southern economy was decimated after the war, made worse by the fact all the free labor from slavery was suddenly emancipated, so Southern states devised a strategy of criminalizing minor offenses, then rounding up and arresting blacks with a vengeance afterwards, often for minor charges like vagrancy or loitering, imprisoned if they could not pay the fines, but once incarcerated the State was free to exploit the fruits of their labor, institutionalizing a practice known as convict leasing, or forced penal servitude, forcing prisoners to do the backbreaking plantation work done by former slaves.  The practice was extremely profitable, in 1898, for instance, 73% of Alabama’s entire annual state revenue came from convict leasing.  In effect, this systematic loophole allowed States to profit from an unwritten form of slavery even after it was abolished, mostly targeting blacks who were sent to field work on chain-gangs.  The documentary film THE FARM:  ANGOLA, USA (1998) reveals the largest maximum-security prison in the United States is known as Angola, named after the area in Africa that provided the slave labor, situated on an old slave plantation in Louisiana, overwhelmingly populated by black inmates and staffed by a white administration, with inmates paid 4 cents an hour to pick cotton out in the hot sun while white overseers on horseback with long rifles guard against escapes.  Generations of black men have been trapped by this system, with Mississippi’s Parchman Farm penitentiary arguably the most notorious abuser, continuing this practice until WWII, thoroughly documented by Wall Street reporter Douglas Blackmon in his 2008 book Slavery by Another Name, suggesting slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, but instead persisted well into the 20^th century. 

DuVernay also gives a master class dissertation on the mythology of black criminality in D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), a blockbuster hit that had an incredible impact on the nation both artistically and historically, viewed at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, who revered the film, but this set the tone for the stereotypical myths of how blacks are perceived in America today, particularly black men, as they were demonized as animals, rapists, and criminals, continuing a pattern of whites associating them with criminalization, where in the film the Ku Klux Klan actually comes to the rescue of a virginal white girl to save the day, like the arrival of the cavalry, the heroes on horseback in white robes.  The burning of a cross was never part of their history until D. W. Griffith liked the cinematic effect, revitalizing a lackluster organization that suddenly experienced a resurgence, introducing a new reign of terror across the South, where black homes were burned, black men lynched openly in public, where the prevalence of historical photographs come from whites who were there either witnessing or participating in these atrocities.  Griffith’s depiction, however, lit the fuse, openly declaring black men are criminals, a perception that exists even today, with some like the Fraternal Order of Police, but also several prominent elected officials, including Senators and a President viewing the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist group, though they ardently practice non-violence.  These same officials are silent on the police brutality that is aimed against black victims, attributing all the aggressiveness to blacks, who are still viewed in their eyes as criminals, even when there is no evidence whatsoever of threatening behavior.  George Floyd, for instance, showed no signs of police resistance, but fully cooperated.  Let’s not forget, Dr. King and his peaceful protesters were similarly viewed as “troublemakers” and “threatening.”  In the face of all rational reason, where does that mindset come from?  Are we placing too much significance on a movie, you may ask?  John Ford did the same thing with his racist treatment of Indians as savages in his westerns.  What’s significant is that Griffith, like Ford, are both considered among the greatest American filmmakers that ever lived, given substantial weight in instilling moral values through each new generation from their movies, with each making films for more than half a century.  Nothing exists in a vacuum, but is part of an extended pattern of principles developed by earlier generations setting the stage for this moment in time.  Displaying well-researched clinical precision, DuVernay traces the root of the racist vitriol to Reconstruction, followed by D. W. Griffith’s immensely popular BIRTH OF A NATION, a box office bonanza that relentlessly dehumanizes blacks, instilling irrational fear, where this same perception led us to the 90’s term “superpredator,” with blacks continually perceived as menacing threats.  The Black Lives Matter group was originated by three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, formed after the acquittal of the murderer of a 17-year old black teenager Trayvon Martin, identified as George Zimmerman, an overly zealous neighborhood watch leader who actually followed him through the neighborhood, viewing him as suspicious solely by his race, thinking he doesn’t belong, before confronting him with a gun and shooting him, claiming self-defense afterwards, though he was the pursuer with the gun.  In Florida they have a stand your ground law, which allows use of a weapon if you feel threatened, so police did not initially charge him with a crime.  After a public outcry, Zimmerman was arrested, but he was acquitted of all charges at trial, which makes little sense, since Zimmerman was clearly the aggressor.  This typically describes what is commonly viewed as racial injustice, as whites routinely kill blacks with impunity and there are no consequences for their actions, as you can literally get away with murder.  The number of unarmed black men who followed in these same footsteps go back to the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year old boy who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman (who years later acknowledged she fabricated her testimony), his body badly mutilated afterwards, yet his mother insisted upon an open casket funeral, as she wanted the entire world to see just how one human being was savagely defiled.  There are 41 names of martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial (Civil Rights Martyrs), to which we may add Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Freddie Gray, Stephon Clark, Sam DuBose, Tyre King, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Reginald Thomas Jr, LaQuan McDonald, Eric Courtney Harris, George Floyd, Akai Gurley, Tanisha Anderson, Sandra Bland, Breanna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, and the list goes on of countless more black individuals who have unjustly died at the hands of police.   

 Mass Incarceration Can't Be Fixed by Legislation ... - Bloomberg   Michelle Alexander in a 2016 interview

I don’t view mass incarceration as just a problem of politics or policy, I view it as a profound moral and spiritual crisis as well.  I think that racial justice in this country will remain a distant dream as long as we think that it can be achieved simply through rational policy discussions. If we take a purely technocratic approach to these issues and strip them of their moral and spiritual dimensions, I think we’ll just keep tinkering and tinkering and fail to realize that all of these issues really have more to do with who we are individually and collectively, and what we believe we owe one another, and how we ought to treat one another as human beings.

These are philosophical questions, moral questions, theological questions, as much as they are questions about the costs and benefits of using one system of punishment or policing practice over another.

The important word here is criminalization, as blacks merely by their skin color generate a fear in whites, where they are typically viewed as criminals.  Politicians have exploited this stereotype, using crime as a stand-in for race, with Michelle Alexander reminding us that Ronald Reagan politicized race when he criminalized drug offenses, implementing a war on drugs, shifting what was originally perceived as a health issue to a criminal issue, going on a Nixonian law and order tirade about locking up drug offenders, who were viewed as the scourge of the earth, yet only black offenders were targeted, as police avoided drug raids in white neighborhoods.  DuVernay produces an audio tape of Reagan’s Republican political strategist Lee Atwater acknowledging their intention was to highlight crime in the eyes of the public, shifting the blame to blacks who would be the ones most adversely affected, suggesting this was by design, part of the Republican Party's appeal to southern white conservatives, a racist Southern strategy appealing to white voters by highlighting the criminalization of blacks, initiating a renewed incarceration of black men, where at the time the prisons only contained about 200,000 inmates in 1972, yet those numbers rapidly started to rise, increasing each decade.  They skyrocketed, however, with Bill Clinton’s signing of the Omnibus Crime Bill (originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, by the way), which provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in discretionary funding for police prevention programs, which led to the militarization of police, using weapons of war to fight neighborhood crime, while also mandating a three-strikes provision addressing repeat offenders who would be sentenced to life in prison upon their third offense.  When crack cocaine entered the picture, predominately distributed in urban black neighborhoods because small quantities were cheap, but overwhelmingly addictive, while the powdered substance was predominately in the white suburbs.  In an epic tale of disproportional racial injustice, the sentence for one ounce of crack cocaine was the same as 100 ounces of powdered cocaine, so not only were blacks being locked up in record numbers, comprising one-third of the prison population that reached a staggering 2.3 million in 2016 (with 90% of those in state or local jails, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016 | Prison Policy Initiative), but they were sent away for long periods of time, basically disrupting the family concept, as one out of every three black men was sent to prison, while whites in the suburbs were getting away with a slap on the wrist.  According to U.S. Senator from New Jersey Cory Booker, “We now have more African-Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850’s.”  DuVernay also exposes the influence of ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that merges corporate interests into the political process, giving them a weighted advantage, where they’re literally able to write bills that are advantageous to their own profits, which led to the growth of for-profit prisons and massive incarcerations, including a cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms, including immigrant detention centers along the border, which are prisons for profit, known for minimally low health standards and atrociously poor food. Somehow, it was not enough to send people to prisons, but they had to suffer there through inhumane treatment, where punishment became systematically integrated into incarceration, an outgrowth of ALEC, along with those crime bills signed by Clinton, and the Stand Your Ground gun laws, now expanded to 30 states.  While offering a sobering look at our corrupt prison and judicial systems, perhaps the singlemost egregious offense exposing exactly what’s wrong is the case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx high school student who was imprisoned for three years, two of them in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, without being convicted of a crime.  He was accused at 16 of stealing a backpack, and his family was unable to afford his bail, set at $3,000, so he languished in prison.  95% of the elected prosecutors in America are white, who typically make deals with these young kids, getting them to plead guilty to lesser crimes that they didn’t commit, simply to be released from prison.  Browder refused a plea deal, convinced he was innocent, suggesting the police even invented the backpack, giving his case a certain notoriety, yet his prison treatment was horribly inhumane, not at all in accordance with his alleged crime, as he was just a kid sent to adult prison, routinely attacked and beaten up by prison guards and treated mercilessly, attempting suicide on several occasions.  Upon his release, when all charges were dropped, he was permanently damaged by the abuses he endured, attempting to end his life several times before finally succeeding two years later at the age of 22.  What did this kid do to deserve that treatment?  To expose just how backwards our system of justice has become, you’re treated worse if you’re innocent and poor than if you’re guilty and rich, where ingrained into the judicial sentencing is the social class of the offender, where being black, exactly as envisioned by D. W. Griffith, still retains an association with criminality in the eyes of whites.

“The Black Lives Matter Movement has to be understood in the context of the historical legacy of the ill treatment of blacks by the police and the criminal justice system and American political and social institutions more generally. That legacy is a fact.”

—Daniel Nagin, 2014 recipient of the Stockholm Prize on Criminology, an elected fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Police, Violence, and Data: The Black Lives Matter Movement ...