Fight the power

Noel Vera

Charles Burnett's "Selma, Lord Selma" isn't on the level of his
masterpieces, "Killer of Sheep" or "To Sleep With Anger." He's out
to depict one struggle out of many in the war for black equality in
the '60s--a crucial one, but he's not trying to transform it, to
show it through the same prismatic lenses he used to such great
effect in "Killer" and "Sleep." The demarcation lines are clearly
drawn, there is little ambiguity here: it's blacks and the few
sympathetic whites helping them vs. the predominantly racist white
community of Selma, Alabama.

That said, and considering that this is of all things a Disney TV
production, it's still a remarkable piece of work. We get to know
the main protagonists quite well--Jonathan Daniels (Mackenzie
Astin), the seminarian who comes to Selma wanting to help; Sheyann
Webb (Jurnee Smollett) the lovely 11 year old girl through which the
story is told; and even Martin Luther King Jr. who, as played by
Clifton Powell, is a modest, warmly humorous man fretting over the
people he leads into danger.

The story is not altogether fresh--we have the usual drama about
peoples' uprisings, and of children trying to convince their parents
to allow them to pursue their beliefs, and there's some preciousness
in having a precocious child tell the story (it's based on a book
written by the actual Webb). But Burnett brings to the material his
inimitable restraint, not so much good taste (something I'd sooner
accuse Clint Eastwood of having) as a sort of simplicity of
approach, a grace that manages to transform any subject, however
idealistic or potentially mawkish.

And then there's Burnett's attention to detail. The first march
fails, of course, because King is needed elsewhere, so the police
are free to beat the horde of uppity blacks that have crossed the
bridge on their way to Montgomery (didn't matter if the crowd
included women and children); a black man is killed by police
officers in the middle of a riot, but even that's all right--the
officers were only doing their duty. Killing a white man, however,
is a different proposition--it has to be done on a deserted street,
with no witnesses, and even then, the repercussions are enormous.

This is different from the actual recorded death of said white man,
a change for which I can think of only two reasons: Burnett may have
felt the historical death too melodramatic to "play" in his film--
the man saves a black woman from a shotgun blast--or he simply
didn't have the budget to film it. Whatever the motive, Burnett does
seem well acquainted with the calculus used by '60s America to
determine the difference in value between the life of a white and
black man.

I noticed that whites other than Daniels are barely characterized,
but this works too--we are seeing the world through black eyes,
through people who have rarely had the privilege of getting to know
many white people. From their point of view, anyone who isn't black
isn't worth knowing well, or trusting.

In the end, it's Burnett's gift for characterization that brings the
film to life: moments of despair, of sudden violence, of glorious,
unexpected hope are sharpened by the fact that we have come to know
these characters, and cared for them deeply.

That 'calculus of value' Burnett knows so well, it's equally
instructive when applied to films. "Mississippi Burning" is a
feature on roughly the same milieu, directed by a white director
with two white Hollywood stars, and it won several Oscar nominations
and is available for rent everywhere; "Selma, Lord Selma" has only
recently been made available for sale in both DVD and VHS, and has
attracted very little attention. "Burning" is chock full of
grotesque distortions, everything from having blacks stand about in
picturesque poses as helpless victims to making the FBI the hero
(?!) of the story; "Selma" is full of rich emotional and historical
detail, of the kind of poetically understated humanity that makes
you feel better about the human race as a whole (that we're capable
of this kind of moral, visual and artistic grace). Wonderful film,
absolutely.

2/24/04

("Selma Lord Selma" is available on Amazon.com)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)