BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness. 

BlacKkKlansmanUSA
4*

Director:
Spike Lee

Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel

David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin

Running time: 135 minutes

America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.

And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.

Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.

Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).

But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.

At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.

Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.

Sweet ‘n Short (1991)

While some would correctly argue that the films of Leon Schuster, South Africa’s most profitable director, have done lasting damage to the industry’s reputation, his Sweet ‘n Short was a prescient work of art.

Sweet 'n ShortSouth Africa
4*

Director:
Gray Hofmeyr

Screenwriters:
Leon Schuster

Gray Hofmeyr
Director of Photography:
James Robb

Running time: 90 minutes

I never thought I would review a Leon Schuster movie, much less do so positively. Schuster is the candid camera king of South Africa, and for the past three decades, he has barely changed his formula: Stage outrageous situations, often with a racial undertone, then reveal the prank to the victim so that everyone can have a good belly laugh at being so gullible. His films are cash cows for the South African film industry, often spending their entire run at the top of the box office charts, but no one would describe them as paragons of cinematic excellence.

And yet, in the waning days of apartheid, during the uncertain time between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Schuster wrote and played the lead in a film that used equal measures of comedy and intelligence so well that, one might reasonably argue, he played a significant role in assuaging white South Africans’ fears about the future and helped pave the way for a smooth transition to a post-apartheid era. That film was Sweet ‘n Short.

Schuster stars as the titular Sweet Coetzee, a 40-year-old TV sports broadcaster who has been with the station for half his life and recently received a service award. He spends the night celebrating, wakes up late, has to get dressed as he speeds down the highway and barely makes it to work on time before utter catastrophe strikes. Crestfallen, he takes to the casino, where he wins the jackpot, moments before an inept criminal crashes into him and sends him off to the hospital. When he wakes up, the world has changed.

Actually, it’s only South Africa, but during the apartheid years, it might as well have been the world. Most noticeably, the previous white/black hierarchy has been reversed, and in what might very well be the highlight of intellectual and comedic symbiosis in Schuster’s work, we see the country’s most famous Afrikaans news presenter, Riaan Cruywagen, read the day’s news in Zulu. It is difficult to emphasise how mind-blowing this depiction would have been to a white South African viewer in 1991.

There are many other sly additions that serve as a wink and a nod to the potential transformation that South Africans were anticipating once the whites would no longer be in power: Among others, the national rugby team’s name change from Springboks to Zambucks (Zam-Buk is a wildly popular antiseptic ointment in South Africa); the flamboyant South African “Shaka” war cry based on the New Zealand “Haka”, but with a local twist; and the renaming of the D.F. Malan Hospital in honour of the country’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Luthuli.

Given the apartheid-era Communist Party’s long-standing support for the ANC, it should come as no surprise that Russian is quite prevalent in Schuster’s depiction of the New South Africa – from businesses advertising their goods in Cyrillic to them selling the traditional ushanka fur hats. But all of this is treated with a gentle chuckle, as if Schuster is seeking to re-assure a frightened white viewership that, even if the blacks and the communists got to run the country, its warm, friendly spirit would continue to triumph, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

One particularly prescient moment of screenwriting comes at the end of the first act, when Coetzee and Alfred (Alfred Ntombela, whose filmography overlaps almost perfectly with Schuster’s), his guide in the New South Africa, attend a rugby match. The match is preceded by a breathtakingly moving rendition of a new national anthem, written by Wendy Oldfield. Because it consists of lyrics in many of South Africa’s 11 languages, it conveys the kind of unity that such a hymn ought to produce, and the pride with which all the different races at the match sing it is simply extraordinary. It should be noted that the country’s new post-apartheid anthem ultimately also contained words sung in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho.

But like so many of Schuster’s other films, Sweet ‘n Short sees him dress up in blackface for the sake of getting a laugh, albeit at the expense of whites who get easily flustered and are made to look ridiculous because they are so obviously racist. Now clearly, this is quite different from the minstrel context in the United States in that racist whites are the butt of the joke here, but one can also easily make the argument that Schuster is reinforcing particularly egregious stereotypes of blacks by giving these caricatures any airtime at all.

Tackling a serious topic at a time when there was a great deal of worry in the country, Schuster and his director and co-screenwriter, Gray Hofmeyr, succeeded in creating an insightful (even intelligent) and comforting piece of entertainment that prepared his (white) countrymen and -women for the immense political and societal changes that lay ahead. But given the major role he plays in getting South Africans to the cinema, it is an utter tragedy that Schuster’s subsequent efforts have been skewed towards a much lower common denominator.

Heart of a Lion (2013)

Dome Karukoski’s Heart of a Lion tells the gripping tale of a Finnish skinhead adapting to life with his girlfriend and her half-black son.

heart-of-a-lionFinland
4*

Director:
Dome Karukoski

Screenwriter:
Aleksi Bardy

Director of Photography:
Henri Blomberg

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Leijonasydän

Many viewers may be tired of Second World War films and choose to leave the history in the past. And yet, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the consequences of racism. It is an ideology that, albeit in a slightly different form, remained on the books in the United States in the form of segregation until the mid-1960s, and in South Africa was codified into law shortly after the National Party came to power in 1948.

Neo-Nazis, or skinheads, can be found in most countries in Europe, and their guiding philosophy usually combines ideas of “purity” from Nazism with patriotism for their particular country. The title of Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Heart of a Lion refers to the animal, found in Africa and Asia, that holds a sword above its head on Finland’s coat of arms and appears as a tattoo on the bodies of many of the country’s skinheads who proclaim their conservative intention to protect the country from change.

The problematic provenance of the symbol is an interesting point of departure for a discussion about the film, which has a skinhead character, the leader of a small pride of like-minded tattooed individuals, fall in love with Sari (Laura Birn), a woman whose son is half-black. This neo-Nazi is called Teppo (Peter Franzén), but having seen his previous love life crumble because of his commitment to defending the fatherland against imposters (anyone who doesn’t look like his idea of a true Finn), and perhaps also because of the great sex with Sari, he is willing to look the other way when his new love breaks the news to him that her son is called Rhamadhani (Yusufa Sidibeh).

Despite what we may be expecting, the film is filled with examples of love, all with neo-Nazi leader Teppo at the nexus, as his relationships – sometimes tender, sometimes fraught with challenges – with Sari, Rhamadhani and his own brother, Harri (Jasper Pääkkönen), inject positive feelings into a storyline that could easily have settled for cheap thrills and violence.

Not that Heart of a Lion lacks violence or aggressive characters, but the overarching idea seems to be reconciliation rather than destruction, and of course it helps our capacity for empathy when Teppo seems to share this desire.

But Karukoski has to step very carefully among the landmines of empathy in a film dealing with this subject matter, as it would be entirely inappropriate to care too much about Teppo or his brash younger brother. Teppo may be conflicted, and Harri may be torn between affection for Teppo and a need to hold onto the seeming security provided by his band of macho neo-Nazis, but although Teppo comes to accept Rhamadhani, he continues to show an affinity for an avowed kind of pro-Finnish fascism for a large part of the film.

Karukoski and lead actor Franzén approach the character of Teppo with extreme circumspection towards his credible development, and their success fuels the viewer’s appreciation of the storytelling here. Teppo is certainly a multifaceted character, but Harri shows signs of even greater complexity: He is an upstart and a provocateur, but when push comes to shove, he protects his brother, even when their ideas about the races are no longer alike. It is unfortunate that the other skinheads are much less well-rounded, as they mostly serve the purpose of a foil to the two brothers’ journey towards a relative liberation from the Nazist ideals.

One particularly puzzling detail is why the skinheads write their graffiti in English, a language that certainly is not part of the proud Finnish traditions they pretend to espouse and protect. In one scene, director of photography Henri Blomberg’s camera even goes in for a closeup on the back of one of the skinheads’ skulls to let us better see the tattoo that reads “White Power”. This English term suggests these Finnish troublemakers see themselves as an extension of the subculture that includes far-right extremists in the English-speaking world. However, none of this is ever discussed, making our comprehension of the way they see themselves rather problematic.

The story itself is very involving, although, oddly, Sari disappears for long stretches of time, apparently without being visited by her boyfriend or her son while she is receiving care at the hospital. It also contains several comical moments that counterbalance the inherent drama. Although Blomberg never shows off with his camera, there is one scene, shot late at night in a single take during a rampage on a few Gypsies, and the violence contained in that unedited bubble of a moment is upsetting and clearly communicated with Karukoski’s choice of shot.

Heart of a Lion is a strong, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable film about love, pride and prejudice, and as relevant as ever.

Viewed at the Festroia International Film Festival 2014