Portrait of a Black Man
Teza Directed by Haile Gerima Runtime: 140 min.
Death at a Funeral Directed by Neil LaBute Runtime: 90 min.
Letters from Fontainhas Criterions Pedro Costa DVD box set
Let the coincidental openings of Death at a Funeral and Teza start a healthy dialogue on the generally dismissive way modern film culture treats movies about black people. The sudden remaking of the 2008 British comedy Death at a Funeral into an African-American burlesque indicates a readiness to see black folks in a trivial way. This contrasts the medias scant regard of Teza, Haile Gerimas first film since the 1992 slavery epic Sankofa. In the modern-day Teza, Gerima opposes the utter triviality of movies about black peoples lives. Hes made a deeply-felt drama about the complexity of the diaspora experiencea connection to Africa, the Mother continent, that gets totally ignored in most films we see, but has been perversely distorted in the work of Portuguese cineaste Pedro Costa, whose largely unseen films about Africa exiles have received almost hallowed acclaim culminating in an unusual new DVD box set from Criterion.
In Gerimas Teza, Anberber (Aaron Arefe) returns to his Ethiopian village as a broken, haunted man. After a long stint in Europe among counterculture Socialists and other Ethiopian exiles, hes still an intransigent thinker concerned about solving the problems of Ethiopia life. Tragedy overshadows Anberber coming home to a country embroiled in civil war, expending its young men and testing the faith of its elders, including his illiterate mother. This dilemma is an indication of Gerimas largerobscure, but crucialstory: the black intellectuals tragic fate in interacting with the West.
It takes an exorcism with a local shaman to reveal Anberbers physical and psychic damage: a series of flashbacks to the 1970s detail his rebellious years in West Germany, even a brief mission in Addis Ababa after Emperor Haile Selassie is deposed. Anberbers clique of Ethiopian exiles, including Tesfaye (Takelech Beyene), his best friend and political motivator, unsuccessfully attempted to promote a new black Socialist government but bloody confusion sent them back to Europe. Exiled once again, they see the fall of the Berlin Wall and new political changes that exclude the best interests of immigrants.
Anberber and Tesfayes names translate as Warrior and Hope, respectively, yet their terrible fortunes almost parallel the lives of African immigrants from Cape Verde who wind up derelicts and drug addicts in the Lisbon neighborhood Fontainhas that Costa depicts in the films that comprise the Criterion box set Letters From Fontainhas. Costas exiles dont have an intellectual background or much of a cultural tradition; theyre trapped in the sinkhole of Western colonialism. Costas movies fetishize this disaster into art-cinema etudes. This isnt much different from the peculiarity of Death at a Funeral. That project puts black performers in the hamster cage of one of the most idiotic British films of recent years, essentially trapping them in a template that replicates humiliating, predetermined, cultural expectation.
Teza, however, attempts large-scale political and dramatic explication of his exiled blacks geographical, spiritual and political roots. While Teza tracks Anberbers personal path, it also portrays an entire cultures uneasy shift between feudalism and communism, but Costas films simply concentrate on the stasis of post-colonial urban decay. Zombie-like characters inhabit miserable social conditions (poverty, drugs, AIDS) that Costa slants into a new existential complacency. The political indifference that prevails in contemporary film culture is newly indulged by Costas artiness. His stylelong takes, chiaroscuro compositions, minimal movementis a highly refined decadence. It allows guilt-free detachment from the reality of his characters and the many non-professional actors he enlists. This indifference is what Gerima contests, both in Tezas expansive story (many references to Mussolinis destructive campaign against Ethiopia ironically suggests that the films family narrative is as complex as The Best of Youth) and in his effort to promote Teza to a culture that doesnt normally grant esteem to stories of black experience.
Costas films are never subjected to the bad taste of racial recognition that Gerima takes as a given. Luc Santes accompanying Criterion essay curiously ponders, Can we rise to the level of [a character] extending mercy and pronouncing sentence, despite our not having earned her experience? Santes mystification contradicts the basic purpose of art, which is to relay the experience of others as our own. Costas petrified art stays remote while Gerimas griot-like unfolding of stories within stories manages the marvelous art of connecting Anberbers struggle to the desperation of all others. A generational tree image has biblical import and dimension. An extraordinary address by an old Selassie loyalist to Anberbers young upstarts conveys brotherhood. It contrasts Costas gnomic figures, who sleepwalk in an infuriating stupor.
From now on, can we dispense with the inane argument that black people deserve to be shown in various (usually demeaning) depictions? Such ignoranceand acceptance of the racisms status quofavors movies that repeat black stereotypes whether rowdy upwardly mobile blacks or Lisbons zoned-out and destitute. In Death at a Funeral, the cast of colored clowns offers no revelation. Its business as usual, but not even as authentically as the 2001 Kingdom Come, since the ripped-off British farce about a patriarchs burial that triggers the disclosure of family secrets doesnt probe the depth of lost identity and blended-family chaos. While good actors like Martin Lawrence, Columbus Short and Zoe Saldana prove their expertise, theyre way short of the roots-deep recognition. Despite a few more laffs than the British original, the cast seems to be operating on auto-pilotthe sort of regular clownishness that lets director Neil LaBute make his standard implication that nothing in (black) American life is to be taken seriously.
Gerima vividly accounts for the pain in post-colonial living, Costa anesthetizes sorrow with aesthetics and LaBute numbs reality with crude humor. These three intersecting film events place contemporary black film portraiture at a crossroads.