Dir. Goran Hugo Olsson, Sweden , 2011, 96 mins, in English and Swedish with English subtitles
Review by Carlie Newman
Black Power Mixtape starts in 1967 with Martin Luther King Junior speaking at a large rally. It goes on to tell its story though a mix of historical and contemporary interviews and audio reports into racism in the US leading up to the rise of the Black Power Movement in the African-American community from 1967 to 1975. This documentary, made by Swedish director Olsson, gives us a Swedish point of view in its commentary and brings to a wider audience newly discovered footage that had had been lying in the vaults of Swedish television for the last 30 years.
The year by year account of the historical events backed by the voices of leading African-American artists, musicians, activists and scholars brings meaning to this particular period. Starting with Stokely Carmichael in 1967, we move on to the assassination of Luther King in Memphis , Tennessee on April 4, 1968 . We also hear from Angela Davis and Harry Belafonte and see film of Belafonte with Luther King. Robert Kennedy was also assassinated in 1968, which brought despair to the black community, which had looked upon him as a supporter.
Nixon is elected and we see interviews with Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Searle and learn of the rise of their Black Panther Party – a militant black organisation – in 1969. Angela Davis is connected with the Panthers (she was accused of being implicated in a shoot out at a court room) and we learn how during 1970 and 1971 the FBI tried to neutralise the effects of the Black Panthers and put Davis on their ‘most wanted’ list. Davis’ trial in 1972, following that of Huey Newton, led to her becoming an icon and an interview in prison by a Swedish reporter. She was tried, acquitted and released after 18 months’ incarceration. 1973/4 sees the rise of drug-related violence in Harlem and Nixon’s resignation. We also learn of the rise of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam, and their belief that the white race is the race of devils. The film ends in 1975 with the end of the war in Vietnam.
The whole film is a mini-account of the way the dominant white people in power tried over the years to suppress the struggles of the black African-American community to achieve equality. Using a variation of a mixtape formula, Olsson manages to convey both the difficulties faced by black people in America and their heroic and occasionally deadly efforts to have the same rewards as their white neighbours. We may now have Obama in the White House, but the ordinary African-American working man and woman are still battling on.
