Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (Charles Burnett, 2003) (Patreon)

Along with The Final Insult, this PBS documentary on the legacy of Nat Turner is the great discovery of my deep-dive into Burnett's career. (I still have one to go, My Brother's Wedding.) Both films demonstrate just how much Burnett can accomplish in one hour, and even if the abbreviated running times are externally imposed, by producers or by funding, they certainly prove what by now hardly needs proving: that Burnett can take a job for hire and make it something strange and remarkable.

For a long time I avoided Nat Turner because of its public TV provenance, and if you've perhaps done the same, trust me. This is not what you expect. Burnett is not dealing with Nat Turner per se, although the available historical facts of Turner's slave rebellion are clearly articulated. Rather, this is a film about the historiographic construction of "Nat Turner," a man about whom little is really known. This has allowed various artists, activists, and historians to sculpt that absence into a productive ur-text, one that evolves according to the needs of the time and those doing the sculpting.

What's truly impressive about Nat Turner is that Burnett never completely abandons the requirements of a PBS documentary. Talking heads are plentiful, and a guiding narration (by Alfre Woodard) clearly articulates Burnett's thesis. But within this accessible format, Burnett achieves something much more akin to Todd Haynes' I'm Not There or the work of Peter Watkins. Historical reenactments give way to direct address. Multiple interpretations are presented, with a different actor portraying Nat Turner at every turn. And while the veracity of Thomas Gray's original Confessions of Nat Turner is clearly disputed, Burnett takes a more complicated approach in considering William Styron's novel of the same name. Styron himself explains his literary intent, and various scholars and critics debate (a) whether Styron had the right to appropriate Turner in the first place, and (b) what Styron's novel did to Turner's historical meaning, for both Black and white readers.

In the final few minutes, Burnett even pulls a Kiarostami, revealing the preparation and shooting of his own reenactments, and speaking about his own "Nat Turner." He allows for the fact that his own film, which foregrounds the problem of Turner as a cultural emblem, is really just another use of the man, since not everyone will share Burnett's own interest in the textual contestation surrounding Turner, and some of the interpreters will no doubt claim to be in possession of the truth. So really, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property performs the gestures of a more conventional documentary in order to display the inherent limitations of that form.

And in some ways, Burnett even seems to be openly mocking the idea of evenhandedness that is so important to PBS liberalism. I mean, how can a Nat Turner documentary seriously give space to a person who looks like this? 

(Her views are exactly what you'd expect.)