Bush Mama (1979, Haile Gerima) (Patreon)

61/100

Got me on its side right away with Gerima's onscreen credit, which isn't "Directed by" or "A film by" but simply "Answerable." The film is indeed a provocation, albeit a slow-burning one; while "woke" was decades away from being coined, we're absolutely bearing witness to Dorothy's belated political/revolutionary awakening after what's presumably years of numbed resignation. Because I'm a clueless white dude, one crucial aspect of the extent to which she's depicted as having internalized society's racism completely escaped me: Not until literally about two minutes before it's removed did I finally realize that Dorothy wears a wig. Just never occurred to me, though in hindsight it seems blindingly obvious. (To be fair to myself, I'm unobservant about hair in general—apparently Scarlett Johansson wears a wig in all the MCU films, and I would never have noticed that on my own, either. Still, there's a cultural element at play here that should have been a tip-off. And I now see that Gerima actually includes multiple shots of signs reading "WIGS" in the opening montage!) But the early scene in which she watches cops shoot an African-American man merely for holding an axe—not even actively threatening anyone with it; it's at his side, blade resting on the ground, when they open fire—certainly made an impact, given what we're still experiencing as a nation over four decades later. It's the casual cut from that moment to Dorothy walking through the halls of what I believe is the welfare office (more on that qualification below) that really draws blood. She (and by extension the film itself, for the time being) sees something horrific, shrugs, moves on. Nothing to be done. For how long can that possibly be tenable? 

On the one hand, this is powerful stuff, especially when you discover (as I did only afterward) that Bush Mama was Gerima's UCLA thesis project. On the other hand, it frequently looks like a student film, with all of the clumsiness and budgetary issues that tend to plague such work. Onaje Kareem Kenyatta's jazzy score helps enormously in smoothing out what might otherwise be very rough edges; the film tends to be strongest formally when it's just following Dorothy as she walks L.A.'s streets (often carrying her shoes, in a touch that's more gender- than race-specific), accompanied by an avant-garde soundscape that's split beween Kenyatta's music and various disembodied voices (with the latter dominated by what sound like questions a welfare applicant might be asked by her case worker). The more experimental Gerima gets, the better—loved the sequence that pans past T.C.'s cellmates as we hear his letter home, concluding with a shot of Dorothy framed by the bars of her twin bed's footboard. Conventional dialogue scenes don't work nearly as well, partly because non-professional actors who improvise well are vanishingly rare (and note that I don't much like true improv even when the likes of Rowlands and Cassel are doing it for Cassavetes), partly because the low budget means that we're sometimes hearing dialogue that's being picked up by the boom mic poised over a different's actor's head. There's also some visual murkiness that impedes narrative clarity—as noted above, it wasn't always clear to me where Dorothy is, and the film's climax is both lit and edited in a way that obscures what's going on (though the key acts of violence are unambiguous). Maybe that's deliberate rather than amateurish, though. It bothered me for most of the film that we're not told why T.C. is in prison—he heads out for a job interview and Gerima just cuts straight to a shot of him being walked to his cell, with no explanation given until the last few minutes—but upon reflection it seems plausible that this omission is meant to avoid stating the obvious (for one viewership) while triggering a late-breaking awareness of implicit bias (in a different viewership, viz. my own). Also, seeing Charles Burnett's name as one of the cinematographers reminds me that I badly need to revisit his early films, for which I was not likely ready when I watched them over 20 years ago.