Black Panther Documentary Sees Timely Release at Montreal Film Festival
By Sarah Teixeira St-Cyr This year’s 11th annual Montreal International Black Film Festival closed with Stanley Nelson’s (Freedom Summer, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple) provocative new documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The film chronicles the birth, the rise, and the ultimate dissipation of the Black Panther Party through interviews with key figures and impressive archival footage, with Nelson offering a straightforward and levelheaded account of the controversies that played out. The film opens in 1966 Oakland, California with the formation of the Black Panthers as a self-defense group against police brutality and systematic racist abuses. Students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the grassroots movement in efforts for protection and progression. The two made national headlines along with other early members when armed with rifles and uniformed in their iconic leather jackets and berets, they made their way onto the floor of California’s State Capitol. The local initiative soon mushroomed into nation-wide chapters, finding strength in numbers in disenfranchised black youth against the backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil. The group stood for survival of the individual as well as of the community; a softer and less-notorious side of the Panthers offering community development in the form of food, health, and educational programs. As the Panthers grew in size and influence, so did a different kind of national concern, and the group was soon faced with a purposeful FBI counter-intelligence program aimed at eradicating them. Opposition came from then-governor Ronald Reagan and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had branded the group a threat to national security. What followed were a string of attacks, arrests and assassinations, including the shooting deaths of “Lil’ Bobby” Hutton and Fred Hampton, ultimately acting toward the destabilization of the organization.
Nelson doesn’t shy away from the unflattering aspects of the Black Panthers in his film, including violence, sexism, substance abuse, and internal strife that plagued the organization. Early in the film, veteran member Ericka Huggins explains how each member existed inside his or her own version of the group, stating, “We were making history, and it wasn’t nice and clean. It wasn’t easy, it was complex.” One of the most dramatic movements in American history, the story of the Black Panthers has been underplayed and underrepresented, particularly in the documentary form. Seven years in the making, Nelson’s documentary is informative and elemental enough to capture those who might be unfamiliar with the heritage of the movement, and the bleak takeaway is that the message is still, unfortunately, all too relevant. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panthers, and with devastatingly sobering moments like an audio clip from a TV newscaster that states “relations between police and Negroes throughout the country are getting worse” so many decades ago, Nelson lets us make the contemporary connections ourselves. “We didn’t set out to make a film that was about today,” Nelson writes in an open letter surrounding the film’s release, “but as we began shooting, it became painfully clear that so many things the Panthers were fighting for were things that are still issues today. From police brutality, substandard schools and substandard housing, to disenchantment with the political system.” The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is an important film that keeps the past in the present, unfortunately out of necessity, and plays to a national dialogue about police brutality and race and the issues contingent to these that have yet to be addressed. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F56O3kZ9qr0