Alabama Day: filmed in Alabama.

 

In what he dubbed “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”, George Wallace, Alabama governor, blocked Black students from walking into the University so he could uphold his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. This prompted a national crisis, resulting in the President issuing Executive Order 11111, making the #NationalGuard step in.

“Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall”

– Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin (1964)

In a then-groundbreaking new documentary format, Robert Drew and associates followed President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis. And they filmed everything; from tense phone calls, private discussions, private moments (one of RFK's daughters on the phone with a bemused “Kerry”, Dept. Nicholas Katzenbach), and many, many shots in which nothing – which is everything – is said.

In my book, entrepreneur is just a fancy talk for conman. A famous one, the one who may've tried to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, was George C. Parker. He'd peddle the famous landmark to any hapless rube, immigrant, or sucker who then would promptly erect a little tollbooth to make a fast buck from any hapless rube, immigrant, or sucker.

“Selling the Brooklyn Bridge again, huh?”

– Police captain Jim McCarey

Like Parker, Mae West's Peaches O'Day bamboozles it her way. And boy, does she have a bridge to sell you!

“I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; Handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

– Muhammad Ali

In typical Western fashion the credits for William Klein's Festival panafricain d'Alger focusses on the French and American participants. After Algeria regained its independence in 1962, it became Africa's – and the #AfricanDiaspora's – centre for postcolonial and liberation moments.

“À bas le colonialisme ! À bas l'imperialisme !”

The 12-day Festival panafricain attracted 5000 people from all over the African continent, as well as liberation fighters from the United States.

It's easy… no lazy to put this documentary away as a failed Idi Amin propaganda project. In 1974, German-Swiss Barbet Schroeder, privileged son of a diplomat, already knew more than enough about how to select framing and manipulate timing. The result, Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, is a prime example of the neo-colonialist gaze.

“You film. Film helicopter.”

– The General explaining a director's one and only task

Amin, clearly not speaking his native language, tries to explain his plans for #Uganda. The camera (Spanish cinematographer) moves in on his gesturing hands, then a jump cut (French editor) to soldiers who – instructed in English – seem unsure of what is asked of them. When (in the copy I watched) people speak in Swahili, no translation is provided and the portrayed are little more than undeveloped, exotic backdrop. Everything seems to be a joke to Schroeder: the air force's MiGs, Amin and his higher-ups joining tribesmen in dance, even the President's children are used to exemplify the stereotype of the overly virile, primitive African male.

 

Amin was, as Schroeder is, a product of Europe's Scramble. With the difference that, although bloody and despicable, Amin's strategy was not to embolden the West's moribund empire.

A ripple went through France in the early months of 1968. It started when the Communist and socialist party joined forces in an attempt to remove President De Gaulle from office. A month later, students at Nanterre (a Parisian university) teamed up with poets, musicians and small leftist groups to discuss class discrimination and political bureaucracy on campus. The meeting was peacefully disassembled but tensions remained. In May, Sorbonne students stood up for Nanterre, by then shut down. Then, police invaded the university and 20 000 stood up against the police.

“Convert all Parisian universities into reception centres for the revolutionary youth of the whole world.”

– student proposal

Somewhere in that crowd were those whose interest went beyond the main spectacle: the toppling of the new ancien regime. A #JeanRouch​ian anthropologist of sorts, artist, photographer and filmmaker William Klein pushes the eye through the masses. But it's also his eye; each frame is a Klein. However, we see not a documentary. Sound is asynchronous. Suddenly, it's night and flames lick the black sky. When bricks fly, frames follow. And then… the end.

A black forest. A man walks through, holding a smoke machine. Then a carriage with a familiar coachman. Dracula! Where are we? No, not 19th century #Transylvania. The film stock reveals bullet holes in ancient walls, and beyond these walls a ladder, maybe scaffolding. A pneumatic drill, more crew members, lights, a clapperboard. Are the characters aware of that? Them seem to interact with the disturbance yet oblige to the interruptions of the movie set. In a state of hypnopompia, guided by kuroko, maybe?

“cut”

Pere Portabella created a hyper-reality with his Cuadecuc, vampir. A director dismantles the man-behind-the-curtain, Franco, the other #Franco while setting up scaffolding for the next Spain. Everything's a reality, or an illusion, then nothing is.

Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem – with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.

“If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

– Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)

Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.