Patission St., Athens, 01.12.2011
I walk by this mural on my way to work. It is located in the heart of the city; Victoria, a major train station, is a block away, and the Athens University of Economics is just around the corner. Patission street gets very busy in this area, and thousands of people walk through it on a daily basis. The building the mural is painted on is not in use and a small informal flea market takes place in front of it, where migrants from Africa and South Asia are trying to make a living. I sometimes stop and look at the people walking by. Most of them seem to be in a terrible hurry; I wonder if they recognize the reference.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200m, raised their fists and bowed their heads on the podium at the 1968 Olympics; Australian silver medalist Peter Norman was supportive of them. It is one of the most significant images of protest of all time; but it is nonetheless impressive to witness the strength of its influence 43 years later in an entirely different context. One can easily argue that the mural is more of a re-articulation, rather than just homage; the red and black color code, for instance, has been associated with anarchist movements. Still, this political tradition, as well as other left-wing trends, has a wide variety of symbols and images of struggle to choose from. Why choose this one?
Let’s have a look at another form of representation: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a documentary film directed by Göran Hugo Olsson. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Documentary Editing Award, and it has been theatrically released, as well as screened at a large number of festivals throughout the world. The film’s articulation of the development of the Black Power Movement is two-fold; on the one hand, it presents original and fruitful archive material from the vaults of Swedish Television, which includes appearances by, and interviews with, key figures of the movement. This footage is effectively organised in a manner which serves the narrative both in terms of a chronological and a thematic order. On the other hand, the film also features audio commentary from contemporary African American artists, activists, and scholars.
These two angles, the archival and the contemporary, occasionally overlap, and meaning is produced through the interaction between a number of layers; the rhetoric of the Black Power activists in the original footage; the aesthetic and thematic choices made by the Swedish journalists who produced the material; the reflections on the movement from the present; the use of the music by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Om’Mas Keith as a narrative device; and editing, as the principal directorial means of connecting and signifying all of the above.
These two angles, the archival and the contemporary, occasionally overlap, and meaning is produced through the interaction between a number of layers; the rhetoric of the Black Power activists in the original footage; the aesthetic and thematic choices made by the Swedish journalists who produced the material; the reflections on the movement from the present; the use of the music by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Om’Mas Keith as a narrative device; and editing, as the principal directorial means of connecting and signifying all of the above.
But why make this film today on the basis of forty-year-old material from Sweden? I think Erikah Badu puts it very eloquently in the film when she argues that “we have to document our history” so as to tell the story right. Moreover, as Göran Hugo Olsson told Sue Lawson of Indie Film Nation, Black Power was a blueprint to many other movements. Its message was that you cannot wait for someone else to give you your rights; you need to stand up for them, fight for them, and also help others who cannot stand up for their rights. And it seems to me that it is along these lines that one needs to address the question of representation, from a Swedish film to a mural in Athens.
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