Throughout the late '60s and '70s, Swedish television and documentary crews flew to the United States to examine why increasing numbers of African Americans were embracing the controversial but burgeoning Black Power movement. While these filmmakers may have travelled to America with different purposes in mind for their work, they all shared a similar desire to cast an inquisitive outsider’s eye on an issue that the American media were cautious about examining too closely. The resulting 16mm footage eventually found its way to the cellar of a Swedish television centre, where it lay forgotten and gathering dust for 30 years. Now unearthed, this archive of film has been transformed into a striking video collage, or “mixtape”, by filmmaker Göran Olsson.
Pulling together raw footage from so many different sources is always a daunting feat, and the success or failure of such a project very often lies in the quality of the edit. In this case the results are admirable, if often a little frustrating. In the same way a good mixtape brings together diverse songs to contrast and compliment each other, Black Power Mixtape embraces the sheer variety of footage it has available to create a captivating whole. The film mixes together impassioned interviews with not just the icons of the movement but those swept along at street level too, to create a vibrant portrait of the era.
Equally however this “mixtape” concept can at times feel like a way to mask the film’s overall lack of focus. There’s the potential here for a much deeper documentary examining the Black Power movement, but instead Olsson sets out merely to chronologically depict the footage available to him in something of a video slideshow. Adding a small amount of analysis is Olsson’s decision to bring in occasional voiceover from contemporary thinkers, activists and artists as they react to seeing the film material. This occasionally hints at some potentially fascinating questions. Notably, what does it mean for America that even in the presidency of Barack Obama so much of this '60s footage of impoverished, struggling African Americans still feels depressingly relevant and contemporary? While Black Power Mixtape dips briefly into these wider debates, such strands of the film are unfortunately never fleshed out in greater detail. As a result there isn’t a great deal of argument, context or analysis here, just the grainy footage itself.
This of course puts a huge amount of strain on the strength of the discovered material. In this regard at least, the film succeeds. Interviews with such articulate and passionate activists as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis are so filled with emotion, bitterness and occasionally wit, that they leap out of the screen. Despite the 40-year gap since these events, the raw intensity of such footage still resonates as if it were happening today in the very same room. The Swedish outsider’s perspective also ends up becoming critical to this footage’s success. Unlike the more cautious American television crews of the time, these Swedish filmmakers seemed happy not only to document, but also to humanise. While we’re used to seeing grainy recordings of the fiery speeches given by these militant thinkers, we’re somewhat less used to seeing them relaxing them at home with their families. The inclusion of such footage helps to not only humanise these Black Power icons, but also the movement as a whole. While there’s likely a stronger potential documentary to be made with this same material, this is such a treasure trove of footage and you can’t help but wonder why it went neglected and unseen for so long.