Fighting over the words is part of the problem. In the late '60s and early '70s, black/colored/Negro/African-American people embraced a pride/power/nationalist/separatist movement that left many of its soldiers/ spokespersons/leaders/ luminaries trapped in the Man's ghettos/prisons/tombs/suburbs.
Into this linguistic limbo sailed some journalists from Swedish television, who spoke little of the lingo and understood even less about the culture. But the Nordic visitors' cameras and curiosity became useful tools for the revolutionaries, who gave numerous interviews to the foreign reporters.
More than 40 years later, the Swedes have stitched together the footage.
"Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975" is a potent time capsule, but without a skeleton of facts and figures, it's a deficient history lesson.
In 1967, radical blacks such as Stokely Carmichael dismissed Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent tactics as ineffective for the racial minorities in the United States.
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Nation of Islam adherents Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan said that whites were irredeemable devils who could be defeated only through economic self-sufficiency and armed self-defense.
In the late '60s, the gun-toting Black Panther Party pushed Malcolm's dictates to the limit. Yet unless they are spoken by the modern-day hip-hoppers who provide some voice-over context, new information about the lives and deaths of Martin and Malcolm goes unexplored here, and the murders of ancillary figures such as Medgar Evars and Fred Hampton are barely mentioned.
Many young Americans, let alone Swedes, don't know the conspiratorial details and after-effects of these murders, and excluding them from this ostensible history is a lost opportunity.
Still, it's thrilling to hear from unrepentant revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and amusing to hear from their bell-bottomed white lawyers. More importantly, we hear from ordinary blacks whose futures were being debated.
It would be instructive to hear from these passionate Americans today. But for that we'll have to wait for Side B.
Review
"Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975"
***
• Not rated, with mature themes, strong language and drug content.
• Directors: Goran Olsson, Göran Hugo Olsson.
• Running time 100 minutes.
