Context
is everything. When it was released in 1979, indie drama Bush Mama was part of the “L.A. Rebellion” movement, which involved
black filmmakers providing unvarnished glimpses at street life. Like the most
celebrated example of this movement, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (which was completed in 1975 but not commercially
screened until 2007), Haile Gerima’s Bush
Mama explodes with cultural authenticity and sociopolitical anger, so its
myriad flaws, ranging from grubby black-and-white photography to a meandering
screenplay, matter less than the relevance of the material. In the context of
the late ’70s, Bush Mama might have
seemed revelatory. Seen today, it comes across as amateurish and repetitive,
even though issues explored in the film are just as important as they were in
1979, if not more so.
Set in an L.A. neighborhood plagued by crime and poverty,
Bush Mama concerns Dorothy (Barbara
O. Jones), a wife and mother struggling to get by. Her husband, T.C. (Johnny
Weathers), is a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD. Cops arrest T.C. on bogus
charges, and he gets sent to prison. Then Dorothy must not only care for their
child, but also decide what to do once she learns she’s pregnant again. Much of
the film cuts back and forth between realistic scenes of Dorothy at home and
stylized scenes of T.C. in prison. The Dorothy scenes feature clashes with
social workers and encounters with friends who are similarly bedeviled by problems
stemming from systemic racism. The T.C. scenes have a beat-poetry feel, with
inmates delivering long speeches about oppression from behind bars. Taken
together, these plot threads explain how and why Dorothy becomes radicalized,
thereby articulating the underlying ethos of the L.A. Rebellion itself.
Viewed
as an artifact of vintage political art, Bush
Mama is endlessly interesting because it juxtaposes humanistic and purely
rhetorical elements. Viewed as proper cinema, Bush Mama much less impressive—though it must be noted that, like Killer of Sheep, this is essentially a
student film. Gerima made Bush Mama
while completing his MFA at UCLA circa 1975, four years before the movie gained
a theatrical release. Perhaps that’s why some of the most effective moments in Bush Mama are the simplest. Whenever
Gerima trains his camera on Jones quietly existing, the weight on her
character’s shoulders painfully visible, he expresses as much truth as he does
in long monologues.
Bush Mama: FUNKY
1 comment:
My first stumbling block is the title 'Bush Mama'. Sounds like a old-timey, storefront
porno...not that I would EVER watch such a thing!
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