Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/26/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)

Ron O'Neal and Sheila Frazier in Super Fly

Cast: Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius Harris, Charles McGregor, Sig Shore, Polly Niles, Yvonne Delaine. Screenplay: Phillip Fenty. Cinematography: James Signorelli. Costume design: Nate Adams. Film editing: Bob Brady. Music: Curtis Mayfield.

I know why the Criterion Channel grouped Super Fly into its "'70s Car Movies" collection, because there's nothing more evocative of the milieu than the shots of Priest's tricked-out Cadillac Eldorado nosing its sharklike way through the streets of 1970s Manhattan. But it's a movie that transcends categorization, especially the "blaxploitation" one with which it has become synonymous. It's a portrait of an American subculture at a pivotal moment in history, when Black lives were moving out of physical and cultural ghettoization and into their still problematic place in the American mainstream. Gordon Parks Jr.'s film is rough-hewn and raw, sometimes awkwardly scripted and acted, but also darkly vital. It's a near-tragic story about a man's hope to be freed from the affluence of criminality, only to be thwarted by both the whites who don't want him to be free and those of his own kind who choose to remain exploited. Curtis Mayfield's songs tell the story of Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal) in their own way, operatically heightening the screenplay's narrative and the camera's images. And it has to be reiterated that Super Fly has a lot in common with a film from the same year, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Youngblood Priest and Michael Corleone share the same hopes and face the same cruel forces.