Modern Art Oxford and Spike Island, Bristol have joined forces to create a retrospective of Lubaina Himid’s work that spans some 30 years, includes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and assemblages and proves what a highly original and complex artist she is.
There's an irony to be found in the fact that America's 45th president is already abolishing any and all things to do with the arts even as his ascendancy looks set to provide catnip to artists to a degree not seen since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher.
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga.
What is light entertainment for? It won’t save the world or heal the sick or bring warring factions to the negotiating table. It’s teeth and smiles and bread and circuses on a Saturday night and it shouldn’t have to bear any greater weight. The Generation Game was never required to offer vital balm during the Three-Day Week. Barrymore didn’t nurse us all through Black Wednesday and Britain’s exit from the ERM.
When, back in October, Donald Trump sulked that his political opponent was being a “nasty woman”, little did he realise the cultural impact it would have.
DW Griffiths's 1915 silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, became notorious for its pejorative portrayal of black people and its heroic vision of the Ku Klux Klan. For his directorial debut, Nate Parker has appropriated Griffiths's title and whipped it into a molten onslaught against America's history of slavery and racial prejudice.
Arriving in an America outraged – yet again – by police violence and witnessing the rise of Black Lives Matter, Parker's The Birth of a Nation was uncannily timely, and it prompted a studio bidding war when it premiered at Sundance in January this year. It's a dramatisation of the real-life slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831, depicting Turner as a visionary preacher pre-ordained to lead his people from their bondage, though his bloody attempt to do so was doomed to failure.
Parker directed, stars and wrote the screenplay (the story is credited to Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin), and he has brought a charismatic energy to the project which often overrides the orthodox nature of the storytelling. As a boy, the young Turner is taught to read by plantation mistress Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller), a kindly act somewhat undercut by Elizabeth's view of her slaves as a species positioned somewhere between infanthood and the animal kingdom. "These books are for white folks," she explains patiently. "They're full of things your kind wouldn't understand."
Nonetheless, the lad studies the Bible, finds he has a gift for sermonising, and begins preaching the Word to his fellow slaves. Times are hard in the South, and at the urging of the Reverend Zalthall (Mark Boone Junior), Nat's owner Sam Turner (Armie Hammer, pictured above with Parker) hires Nat out to local plantations, with the aim of placating rebellious urges among the slaves with soothing Scriptural messages.
Sam Turner seems relatively liberal, enjoying a friendly rapport with Nate (they were childhood friends) and rescuing him from the vengeful intentions of a spiteful fellow landowner. However, in Hammer's skilful portrayal, he's gradually revealed as a weak man with a drink problem who's never going to break ranks with his white compatriots and become a civil rights advocate for his negro chattels.
The narrative steadily gathers pace as it arcs towards its inevitable denouement. Nat's early optimism is soured by the appalling sights he sees on his travels (not least a scene where a slave has his teeth knocked out with a chisel before being force-fed). His preaching begins to sound more like a cleverly coded exhortation to fling off the chains of bondage and rise up, and his progress towards rebellion is guided by visionary images (corn spattered with blood, a dramatic total eclipse). A couple of incidents of rape, including an assault by slave-catchers on his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King, pictured above, depicted as little more than a signifier of idealised love and fidelity), prompt Nat to recall that the Lord could be vengeful as well as merciful. When he's brutally flogged by Sam, for baptising a white man, the rebellious die is cast.
Parker has been accused of excessive self-regard for the Christ-like overtones in his portrayal of Turner, while any positive contribution towards bridging the racial divide has been scuppered by his depiction of the white characters almost exclusively as depraved, misshapen sadists. The Birth of a Nation's apparently glittering commercial prospects in the States were dented by a media storm over the fact that both Parker and Celestin had faced rape allegations in 1999. Nevetheless, if we can judge the art and not the artist, this is vivid and unsettling film-making.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Birth of a Nation
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men have put down their guns. Or, as the sisters have it, “No peace, no pussy”.
Just like the original, Chi-Raq, co-written with Kevin Willmott, is mainly in verse – yes, verse, though there’s a hiphop/rap soundtrack as well, featuring R Kelly and Mali Music, among others. Samuel L Jackson is Dolmedes, a one-man Greek chorus (pictured below). “Welcome to Chi-Raq, land of pain, misery and strife,” he begins, swinging a cane and wearing the first of a selection of pimped-up suits, ties and hats. Lysistrata (the vibrant Teyonah Parris, recently in Dear White People and formerly Don Draper’s secretary in Mad Men) is the girlfriend of gangsta rapper Demetrius “Chi-raq” Dupree (Nick Cannon), head of the Spartan gang, locked in rivalry with the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes with an eye-patch and a weird giggle).
She is OK with the gang-banging status quo – “Everyone here got a man bangin’ and slangin’ / fighting for the flag / and risking that long zip of the cadaver bag". Then an 11-year-old girl is killed (off-screen – we don't see much violence) in a drive-by shooting. (Last year – in real life – a nine-year-old boy was killed as part of gang retaliation.) The girl’s mother, in a moving performance by Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and seven-year-old nephew were killed in 2008 in gang-related murders (real-life again), scrubs the blood, hyper-real, crimson and foamy, off the pavement. She appeals for witnesses but no one comes forward, even after the local church, led by Father Mike Corrigan (John Cusack, looking very white) offers a reward. Corrigan is based on celebrated Chicago activist Father Michael Pfleger, who was a consultant for the movie and whose foster son was killed by gunfire.
Lysistrata is horror-struck and moved to act, influenced by intellectual Miss Helen (the formidable Angela Bassett, who was also in Lee’s Malcolm X and is now in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close to the Enemy). In one of the more thought-provoking scenes, Miss Helen sees off a vile life-insurance salesman who’s pressurising her to take a policy out on her nephew. Lysistrata unifies the women of the two gangs – this is strictly musical-fantasy land, so nothing makes much sense – and gets them to agree to “deny all rights of access and entrance” because "saving lives is our job, it’s ‘bout breaking strife / givin’ da hood da true meaning of life”. Soon the no-peace-no-pussy cause goes global – Brazil, Lahore, Santo Domingo, Montreal and more are all in on it.
There’s plenty of raunchy dancing, singing, craziness and sex, with strip-joints unable to open because of the edict: “The situation’s out of control / Because I’m in front of an empty stripper pole,” proclaims Dave Chappelle in a cameo, not very funnily. It’s all frenzied, dazzling and finally empty, in spite of Corrigan’s impassioned words from the funeral pulpit about self-inflicted genocide and mass incarceration as a “legal form of lynching”, as well as a scene where real women holding up pictures of their dead children surround Chi-raq.
But Lee doesn’t tackle any of the complex reasons for gun violence – the fracturing of gangs, leaving them leaderless and anarchic; the hopelessness of young men without prospects; the dismantling of public housing. He thinks he can reach more people in a feature film (it’s the first production by Amazon Original Movies) than with a documentary. But why? Lee’s HBO doc about New Orleans after Katrina, When the Levees Broke, was a triumph and gave people a voice. Sadly, I can’t imagine that Chi-Raq is going to reach Lee’s intended demographic – the gang members – nor inspire them to lay down their guns.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Chi-Raq
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
“Why is everyone from your school a criminal crackhead?” “Why is everyone from yours a Tory minister?” These questions lie at the heart of Zadie Smith’s NW. Keisha (the wonderful Nikki Amuka-Bird), aka Natalie, is married to wealthy Frank (Jake Fairbrother), who’s asking the crackhead question. Leah (Phoebe Fox), who answers back, is her best friend – though that’s no longer a given.