Bushman (David Schickele, 1971)

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/07/26/thinking-aloud-about-film-bushman-david-schickele-1971/ BUSHMAN (David Schickele, 1971) is a real discovery, already the subject of much excitement when shown at Ritrovato in Bologna, and now made available to us through Cinema Re-Discovered this coming weekend, where it is being screened Sunday 30th of July at 18.30. Set in 1968, in the context of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, with the Nigerian civil war in its second year, the film centres around the experiences of Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Opokam), a Nigerian graduate student also teaching at San Francisco State College, the cross-cultural experiences he’s afforded, and the different types of racism he encounters. In the accompanying podcast, we discuss the film’s beauty, its politics, how it fluidly seems to condense so many of the burning issues in black American cinema in the following four decades, and the important shifts in register near the film’s end. A really great film, so far little know, that’s bound to encourage much discussion, as indeed it did with us.