First talky by Vidor with only Black Afro-American actors. The second film of a quadrilogy that intended to reflect the great 1929 depression that was to throw the US into the arms of history, of reformism and social progress that will have to go through WW2 to finally come to a real leap forward that has never been finished nevertheless. The film shows first of all how much the US owed to the Blacks they had imported as enslaved cattle and that were starting to conquer a human position in a deeply unjust society, through the cultural development they brought and invested in US music. The musical side of the film is fascinating especially how all the gospels, blues and other songs are entirely integrated in real life in the very story of the film. They are part and parcel of it all and that shows how music, poetry, religion are one only thing that gets its life from and gives life to the real world. But
The desire to give a picture of the Black world in America as being an entirely self-contained society leads to two regrettable elements. For one the Blacks are not exploited by banks, by white society, by white capitalism. Then they have to contain the causes and reasons of all that is evil in their midst. And we have it all indeed. The main poor character gambles the money of the cotton harvest of his family and loses it to a Black cheater who uses fake dice and is using a woman to bait and trap Zeke into the game. Then Zeke will kill his brother in the ensuing brawl. Then he will become a preacher and will finally marry the woman who had gotten him into the dice game when she pretends to have changed and repented her evil ways. Yet she will try to elope with the gambler. Zeke will chase them, kill his wife and then the man. He will end up in a force labor camp, still with no whites anywhere. He will be paroled and go home to find all his family happy and forgiving. We then understand and have to admit the fable is naive and even vicious since it exonerates the whites of all their responsibility for the morally and socially deprived Black community they relentlessly exploit, down to their very bones and blood. It may represent the Black nationalist movement of the time (the 1920s) but it shows how artificial and racist in the end this vision can be. Does the music save this tale? Probably not, even if it shows how much the music is embedded and encrusted in both the Blacks and the US.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines