Week #25: My Brother's Wedding
If film is to aid in [the] process of redemption, how does it work its magic? […] I think that it is the little personal things that begin to give a hint of the larger picture. The story has the effect of allowing us to comprehend things we cannot see, namely feelings and relationships. It may not give you answers but it will allow you to appreciate life and maybe that is the issue, the ability to find life wonderful and mysterious. If the story is such, film can be a form of experience, and what is essential is to understand that one has to work on how to be good, compassionate. One has to approach it like a job. Until there is a sharing of experiences, every man is an island and the inner city will always be a wasteland.
Charles Burnett, ‘Inner City Blues’, 1989
Besides lack of access to funding and institutional racisms, one of the major challenges of making a film as a black person is the expectation of being ‘representative’. With so few figurations of black life on screen, the chance to speak on your behalf, to your individual concerns is sacrificed to making some contribution to a monolithic, false idea of ‘blackness’. Satisfying your own inner standards becomes secondary; you must consider how your work reflects on your community, both to insiders and outsiders. Charles Burnett, whose magnificent films manage to embody some idea of ‘representative’ while also speaking to something searchingly personal, described his battle to walk this line: “The middle-class blacks wanted to emphasize the positive and the inner city wanted Superfly; neither had any substance, however, both were detrimental. There is a difference between illusion and inspiration.” Against these burdens of expectation, the best hope you can have is that you have multiple chances at bat, that you can speak to other experiences, other scenarios, but few black artists get the chance to work on that canvas.
As well as a future that doesn’t promise this kind of latitude, black artists also suffer from being displaced from filmmaking traditions that could inspire and inform. There’s an illusion that black film history doesn’t exist; in actuality the circumstances under which the work was made, the belief that these works are commercially niche, and the lack of visible champions means that small obstacles block these works from being seen. Some see freedom in being removed from the anxiety of influence. But one can choose to engage with a tradition or not if it’s open to you.
We can look at Charles Burnett’s lack of recognition today as a series of these kinds of ‘mishaps’. Despite playing a foundational role in the LA Rebellion – a collection of filmmakers who emerged from UCLA’s filmmaking department including Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima and Larry Clark – Burnett’s work was inaccessible for many years. His debut, his graduation film Killer of Sheep, was stricken from the record for many years, unable to be released on home video because of rights issues around the music (an issue only in as much as no one was willing to pay the fees for the film). His second film My Brother’s Wedding (streaming on champion distributors Milestone’s VOD channel) suffered a similar fate, but from different causes. Burnett’s rough cut was rushed to a festival premiere by its producers (including Channel 4 and German television), met with middling reviews and sunk from sight, revived at retrospectives but otherwise unseen. When the film was restored, Burnett was offered the time to arrive at a final cut, resulting in one of the few director’s cuts that is significantly shorter than the release version (trimming nearly forty minutes to leave it at the same 80 minute run time as Killer of Sheep).
Watching My Brother’s Wedding, it’s clear why a lean runtime let the film sing. The sound of My Brother’s Wedding is less of a symphony moving in one direction and more about a few beats that are then picked up again, dropped, picked up again. Here we’re watching a prepubescent girl artlessly flirt by complaining about her menstrual cramps and dreaming of seeing Smokey Robinson. Later we’re watching a man pick through his grandmother’s hair, mystified by its blue streaks. Another moment we’re seeing a mother scold her son for his shiftlessness. This is one answer to the question of ‘representativeness’: by offering fragments of the whole neighbourhood of Watts (white people are absent from the film, even if whiteness casts a shadow), we can gain some sample of life as it is, painful, laughable, inconsequential. There’s a respect for the viewer in this, an expectation that you’ll thread together the meanings. Burnett is open about his filmmaking being a kind of enquiry rather than an answer. When studying electronics at university, he ‘became interested in storytelling. I also had a feeling of waiting to find out what went wrong when I was growing up.’ Looking at John Singleton (whose Boyz n the Hood has similar cross-generational preoccupations) and Spike Lee, there’s a young man’s desire for didactic resolution, an argument with an end point. In Burnett’s approach, there’s an honesty that life in society’s cracks doesn’t necessarily conform to any established narratives, to a natural order of events and consequences.
I saw a lot of films concerning the working class. But the issues were idealized, and the conflicts were reduced to problems between management and labor. Management exploits the workers, and the union goes on strike. These films had a built-in resolution. Those weren’t the kind of films I was interested in, because they didn’t represent the experiences that I had gone though, the things I saw, or how I saw working people in my neighborhood.
There’s a moment halfway through the film when the two leads are walking the streets when a man jumps from out of the alley, starts firing a gun upon them, only for the gun to dismantle itself and for them to give the assailant several minutes chase. Is this the man who threatened them earlier for beating up his buddy? We can’t be sure. Neither played for its almost Looney Tunes humour nor for tragedy, the event is simply an actuality. As Burnett says, this isn’t about a war with sides, a conclusion, “You don’t necessarily win battles; you survive.” The film’s titular event is not its focus; it is a scrapbook of events that surrounded the wedding. When the tragedy of the film occurs in its final quarter, it happens arbitrarily, almost without any preceding events, both entirely a result of the environment and a piece of ugly happenstance that is part of the common lot.
In place of a conventional plot, we have a deep specificity of place, and to a lesser extent, of character. Pierce (Everett Silas) is thirty, working in his parents’ dry cleaning business and deep within an inertia that he cannot recognise. Frustrated by his lawyer brother and his fiancée’s buppy aspirations, but completely incapable of imagining another life, he instead spends his days with his recently paroled friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell), shooting the shit and getting into minor trouble. They are both residents of Watts, LA’s historically black neighbourhood, still living through the scars of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. As so often, a needlessly brutal police altercation (the accused, Marquette Frye, was a junior highschool classmate of Burnett’s) turned into a full-scale revolt against living conditions that ultimately resulted in a 16,000 strong police and National Guard response. Knowing that this ridiculous level of sedition is ready to mobilise against you is a heavy weight. Nevertheless, the film wrings great beauty out of the streets, in lush, sensuous 35mm that captures midday heat, midnight’s blackness and gives a rare view of LA as it was, with pockets of the rural around every corner. (K. Austin Collins’ lovely review reflects on the film’s strategy of roughening the smoothness of its frames).
As Burnett describes his protagonist’s central moral problem, ‘It’s like rushing head on into a wall. The metaphor is running blindly—a man who refuses to take control of his life. These guys are rushing into life with limited knowledge. No, it’s not so much knowledge they lack, it’s wisdom.’ Pierce rejects his brother’s answer of upward mobility, but his solution is stasis: he lives with his parents, wrestles his father and makes himself the fool by adopting a child’s binary view of every situation (‘Doctors and lawyers… biggest crooks in the world.’ ‘You’ll have to excuse my brother. He has a very romantic view of the havenots.’). Although the film’s acting is a mixed bag, there is something pronounced about the clipped, deliberate speech of the two lawyers, as though they exist in some Stepford reality. By keeping firmly within the black community of Watts, minor class distinctions have space to appear. Partly these lines are drawn by aspiring to material success; partly it is about the church (Pierce mocks his parents’ ‘hootin’ and hollerin’’); and partly it is about rejecting the countryfied ways that were common given the swathes of resettled Southerners who established Watts. Pierce refuses his brother’s vision of the future, and nostalgia also clouds his view, with Pierce himself lamenting the violence compared to his youth (‘Nothing like the kids walking the streets today.’), as well as Pierce’s father harking back to chopping cotton. For all this, it’s not to say these men exist selfishly. We see Soldier change his niece’s nappy and Pierce bathe his elderly grandfather. But they perform these tasks as frustrating chores rather than embracing them as adult responsibilities.
Burnett as a filmmaker takes the opposite path to Pierce as a character. Although My Brother’s Wedding concludes with the most pointed of moral choices, Pierce walks between them, ultimately satisfying no one. Burnett is ambivalent where his character is definitive, refusing to take a moral stance on the characters, while also offering a strong argument for their lives to be transformed beyond the choices available to them. Burnett has created that most precious thing, something so intensely personal it can only be political. That path, that commitment to an undiluted, unresolved view of life is a hard path to walk, even if it’s the most honest way to be. Speaking in 1990, aware of how badly treated his films to date had been, Burnett summarised the challenges of making work with his commitments:
The situation is such that one is always asked to compromise one's integrity, and if the socially oriented film is finally made, its showing will generally be limited and the very ones that it is made for and about will probably never see it. To make film-making viable you need the support of the community; you have to become a part of its agenda, an aspect of its survival.
Recommendations
I finally saw the utterly grimy Korean thriller/horror I Saw the Devil and would recommend if you have an extremely strong stomach for violence that is both felt and passes into the realm of the comic. Basically a series of encounters between a serial killer and his victim that reverses the power dynamic, it poses the kind of questions of a Michael Haneke film, but with Bong Joon-ho’s sense of style. Rent it on VOD.
It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which means you should either watch Gremlins 2 or watch Key & Peele’s superb prospectus for its charms here.