Whether in auteur films or Hollywood spectacles, there’s no conflict between daring style and confrontational politics, which converge to grand but scathing effect in Mario Van Peebles’ “Posse.” 1993. It’s one of the great modern westerns, and it’s now streaming widely, including on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. The coincidence of its arrival on Pluto TV in August with a Film Forum retrospective of films by French director Alain Resnais is a useful reminder of what connects art-house and Hollywood traditions. Resnais, especially in his first films (such as “Hiroshima my loveand “Muriel”), delivers sharp political calculations – and the politics of memory itself – with a uniquely rarefied and formalist aesthetic. For Van Peebles, the flash and flair of “Posse,” along with its distinctive flashback-centric form, serves a similar and powerful purpose: to go beyond movie mythos and reveal the truth about the Old West and the American history over time. all, through those who remembered this story but were long ignored. As in some of Resnais’ best films, Van Peebles – working in an altogether more populist and spirited way – dramatizes memory as action, as a form of activism.
“Posse” centers on the lives of black people – townspeople, cowboys, even sheriffs – in the 19th century West. It’s a wild, picaresque adventure that’s strained by an unwavering and passionate sense of principle, provided as much by the filmmaker as by the film’s protagonists, not least because Van Peebles also stars as Jesse Lee, an unwitting recruit to the Spanish-American film. War. The action begins in 1898 Cuba, where Jesse, a convict sentenced to life military service, is the leader of a mostly black regiment sent on a suicide mission by the racist Colonel Graham (Billy Zane). Jesse leads a group of three black soldiers and one white soldier in a revolt against the Colonel, and they sneak back to the United States, a stolen chest of gold coins in tow, via the comic conceit of taking the place of the corpses. . Reaching New Orleans – and joined by a gambler called Father Time (Big Daddy Kane) – the band of defectors trust Jesse to stay one step ahead of the law and the Colonel, who is hot on his trail. But Jesse has something more in mind than mere survival. He is haunted by memories of burning, destruction, and the murder of black people by white lawmen and vigilantes, memories rendered in stark, nightmarish, fragmentary black-and-white flashbacks. Seeking revenge, he brings his group to the so-called Western Frontier, to the town where he grew up and where those horrific visions were his realities.
What is the story that needs to be told and how is it told? This is the overall voltage of “Posse”. The film’s flamboyant, rowdy action takes place inside a framing device of an anonymous, elderly black man reminiscing about the group of six, dubbing them the “original group,” and delivering a history lesson: nearly a third of all films from the late 19th century. American cowboys — and half of Los Angeles’ early settlers — were black. The identity of this character converges with that of the actor himself, in a stroke of genius in the casting: the narrator is played by Woody Strode, born in 1914, who played the title role in the Western “Sergent Rutledge”. by John Ford in 1960, set in 1881. , about the racist persecution of a black officer. The intersection of history and myth, the inseparability of history from the voices of personal testimony, the decisive power of commemoration and transmission: these are the very subjects of “Posse”. Throughout, Van Peebles nods to the mythic power of classic Westerns while infusing his tropes with a different, broader historical substance and introducing new heroes to embody it. As in Ford’s Westerns, it’s striking that the film’s deep-rooted, deeply felt intellectual considerations are given such vigorous, thrilling, complex, and, at times, even gratingly humorous dramatic treatment.
The story Van Peebles tells (working with a screenplay by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane) is an extensive dig into the crimes and sins upon which the United States is based. It is a story of military adventurism, colonial expansionism, crony capitalism, deceptive political maneuvering, the repressive sham of law and order and the underlying premise of white supremacy whose depend on these abuses. Jesse grew up in a town called Freemanville, a black settlement that is unwittingly twinned with the nearby white outpost of Cutterstown, which is run by a despotic and sadistic sheriff named Bates (Richard Jordan). Bates’ interests are both violent and mercenary, and he uses the power of the stock market to win the complicity of Freemanville’s black sheriff, Carver (Blair Underwood), in his schemes. A crucial aspect of ‘Posse’ is the discovery of Bates’ patterns – their recognition through memory, cognition and education, which also provides the crucial basis for resistance.
The pivot of Jesse’s haunting memories involves his father, King David (Robert Hooks), who was murdered for building a school emblazoned with the slogan “Education is freedom.” Jesse is, indeed, a man of the book, carrying around a small and precious volume containing a poem about the life of a slave that begins with “Nicodemus was a slave of African birth”. (The poem was published, anonymously, in 1877, to promote a black colony named Nicodemus, in Kansas). The book, which Jesse gives to the illiterate Obobo (Tom Lister, Jr.), the most powerful warrior of the group, takes on a symbolic function – an artistic trace of a story which, then as now, risks being removed. Transmission and mentoring are embedded even deeper into the story through the cast of characters, which includes the elder Papa Joe, Jesse’s mentor; he is played by Melvin Van Peeblesthe founding modern director who is also the father of Mario Van Peebles. (Papa Joe’s daughter Lana, played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield, is the town schoolteacher.)
The plot depends significantly on the recognition and effect of the genocidal displacement of Native Americans and the oppressive conditions endured by Chinese workers; it also involves the explicitly cited “grandfather clause”, which stated that any black person who had an enslaved grandfather, and therefore ineligible to vote, was also prohibited from voting. For all its historical digging, “Posse” is a tale of exuberance, flowery personalities whose idiosyncrasies and daring, whose pleasures and misadventures, are also the essence of the story. Alongside the unflinching Obobo and the brash, composed Father Time, there’s the sleek Angel (Tone Loc), the sly, sassy Little J (Stephen Baldwin) and the talkative, brash, and shrewd Weezie (Charles Lane ), who had the misfortune to serve the colonel and the audacity to switch sides under pressure, and whose ancient chatter serves as something like the exteriorization of conscience in the heat of struggle. The storyteller played by Strode brings these oversized personalities to life in an outsized and outrageous tale, and in doing so, joins Van Peebles in uniting myth and history.
“Posse” shows an artistic conscience at work at the same time as a political conscience. The joy of talking about the film – and about spirit, music, poetry, costume, dance and acting – is as much about embodying conscience as it is acknowledging and making amends for the crimes of history. Although the drama is often dark and chilling, the titular group’s improvisational maneuvers and daring exploits, for all their deadly ferocity, have a joyful energy that reflects something more than survival – they reflect constructive vigor, purpose black community collective. The personal appearance of the protagonists is itself a question of style; or rather, the style of the group is a question of identity, self-affirmation, endurance. Van Peebles, making the film with exuberance and elegance, both depicts this history of style and presents it as a modern ideal. ♦
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