Black experience through Swedish eyes

One reason people object to The Help is movies like Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a documentary that comprises footage from Swedish television journalists covering black Americans during the end of the civil rights era and the Vietnam War. The challenge and actual revolution that scare The Help are freshly, thrillingly apparent in Mixtape.

For instance, the documentary contains film of Angela Davis. Even in defiance she maintains a stirring placidity that belies reality - she was headed to death row for aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder (a jury eventually found her not guilty). You look at that Afro, hear that commandingly gentle diction (part scholar, part Southerner), and sense her power, and you wonder, "Where's the movie about her?'' Actually, you watch the material here and wonder whether most of the movies made about black people are meant to pacify general audiences, to distract them from demanding more of the movies.

Where are the films about black America in the late 1960s and 1970s? Last year, Tanya Hamilton released a tiny drama about a sliver of the movement, with Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, called Night Catches Us. It quickly disappeared. It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country. Pending the arrival of another film like Hamilton's, there's Mixtape.

Göran Olsson spent years paring down the footage with his coeditor Hanna Lejonqvist. He then showed that material to activists (Harry Belafonte, Sonia Sanchez, Davis) and to Ahmir "?uestlove'' Thompson, Talib Kweli, and Erykah Badu, highly regarded, iconoclastic musicians who, in Olsson's thinking, connect the two eras. The assemblage of images compresses nine turbulent years into 95 minutes.

The assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 are flashpoints for a social revolution whose urgency waned as drugs flooded black communities, turning blacks away from fighting for justice to fighting one another. In that sense, the film manages to explain how the movies swung from the blaxploitation era to, I don't know, Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.

Olsson acknowledges in a disclaimer that his distillation amounts to significantly less than the whole story. But what he's done achieves significance nonetheless. We don't see any of the other interviewees. All we hear is their voices playing over the footage as commentary. The observations are incisive, though Abiodun Oyewole, of the Last Poets, gets a few of his dates wrong. Really, it's the footage that astounds and fascinates: Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton holding separate news conferences. This country once endured something like an Arab Spring. It was a headache for the government, and the footage makes a compelling case for the assertion of Malcolm X - and many others - that the influx of drugs in those neighborhoods wasn't an accident.

This is a movie that shows us the black experience through European eyes. But the Swedish filter is an important one.

Olsson doesn't tell us how to feel. He doesn't have to. His sharing this footage is a moral act whose righteousness can stand on its own. The material obviates the need for an outsider's commentary. It's powerful, vivid, inspiring, demoralizing, and damning enough to speak for itself.

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