This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)
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15 October (updated 22 October)
This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)
96 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 15 / F : 16
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
I could estimate the running time of this film, but I do not wish to - doing so would only satisfy that curious sensation of how much cinema-time has elapsed.
I had heard the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964) reviewed on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves [now Free Thinking], but nothing prepared me for the perfection of the picture quality - from its age, it must have been restored, and it has been done gorgeously in this digital re-issue.
This is a piece of work that is not afraid to keep you aware that cinema is a social construct, and it has just that remove, that distance to keep us from thinking that we are engaging - or want to engage - with it. By which I mean nothing bad, nothing that did not connect, for a moment, with feeling that we might stray into Georg Büchner's drama Woyzeck, but moved away again. Cinematically, starting with the chain-gang and the laying of railroad tracks, we have just the right level of interest, and the progression of the work seems effortless, with easy, fluid camerawork.
The story - for which I experience no need to seek out what some call a back story - is of a man (Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson) not prepared to be a white man's nigger, which is what he calls the father (a preacher embodied by Stanley Greene) of the woman whom he marries (Josie, played by Abbey Lincoln), and so not finding things easy.
As the closing words say, it is not going to be so, but there is a finality through the arc of lives that has resolved towards the end. It is set, we are told, eight years since the last racial violence, and after Birmingham, Alabama, has been the home of lynchings : as Duff sees it, those lynchings still go on, but are of a different character.
Contemporaneous with Nothing But a Man, co-writer and director Michael Roemer seems only to have directed one other feature*, and then not to have done anything of this kind except with t.v. twenty years later, so it is hard to know what perspective a Berlin-born child of 1928 brought to these tensions, or how the film was received in the mid-1960s (now see below, on the latter point, and follow the links for how the film came to be made).
End-notes
* According to the Wikipedia® entry for the film, and that given by IMDb for Roemer, he started teaching at Yale University in 1966, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He published a book in 1997, and a two-volume work in 2001, both relating to stories.
Despite winning the San Giorgio Prize at Venice Film Festival, being very favourably reviewed at New York Film Festival, and apparently being a favourite of Malcolm X's, the film was essentially only distributed in film theatres (i.e. cinemas) that specialized in independent and foreign films. In 1993, The Library of Congress selected it to be preserved in The National Film Registry, since when it has achieved a wider release and a warm reception.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
