Apparently, a Swedish crew was in the states, documenting the Black Power movement and other events between 67-75, the film forgotten about in a cellar for 30 years.
Excellent stuff. There's an early scene, with Stokely Carmichael hanging around with his mom, the Swedish crew trying to interview her, sitting on an iconic sofa. (If, for nothing else, you should watch this for stunning shots of most awesome circa 1972 sunglasses, skinny mod pants, flared collars, the awesome circa 67ish no-mustache-beard on one of the Swedish camera guys, and Angela Davis's afro on film.)
She seems a little uncomfortable. Stokely grabs the mic and starts asking her questions about her life when they migrated to the u.s. It is the most unusual scene in so far as he keeps trying to get her to say *why* they lived 8 people in a three room apartment, why her husband could only find low paid transient work in spite of skills, why he was always getting laid off, etc. He has to draw it out of her, like she doesn't have the words to say it, as if she still doesn't know how to say that it wasn't their fault, that they weren't responsible for it, that it wasn't inevitable that they lived that way.
In other words, her voice, posture, facial features suggest a woman who has internalized the idea that their poverty was of their own making, nothing to blame but themselves for being failures. She doesn't have the words to even name is "racism." She doesn't know how to say Negro, still feels uncomfortable saying the word, as if she shouldn't say it, as the only thing she can say is "colored" which, as she explains, was the only word they knew at the time.
This has got to be the most powerful scene of the movie, to see the human face reveal the powerful emotions associated with the ability to speak, to give social relations a name, to utter words that were uttered only because of a human struggle for something intangible (and lately derided as useless to real classstruggle): dignity.
The ability to name something racism, the ability to name yourself against the dominant society's name for you - these two simple acts - of naming - were something that you could see a woman of, maybe, 40, struggle to actually achieve.
I think the next most powerful scene is the interview with the president of TV Guide who wrote a TV Guide piece accusing Switzerland, Holland, etc. of being anti-american for showing nothing but bad things about the u.s. on their TV programs.
The Swedes interview the guy defending how great the u.s. is and intersperse it with a scene of a u.s soldier beating Vietnamese prisoners.
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