Coming to PBS’s American Experience today, Monday, February 15: VOICE OF FREEDOM
Director: Rob Rapley
World Premiere: PBS broadcast (February 2021)
About: The story of singer Marian Anderson and the barriers placed upon her because of racism.
While not a household name today, for decades contralto Marian Anderson was heralded throughout Europe and the US as the “Voice of the Century.” While never an outspoken civil rights activist, her 1939 open air performance in front of the Lincoln Memorial – and the long controversy that led to it – marked a pivotal moment of dawning awareness by non-Black audiences of the pervasiveness and injustice of Jim Crow laws. Filmmaker Rob Rapley bookends his profile with this legendary event, telling the Black singer’s story in between, from early promise and success against the backdrop of segregation and racism to a life-changing and career-defining span of years honing her craft throughout Europe between 1927-1935 before returning to the realities of life as a Black woman in America. Little did Anderson know when she agreed to perform a benefit concert for Howard University in 1939 that she would be at the center of a national awakening about racism. Refused the use of a venue by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the concert became a cause célèbre, spurred on by the canny efforts of Walter White at the NAACP, who used his friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to attract national attention. While the DAR embarrassingly stuck to its restrictive policies, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed the concert to go on in front of the Lincoln Memorial, ultimately drawing 75000 attendees and millions via radio, and underscoring Lincoln’s pivotal connection to civil rights and freedom, something that had been shockingly downplayed if not buried in the decades since the Civil War. As with virtually all American Experience programs, Rapley’s follows its typical, workmanlike format, resulting in a somewhat muted sense of Anderson’s personality, but there’s still clear power in her story.
About: A personal meditation on the relationship between the gay filmmaker and his grandmother.
The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read: From a young age, filmmaker Stéphane Riethauser was groomed to become the golden heir to his family’s business—an alpha male who would fulfill their patriarchal expectations. His best friend and confidante was his grandmother Caroline, a self-made independent woman ahead of her time. After playing the part for several years, Stéphane matures into his true self and embraces LGBTQ activism. But will glamorous, old-fashioned Caroline understand? Riethauser’s filmis an honest and edgy confrontation with things long left unsaid in a family’s past.
About: Female officers from the Minneapolis Police Department provide an inside look at a troubled institution.
The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read: When Janeé Harteau becomes Minneapolis’s first female police chief, she sets out to change a troubled department by addressing racially biased policing, increasing transparency, recruiting more women into the force, and championing leadership roles for female officers. But all of her reforms are threatened by an officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed woman. Filming both before and after George Floyd’s murder, Deirdre Fishel follows four female officers as they navigate the changing department, offering a compelling inside look at the complex intersection of gender, race, and the limits of reform within an ethically questionable institution.
World Premiere: Dutch theatrical release (April 2018)
Select Festivals: Vancouver, Architecture & Design, Nederlands, New Zealand
About: A biographical celebration of the famed Dutch artist and would-be mathematician.
Working off of MC Escher’s own proclamation that the only person in the world who could make a film about his work was Escher himself, filmmaker Robin Lutz structures this tribute around the artist’s own words, voiced here by Stephen Fry. While there are a select few other commentators, notably Escher’s surviving children, the film is absent the perspectives of art world experts – a curious omission, given the project’s advocacy that Escher should be considered a high-art figure rather than a popular graphic designer. Instead, Escher, via Fry, guides us through his life history, the inspiration and development of his work through his travels and amateur interest in mathematics, and how he found fame, even if he was miffed by the mass marketing and colorization of his prints by hippies in the 1960s. Though the doc can feel at times like a dry PBS portrait, as a whole, it’s engaging enough, thanks to the curiosity and visual appeal of Escher’s prints.
