[Roger Ross Williams cinematic tour de force proceeds to tell the
story of racism through the colonial period up to today’s Black
Lives Matter struggles against police brutality and more.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

AN ANTI-RACIST CINEMATIC MASTERPIECE: STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING  
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Ed Rampell
October 27, 2023
Hollywood Progressive
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_ Roger Ross Williams cinematic tour de force proceeds to tell the
story of racism through the colonial period up to today’s Black
Lives Matter struggles against police brutality and more. _

Poster - Stamped from the Beginning, Stamped from the Beginning

 

The screen adaptation of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book _Stamped
from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in
America _directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African American
director to win an Academy Award, is a cinematic
masterpiece. _Stamped from the Beginning _– which derives its
title from a despicably racist 1860 speech delivered by Senator
Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy – is one of the
greatest anti-racist nonfiction motion pictures ever made, in terms of
film form and content.

_Stamped _goes back in time to before the trans-Atlantic slave trade
began in Europe, and shows how racism was a construct to rationalize
the brutality of slavery on the grounds that Europeans were inherently
superior to Africans. Blacks replaced Eastern European Slavs (the film
contends that term is the source of the word “slave”) for forced
labor because due to the color of their skin, it was harder for
escaped Africans to blend in with the white population.

When slavery was exported to the “New World,” white indentured
servants were given more benefits than Blacks after Bacon’s
Rebellion in 1676, wherein slaves and indentured servants united
across ethnic lines on a class basis to overthrow the plantation elite
in Virginia. By endowing poor white workers with “white skin
privileges” the ruling class aimed to divide laborers racially.

This cinematic tour de force proceeds to tell the story of racism
through the colonial period, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow,
the Civil Rights/Black Power movements and up to today’s Black Lives
Matter struggles against police brutality and more. To do so, Kendi
and Williams interview prominent female African American academics,
including the legendary onetime political prisoner Angela Davis,
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Carol Anderson, Brittany Packnett Cunningham
and Jennifer L. Morgan.

_THE FILM FOCUSES ON PHILLIS WHEATLEY, A BLACK WOMAN WHO BEFORE THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION, HAD TO PROVE TO INCREDULOUS MASSACHUSETTS WHITES
THAT SHE REALLY WROTE THE POEMS BEARING HER BYLINE._

The film focuses on Phillis Wheatley, a Black woman who before the
American Revolution, had to prove to incredulous Massachusetts whites
that she really wrote the poems bearing her byline at a public
hearing. The crusading anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells is also
highlighted, as are other African American writers.

All this is interwoven in a highly innovative manner by Williams and
Emmy-nommed screenwriter David Teague (who’d co-written the 2020
screen version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ _Between the World and Me _for
HBO) with a captivatingly impressive visual verve and sonic
sensibility, which brings the subject matter vividly alive. Along with
its original interviews with talking heads, _Stamped _deploys a
painterly animation style, a graphic style redolent of each period
being depicted, reenactments, archival/news clips of significant
figures including Reverend King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Stokely
Carmichael, etc. The production looks like a filmic version of a
graphic novel (there is also a graphic novel version of Kendi’s
book). Williams won the Oscar in the Best Documentary, Short Subjects
category in 2010 for _Music by Prudence _and was also nominated in
2017 for Best Documentary Feature in 2017 for _Life, Animated_ –
he should win in that category for _Stamped_ at the next Academy
Awards ceremony.

As a film historian, my favorite vignettes were brilliantly edited
montages of movie/TV/ advertising clips that show how Blacks have been
dehumanized via depictions in mass mediums controlled by the dominant
majority culture, including a scene of a libidinous freed slave
pursuing blonde Southern belle Mae Marsh in D.W. Griffith’s 1915
Civil War/Reconstruction era epic _The Birth of a Nation_, arguably
the most racist Hollywood feature ever made. But with _Stamped from
the Beginning_, the much-vaunted Griffith, “the man who invented
Hollywood,” has been bested by Black filmmakers, who are armed not
only with superior techniques, but with something Griffith did not
possess when he directed _The Birth of a Nation_: The stamp of truth.
As the national debate over American history rages, _Stamped _is
essential viewing, and starting November 20 it can be seen on Netflix.

Executive producer/author Dr. Kendi, producer Alisa Payne and
executive producer Mara Brock Akil attended the October 26 screening
at AFI FEST and did a post-screening Q&A with _Gil_ Robertson,
president of the _African American Film Critics
Association,_ about _Stamped from the Beginning_. BRAVO!!!

For more info about AFI FEST 2023 and tickets
see: [link removed]. 

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect
the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.

_ED RAMPELL is an L.A.-based full-time freelance writer and author.
He was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because
of his TV exposes of Sen. Joe McCarthy and majored in Cinema at
Manhattan’s Hunter College. After graduating, Rampell lived in
Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear free
and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements for: ABC
News’ “20/20,” Reuters, AP, Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand,
NewsWeek, Honolulu Weekly, etc. _

 

 

 

* Film
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* Documentary Film
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* Film Review
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* Stamped from the Beginning
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* Roger Ross Williams
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* Dr. Ibram X Kendi
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* History of Racism in America
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* slavery
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