灵魂乐之夏

从一个音乐节的消逝体现黑人种族时间线上的解放、碰壁和思考

作为影片 技术确实还可以 以不同的访谈切入不同的乐队或者书面资料的体现……但是内容引起不适：黑人表达对政府登月的不满 因为花的钱太多了 政府可以把钱交给黑人让他们脱贫 ；完全杜绝动机地对纽约市长亲近黑人这件事的讴歌；我觉得太简单粗暴了，一个音乐节的消逝是令人惋惜，但只是无绪的拼凑各个乐队，让人看得好累。

纪录片是有教育意义的，这部片子有无脑向观众灌输单方面的黑人牛逼论。为什么要去否定登月类似对太空的探索，这是人类文明的进步，而且脱贫不是给钱就可以解决的。此外市长只要参与了黑人，为了选票，你们就可以简单的觉得他值得讴歌？还有肯尼迪被杀害，无脑灌输要革命，因为革命混乱可以获得自由？灌输宗教音乐，人们要相信神的存在……

奥斯卡体现了政治正确，也有对种族方面的关怀，可是这个片子确实太差强人意了，难道种族平等只体现在黑人崛起吗？在美国纽约，黄人的地位比黑人还差，所谓的和平也不是单推黑人值得政府登月的钱、值得市长的特别关注、值得宣扬他们的宗教主义让所有人认可。

和平绝对不是特殊对待。

By Anthony Lane

June 25, 2021

Halfway through a heavy year, the best movie so far—the one most likely to ease the load and lift you up—is “Summer of Soul.” It’s a documentary, directed by Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson, a drummer, a d.j., a record producer, and a founder of the Roots, best known as the house band for Jimmy Fallon. You may have spotted Thompson behind the decks at the Academy Awards, in April, where he seemed to be just about the only person, amid the scores of participants and the millions of television viewers, who was demonstrably having a good time. Now, adding one more arrow to his quiver, he has made his first film, in which pretty much everybody has a good time.

“Summer of Soul” is about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. If you haven’t heard of it, that may be because it was—tellingly, if not deliberately—erased from public consciousness. The festival took place outdoors, in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), and it was filmed, under lighting generously provided by the sun. The tapes then sat in a basement, largely unseen, for half a century. At last, they have been unearthed and, in the hands of Thompson and his editor, JoshuaL.Pearson, given new life and shape.

Among the skills required of any documentarian is a croupier’s cunning, and you have to be quick to notice the way in which Thompson, holding a full deck of footage, shuffles and deals. The festival consisted of six separate events, held on a bunch of Sundays, beginning on June 29th and concluding on August24th. But we glimpse that schedule only once, in passing, and the rest of the film makes no distinction between the different days, splicing the acts together and leaving us with the impression that the crowds that mustered in the park—some three hundred thousand strong, in total—were treated to one big rolling jubilee of sweet sounds. As far as I can tell, we get no clips from the final event, listed as “Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant and Local Talent.” Probably a wise move.

The festival’s producer, and the host of the proceedings, was Tony Lawrence, who is lauded in the film as “a hustler, in the best sense.” The outcome of his hustling was a lineup so absurdly rich, and so river-wide in its range of genres, that you want to laugh: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B.King, Hugh Masekela, David Ruffin—as thin as a barber’s pole, in a pink bow tie, with a falsetto sent from God—and Gladys Knight and the Pips. Especially the Pips. Their curveting dance routines, around a single microphone, are a thing of calibrated beauty. (We long to know more, and Thompson, an ace of the educative cutaway, obliges by bringing in Knight. She credits the band’s choreographer, Cholly Atkins, who schooled them for ten or eleven hours a day.) Then, there’s the gleeful confession of Ray Barretto, bespectacled and busy at his drums: “In my blood I got Black—and white—red—Puerto Rican—Indian. I’m all messed up!”

To claim that the stage was occupied exclusively by people of color, though, would be inaccurate. For one thing, we see Lawrence bid welcome to the mayor of New York, JohnV.Lindsay, and introduce him as “our blue-eyed soul brother.” (For any viewers who are baffled by the film’s description of Lindsay as a “liberal Republican,” it should be explained that this refers to a once flourishing species, tough of hide but strangely peaceable in demeanor, that now verges on total extinction, like the Sumatran rhino.) Also visible, during a phenomenal set by Sly and the Family Stone, and easy to pick out in leopard-skin bell-bottoms, is Greg Errico. In the words of a man named Darryl Lewis, who was there that day, “The white guy is the drummer! You know, he’s not supposed to be able to do that.”

Lewis, a fount of geniality, is one of many attendees who are interviewed for the film. Their memories are, without exception, deliciously fresh. Dorinda Drake, who was nineteen at the time, says, “That’s the summer we became free”—pause—“of our parents.” Musa Jackson recalls the aroma in the park as if it were incense: “It smelled like Afro Sheen and chicken.” He was a little kid at the festival, though not so little that he didn’t lose his heart to Marilyn McCoo, a singer with the 5th Dimension. “I didn’t want to leave,” he says. Then, being a gentleman, he corrects himself: “I didn’t want to leave her.”

The 5th Dimension are seen performing their version of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”—which is almost as merry as the lip-synched version at the end of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” (2005)—wearing yellow, red, and orange. “You remember Creamsicles?” Jackson says, needing to nail the orange down. At the risk of blasphemy, I reckon that the clothes in “Summer of Soul” are very nearly as entertaining as the music. The cravats! The fringes! The hectic ruffs! Lawrence, as befits the master of ceremonies, sports an ever-changing cycle of outfits, including a white lace top with a carmine vest, and a shiny shirt that looks like an explosion in a host of golden daffodils. Imagine the envious glances he would have drawn at the court of Louis XIV.

“Summer of Soul” is one of those rare films from which you emerge saying, “My favorite part was that bit. No, that bit. Wait, how about that bit?” Personally, I’m torn between Stevie Wonder’s keyboard solo on “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da Day,” in which he plays like a man possessed, and “Everyday People” from Sly and the Family Stone, with its captivating chorus—“Different strokes, for different folks,/And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-doo.” Has there ever been a neater précis of the Bill of Rights? And I haven’t even mentioned the beatific array of gospel performers, including Pops Staples and the Staple Singers, or the Edwin Hawkins Singers, vivid in lime green, swaying in unison to “Oh Happy Day.”

But something else is happening here. There’s no lack of great concert movies, so how to account for the urgent thrill of this one? Because of all the unhappy days. Because the whole of the Harlem Cultural Festival was, as someone remarks of Nina Simone’s imperious set, “like a rose coming through cement.” Because “Summer of Soul” has a subtitle that presents its political credentials: “Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised.” The buzz of the occasion (even as the end credits die, you hear the hum of the throng) arose against a backdrop of profound unrest, in the African-American community above all. A year earlier, on April 4, 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Harlem had suffered riots and hours of looting, and, as Darryl Lewis suggests, “New York was trying not to have a repeat of that, in ’69.” Hence the brief but vital images of white policemen, standing calmly in the midst of Black festivalgoers, and neither making trouble nor seeking to rein it in. Who knows, maybe they felt the groove inside.

What we are witnessing, in short, is not a state of bliss but a precious, precarious interlude of release and relief, before the pressures of an unequal society kicked back in. History chose to commemorate Woodstock, which unfolded a hundred miles or so away, in the heat of the same summer. But history, as so often, went to the wrong gig.