Personal Problems, in two volumes. Shot on U-Matic video for $40 thousand in 1980, a series of long dialog scenes. Ishmael Reed who came up with the original idea as a radio drama broadcast on NPR.
“Not a single weapon is pulled. That alone makes it an unusual black film,” said Reed, 80, in a recent interview.
In fact, it’s the ordinariness of the two-part, nearly three-hour “meta-soap opera” that makes it revolutionary, said Reed, the renowned and iconoclastic Oakland playwright-poet-novelist who has been a critic of political oppression and inequality for decades.(Read the whole article here.)
In one scene, a 17-year-old who's obviously in pain answers a long, long series of questions before he can be admitted to an emergency room.
A husband tells his wife over breakfast that he's going to meet with a friend, Rabbit, about a business deal. She mentions Raisin in the Sun as a cautionary tale. He's never heard of it and thinks she means Uptown Saturday Night. His father (Jim Wright, Souls of Sin, 1949) thinks it was Cabin in the Sky.
Directed by Bill Gunn.
Johnnie Mae and her cohort are not enslaved, drug-addicted, menacing or exceptional, said Reed, who has been openly critical of Hollywood successes like “The Color Purple,” “Precious” and “The Wire” for accentuating the negative or being “told by outsiders.”
“I’ve lived in inner-city Oakland since 1979,” he said. “Johnnie Mae and Charles, they’re like every black couple in my neighborhood, people with jobs. Some kids on the block ended up with ankle bracelets, but many more went to college. It’s just that the crack houses are the ones that normally get the media attention.”Available on The Criterion Channel.
U-Matic video didn't look bad. Why did people use VHS?
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