In the cinema, happiness sometimes comes from discovering a new work, from who knows where, whose intelligence and dazzling delight. See Bushman (1971), disturbing fiction alongside the direct cinema of the American David Schickele (1937-1999), it is a journey into the tumultuous America of the late 1960s, between protest against the war in Vietnam and the fight for rights civic, through the eyes of a young Nigerian – the restored film is distributed theatrically by Malavida. Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam) came to teach literature on the campus of a San Francisco university, after fleeing his native country in the middle of the civil war.
For an hour and a half, in its free form like John Cassavetes and its powdery black and white grain, Bushman tells its four truths to the great power that is the United States. Which appear generous and progressive while allowing the police to quell student revolts, or to foment false accusations against certain individuals deemed undesirable – Paul, alias Gabriel, will pay the price, as we will see later . Also a musician, pacifist, and author of Give Me a Riddle (1966), with the same actor, a film about the Peace Corps (named after this corps of peacekeepers created by John Kennedy in 1961), David Schickele has the gift of relying on clichés (racial, social …) to produce the most unexpected plans.
We discover the young Nigerian on the edge of a highway from the West Coast, moving barefoot, his pair of sneakers balanced on his head, a powerful image of a world walking on its head. We are in 1968: “Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Bobby Hunter [l’un des premiers membres des Black Panthers, qui fut tué par la police], have recently died », soberly indicates a box. Gabriel hitchhikes, a biker white stops to take it. And yet this hospitable gesture is immediately tinged with an uninhibited arrogance, which today we would describe as ordinary racism, the driver hastening to ask his passenger if the African women who wander around topless in his bush do not don’t drive you crazy. Or wondering what the Nigerian professor can teach an American audience…
Caught up with reality
Gabriel has few illusions and knows that one day he will leave ” this country “ to find his own, the film disseminating some flashbacks on the Nigerian village. The only person who could hold him back is his girlfriend Alma (Elaine Featherstone), “a little less black” but as sunny and pessimistic as him.
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