Legend has it that, three days before his assassination, Malcolm X met in the streets of New York one of the actors of Nothing But a Man (1964) and docks it: “Are you Julius Harris?” I saw Nothing But a Man and I liked it a lot! » It is not surprising to see the leader of the Black Panthers dub the work, one of the very few of the time to so crudely take the pulse of the condition of African-Americans in the United States of the 1960s.
If there have always been meteoric works that have tried to evoke the black condition, political lucidity has always come from the margins of industry. Opposite, Hollywood has long been cautious: the black condition can never be thought of outside of a “white gaze”, to which the black hero must constantly give pledges, until he is damaged in it.
It is the insistence of this white reverse shot that definitively atomizes Nothing but a Man, enraged and clairvoyant work, like a novel by James Baldwin. We never leave the gaze of Duff Anderson, a railroad worker in an Alabama town, who crosses his way of the cross and who, at the risk of his happiness, stands up to a still segregated South. The man falls in love with a young black woman from the middle class. The father, a respected pastor, initially opposes their union: with exemplary simplicity, Michael Roemer makes inseparable the question of race and that of class.
The film’s quasi-documentary vivacity gives it its formal power: the close-ups enclose exhausted faces, destinies shattered by unemployment and alcoholism, without Roemer ever making them “subjects”. The use of great Motown hits shows this desire to refuse any overhang, to always start from the culture of his characters: the filmmaker catches politics in the nets of filial, friendly and romantic relationships.
He does much more than observe a simple divide between blacks and whites, the latter being here reduced to the status of oppressor. He grasps the tiniest and most perverse consequences of this hatred: social and emotional misery, division within a community deprived of its capacity to organize itself collectively, polarized between resignation and revolt. The trap closes in concentric circles, poisons the couple before splitting the hero himself, emptied of his power to act, whom he ends up winning back, at the end of the race. Michael Roemer has here sublimated all his experience as a Jewish child persecuted by the Nazis, and his film wants to be, in this, the ultimate response to an approach to identity which would like us to understand and film a minority only in being itself from.
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