Mother Jones
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Stanley Nelson had just returned from a screening of his new documentary “Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution” at the Apollo Theatre, when he saw her—Beyoncé—backed by dancers adorned in jet black outfits, berets and blown out hair, dancing with authority before thousands of raucous fans at the centerpiece of mainstream American culture, the Super Bowl. “I was shocked and amazed by it,” Nelson recalled later. “But also, it was beautiful.”
The award-winning filmmaker had been swept up in a Black Panther moment. And in a way, so is the rest of the country. Much like during the late 1960s, protests over police brutality in the past year has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. The film serves as a reminder that the issues the Black Panthers combated—poverty, economic disparity, tensions between law enforcement and the black community—remain relevant today.
The film, told mainly through the voices of the Panthers’ rank and file, captures the group’s rise and long, steady fall as a cultural and political force, from its infamous gun-touting demonstration at the California statehouse to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to disrupt and destroy the Panthers’ national influence. Nelson’s doc also gets at the internal struggles as women rising through the Panther ranks pushed for gender equality.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, has largely been praised, although some insiders have taken issue with Nelson’s portrayal. Former Panther leader Elaine Brown dismissed the film as a “two-dimensional palliative for white people and Negroes who are comfortable in America’s oppressive status quo.” Nelson chose not to respond directly, saying simply, “I don’t think there’s anything about the Panthers that anybody can agree on. But I think in some ways, this film comes really close.”
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This New Film Will Change the Way You Think About the Black Panthers
