Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of
Remembrance is a film of sharp contrasts: between documentary and fiction,
celebration and criticism, hope and despair, traditionalism and progressivism,
heteronormativity and queerness, between submitting to chance and fatalism and
aspiring to control, all fascinatingly, often thrillingly interwoven. The film’s title speaks to the commemoration
of the struggle for social and racial justice, and it’s particularly concerned
with how the telling of that history, however passionate, has been a predominantly
male function, dominated by easily assimilated “iconic” images such as the
American athletes giving the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics (a clip
included here). It’s particularly biting on under-examined male attitudes
toward homosexuality, with the mother and sister defending a gay friend against
complacent barbs, and (in one of its most straightforward dramatizations)
depicting a couple of policemen going easy on a group of violence-minded youths.
At the same time, the film takes time to assert the joyfulness of family and
friendship, even in such minor rituals as collectively watching and squabbling
over a TV gameshow; it has extended sequences of stirring music and uninhibited
dancing (there’s an occasional music-video-like playfulness in its approach to
the documentary montages also). And further, Blackwood and Julien’s framing device,
with a man and woman conversing and arguing in a desolate landscape (seemingly
a representation of a parched history which undervalues the contributions of
women to activism and discourse), has the quality of myth, of post-apocalyptic
science fiction in which, after all else has been stripped away, the core
issues of social and gender equity may be all that remain. The film can feel
somewhat stilted and overly formal at times, but the lack of polish feeds the
broader sense of direct engagement and authenticity, of a film urgently concerned
with immediate needs and crises.
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