Ethiopian-American director Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama is one part fly-on-the-wall documentary and one part surreal arthouse psychodrama, showcasing the experience of poor African-Americans in ’70s Los Angeles.
With its grainy black-and-white footage and its fierce, fiery jazz-meets-musique-concrete soundtrack, Bush Mama seems teleported from another time and some far-off place. And yet, 1165 people were shot and killed by police officers in 2018. 26.7% of those fatalities were African-American.
The fact that little has changed in the 40 years since Bush Mama‘s release is a tragedy. It also offers an opportunity, as it’s the perfect time to revisit Gerima’s story of a poor African-American community in late-70s Los Angeles.
Bush Mama primarily follows Dorothy (Barbara O.) and her husband T.C. (Johnny Weathers). Dorothy spends her days navigating the unemployment office, talking to people in the neighborhood, raising her daughter Luann (Susan Williams), and occasionally drinking too much. T.C. is a Vietnam Vet who’s plagued by bad dreams and also sometimes drinks too much. He seems lost in a daze, as does Dorothy, but T.C. snaps out of it, gets himself a new job where he’ll be well paid working with computers. This bright future never materializes, sadly, as T.C. is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. He spends the rest of the film corresponding with Dorothy, as he becomes increasingly radicalized while in prison.
Dorothy begins to rouse from her somnambulant state, as well. First of all, she’s pregnant with her second child. Her welfare worker continually advocates for Dorothy to get an abortion, as she has no job and her husband’s in prison. She threatens to cut off Dorothy’s benefits if she doesn’t.
Dorothy’s days are full of people from the neighborhood. There’s Angi (Renna Kraft), a teenage girl who participates in demonstrations, bringing Dorothy posters from the rally. One shows an African woman with an AK-47 in one hand and a baby in the other, the “bush mama” of the film’s title. The other shows the body of a young black man, shot 25 times by the L.A.P.D. Others, like Molly (Cora Lee Day), deride the militants, jaded and cynical by a lifetime of disappointment.
All of this comes to a head in the film’s final moments, as Dorothy comes home to find her daughter Luann being assaulted by a white police officer in her home. She loses it, becomes the “bush mama” as she beats the cop to death with a cane. The film finalizes with Dorothy writing to T.C., speaking of her own on-going radicalization. She’s shown with her own natural hair, a headful of coiled natty dreadlocks, that she’s kept hidden beneath a wig throughout the film.
She’s not hiding any longer.
Bush Mama is a brilliant but painful watch. It’s beautiful, for those that like scratchy old black and white movies. The acting is beyond phenomenal, particularly from Barbarao and Johnny Weathers. Barbara O’s a marvel of emotive physicality, conveying so much with just a facial expression or a look in her eyes. Weathers is heartbreaking in his positivity, radiating strength and positivity as he discovers the works of important African-American thinkers. Rather than shutting down and succumbing to bitterness while in prison, he rises to the challenge, even trying to provide for his family while incarcerated. He’s the definition of a good man.
Bush Mama is also an example of film’s potential as an artful, artistic medium. Haile Gerima’s editing says as much as the plot, if not more so, using special effects and meaningful transitions to provide a poetic subtext to the film. At one point, a panning shot of African-American men in prison, freezing on T.C., cuts back to Dorothy, shooting between the bars of her bed’s headboard. Is this a commentary on the plight of all African-Americans, inside and outside of jail and society? Is it foreshadowing Dorothy’s ultimate, untimely fate? You’ll have to be the judge of that. Gerima’s not here to tell you what to think. He’s just asking you to think.
The sound design and soundtrack deserve special mention, as well. Much of the film features an abstract, atmospheric sound collage – interviews with welfare recipients interspersed with weather and traffic reports, radio broadcasts, snippets of random dialogue, all the while punctuated with a muscular jazz score. It’s like Gerima included the air surrounding the characters just as much as the people themselves.
Taken together, Bush Mama becomes an essential glimpse into the African-American experience of the late ’70s, taking you on a trip through the psychosphere, through the dark heart of American dreaming. There is great ugliness there, savagery, brutality. And yet, love perseveres. Hope springs eternal, even when they try and lock it down behind iron bars.
Movies are particularly adept at evoking real empathy, deep understanding, actual connection. You are, by definition, looking through someone else’s eyes. You are walking a mile in their shoes. Personally, i couldn’t be more thankful for the glimpse, while being all-too-aware that this is no revelation for a huge swathe of this world’s population. It’s just business as usual, even 40 years on. Bush Mama may leave you as radicalized as Dorothy and T.C. and that is a good thing.
Bush Mama was part of the L. A. Rebellion film movement, the first i’ve seen. I’m looking forward to investigating more of these films in the near future. Bush Mama was screened as part of the mighty Church of Film at the equally marvelous Clinton Street Theater. Make sure to frequently frequent both if you’re a movie lover living in Portland, Or.
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