Documentary on the Black Artists’ Group premieres at SLIFF
Bryan Dematteis’ documentary film “The Black Artists’ Group: Creation Equals Movement,” which will premiere at the 2020 St. Louis International Film Festival from November 5-22, was a long time in the making. Dematteis began working on the film in 2014, and the Black Artists’ Group dissolved back in 1972, so this movie took either six years or a half-century to be made, depending on how you look at it.
Dematteis told The American that he canned more than 50 hours of on-camera interviews for this lean, 48-minute film. The new interviews he conducted – of BAG principals such as Oliver Lake, the late Hamiet Bluiett, Malinke Elliott, the late Shirley LeFlore, Portia Hunt, George Sams and the late Charles “Bobo” Shaw – form a valuable contribution to the history of black artist movements and of St. Louis. The interviews all look and sound great, and the subjects are eloquent. Given how long Dematteis worked on this film, he captured what must have been the last on-camera interviews for some people we have since lost, such as Bluiett, LeFlore and Shaw, that the public is now seeing for the first time after they are gone.
Collectively, these direct participants tell the story of Lake traveling to Chicago and finding fellow St. Louis native Lester Bowie in the center of Black artistic ferment with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in 1965. Lake transplanted the idea of Black artistic self-definition to St. Louis as BAG in 1968. Four whirlwind years of innovative multi-media performances, community-based public education and daring activism later, BAG disbanded as the musicians at heart of the group absconded to Paris.
Little known and poorly understood in St. Louis, the BAG musicians were hailed as visionaries in France; live recordings of the band, released as “In Paris, Aries 1973” is one of the few documents of BAG’s creative efforts to survive. That record was the most substantial trace left by the group until Benjamin Looker’s 2004 book “‘Point From Which Creation Begins’: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis” (Missouri Historical Society Press) and now this film.
Dematteis unearthed some powerful film and photographs of BAG in action, which he uses to stitch together and illustrate his interviews of talking heads. Dematteis would make an even greater contribution to history if he were to release these archival documents in their totality along with his documentary. The fragments of Malinke Elliott doing dramatic improvisations to the music of J.D. Parran and the late Julius Hemphill or of the late Emilio Cruz teaching visual art to public school children are riveting and tantalizing.
These images from the past are especially haunting given that creative forces like Hemphill and Cruz are no longer with us. These fugitive, flickering images are precious. For many people who lived through BAG and its aftermath in St. Louis, this will be a moving, poignant, emotional film.
“The Black Artists’ Group: Creation Equals Movement” provokes musing upon the lost world of the late 1960s and early 1970s and departed genius. It also has lessons to teach St. Louis in 2020. The notion that artists need to own their work and produce their own shows and recordings without external meddling is more commonplace now, but it’s refreshing to see the birth of this idea in St. Louis. In fact, the financial support that BAG finally attracted from the Rockefeller and Danforth foundations was a mixed blessing, given that the eventual loss of funding was critical to BAG falling apart. Live by the grant, die by the grant – it’s a bitter lesson that creative artists keep learning the hard way.
Today’s Black Lives Matter activists (many of them also creative artists) have come to expect that their movements and social media will be monitored by law enforcement. BAG was stung by COINTELPRO, the granddaddy of U.S. government surveillance and disruption of Black-led social justice movements. It’s infuriating to be reminded of federal agents trailing Black artists as they educated Black youth, certainly one of American history’s most laughably wrongheaded forays in threat assessment.
“The Black Artists’ Group: Creation Equals Movement” inspires more than regret and rage, though. The archival footage captured young Black artists in St. Louis reveling in the joy of improvisation and creation. Dematteis did us all a favor to bring to the screen these blasts of free jazz, Black dance, painting, acting and mime. If you have even one single creative bone in your body, this film will compel you to try to create something no one has ever seen or heard before.
Watch “The Black Artists’ Group: Creation Equals Movement” as part of the 2020 St. Louis International Film Festival from November 5-22 at https://tinyurl.com/SLIFF-BAG. For more festival screenings, visit https://www.cinemastlouis.org/festival-home.