Panther

The year is 1966, the place, Oakland, California. The blacks living in the ghettos are tired of being harrased by the police. They react by forming a group called The Black Panther Party of Self-Defense. Both of the founding members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, talked as strongly about freedom and justice as today's rap-artists. They lived as they preached, and soon their message of pride and improvement for the black man's lot spread across the country. The Panthers introduced a number of social programmes to the ghettos, propogated for electoral participation and in-structed in law and civil rights, so that blacks could help each other during illegal arrests. Almost thirty years later the filmmaker Mario van Peebles has chosen to re- examine these turbulent times. With help from his father, Melvin, he has chosen to present his material through the eyes of a Vietnam war veteran, Judge. He joins the Panthers, but when the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, classifies them as public enemy number one, he is forced to become an informer for the state. The fight for Judge's soul is a minor question when considering how little has really changed during the past twenty years. Panther ventilates the question of whether change should be fought for from within, or outside of, the system. It also deals with the theory that the drug culture has be planted in the black society to make people easier to contain. An ultra right-wing group in America called Van Peeble's film a two hour lie whereupon a large group of black celebrities, among them Danny Glover, Spike Lee and ''Magic'' Johnson, expressed their support for the film. Mario van Peebles has become a director with a feeling for the power-fully visual, and Panther is no exception. It is a drama-documentary, a military spectacle about young blacks who for the first time in their lives - and in American history - find themselves armed to the teeth. The director uses the same mixture of documentary and fiction that directors such as Oliver Stone have used in a number of films. The controversial film showing the beating of Rodney King would, in the light of this film, be an everyday occurence. The violence is brutal and aggressive, though the young Panthers seem a little lost in their armed commitment. In the end, the film Panther seems to be more a tribute to Martin Luther King's call for peace, than a call for an indiscriminate armed revolt.