Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther

TUESDAY APRIL 15 A reception will be held from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the BAM Theater Gallery, where the photography exhibit The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones is on view. 7:00 Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther William Klein (France/Algeria, 1970) Introduced by Kathleen Cleaver Kathleen Cleaver has spent most of her life participating in the struggle for human rights, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s through her present work with the Southern Center for Human Rights and as Senior Lecturer at Emory University’s Law School. She is Executive Director of the International Black Panther Film Festival. In 1969, with an uncanny sense of political timing, William Klein filmed an interview with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, then living in exile in Algeria. Klein garnished Cleaver’s words with graphic titles, archival film, and documentary footage; the result is a singular portrait of black activism, very much of its time. Klein met Cleaver at the Panafrican Cultural Festival in 1969; the film was made soon after at the request of Cleaver and the Algerian government. But if Cleaver is the film’s hero, he is also very much, and very consciously, its antihero. As Irwin Silber wrote in The Guardian, “Cleaver, on film as in life, is a complex mixture of profound political insight, socially crystallized ghetto cultural patterns and a multifaceted human personality… [I]t is clear that Cleaver himself is aware of the fact that he is not the new man but a spawn of a very sick, very rotten social order and that his own claim on humanity rests on his willingness to serve as an instrument for that social order’s destruction.” • (75 mins, Color, 35mm, From Walker Art Center, with thanks to Dean Otto, permission William Klein) Preceded by: Mayday! (Newsreel, U.S., 1969). Documents an historic rally calling for the freeing of Huey P. Newton. (15 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema) Feature followed by: American Exile (Cassandra Herrman, Katy Shrout, U.S., 2001). Artists in Person. Reveals the story of Pete O’Neal, a former Black Panther leader from Kansas City, who has been in exile in Africa for 30 years. (26 mins, Video, From the filmmakers) • (Total running time: 116 mins plus discussion)