I still find this film to be one of the best movies in the past several years. I have written extensively about it and have screened it amongst college students and independent film lovers. The film is even particularly relevant in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the conservative tide that has taken over America and the political unrest that agitates the entire world.
The movie is an epic story of Cairo Medina, a black actor, and his quest for self-realization and contribution to the revolutionary movement he desires to be a part of -- very much like the creators of the Black Arts Movement such as Amiri Baraka, Marvin X, and the Last Poets. However, this film is set in the present and in this sense it is extremely modern and contemporary and Mr. Moore clearly shows the problems that face the new wave of black fine artists and theatre-folk in specific.
Dennis Leroy Moore proves himself as an exceptional actor in addition to being an auteur. He plays the director, Abner, in the film - He is intelligent, sharp, and has sealed his eyes on the prize; he is unlike anything I've ever seen on film: A manic black man who swaggers, swears, quotes Yeats one minute and the Last Poets the next, his rhythms are up and down - to say he is eccentric would be too easy. What he is is a real person with a dream.
Cairo, in a beautiful performance by Luis Laporte, is the opposite side of the coin. He is repressed, weary, and nervous. He suffers from an ulcer apparently that seems to represent the gnawing, draining, disease of racism. Cairo and Abner are easy targets for the White Supremacist Patriarchy - they are two young, healthy black men who are creative, not destructive and for all their tragic clichés', Abner and Cairo threaten the status quo since they are not bouncing idiots out of an MTV video. Hype Williams would never know how to operate in Mr. Moore's world -- since Moore's characters do not posture or worry about being liked or looking hip. They are concerned about survival.
There are a series of events that the characters, and most notably Cairo, go through. The film is really a collection of endings and mediations on racism, black manhood and definition, and the role of the artist. The first act ends with a board of white bankers taking over the Harlem theatre (an excellent comment on the gentrification of Harlem and the castration of the black voice) and we see Abner, the tough talking poet of the theatre, give up. Abner is crushed and this surprises us because of the change we see him go through. The scene works, however, because it shows another side of Abner - a realistic portrait of a dream squashed...
The racism around Cairo is too much, illogical, and violent in all ways. He's lost his artistic outlet (the theatre), he's constantly reminded by a barrage of media images of the lack of worth of the black man's life, police sirens seem to bombard the film, and his relationship to his loved ones, and the world around him diminishes. It's a cold world, underscored by a soundtrack of howling wind and dark interiors. The film takes on the quality of a horror movie by the time Cairo begs a well-known author and professor for help in dealing with the racism in the city. He admits he is confused by life, by America's system, and that he needs help.
Ward Nixon portrays Professor Eastman in a chilly reptilian vain and Moore crafts the scenes at Eastman's house with obscure long lenses and a host of dialogue that anyone would find captivating, interesting, and annoying all at once.
My goal, however, is not so much to relay the narrative of the film as much as it is to express the journey and ingredients of the film as an artistic experience and political manifesto because Dennis Leroy Moore is obviously very concerned about the situation black artists suffer through, the turmoil black men go through to discover who they are, have been, could be, should be, and want to be without any influence of the Western world's history, culture, and art. Of course this is, to a certain degree, impossible like DuBois mentions in his famous "double consciousness" theory.
There is a lot to this film, like a double album, or epic poem. Long, excessive, meditative, humorous at times -- As An Act of Protest represents a new wave of Black Film-making in the United States. It is very New York, extremely paranoid, and unapologetic about its blackness. The filmmakers took a risk and I feel they should be applauded. The film contains various styles and homage's from movies like "Taxi Driver" to Haile Gerima's "Ashes & Embers."
