Before the jungle rumbled, it had soul http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/before-the-jungle-rumbled-it-had-soul/article1226200/
Guy Dixon Jul. 21, 2009 James Brown in 1974 is muscular, mustached, at his peak as Soul Brother Number One. When a camera follows him backstage, the electrical charge of singing The Payback to a stadium in what was then Zaire still courses through him. In his makeshift dressing room, he's exhausted and needs his space. He thanks the filmmakers, and they slowly pan the camera away. But Brown continues to wave back for an unusually long time, raising his arms in gratitude to the fans who will be watching this footage. It speaks volumes about how he sees himself, as an entertainer and figurehead. It should be as classic a scene as Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonizing in Woodstock or Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar in Monterey Pop. Except that the film is only coming to theatres now 35 years after the legendary show. For the newly released Soul Power, American filmmaker Jeffrey Levy-Hinte plowed through the largely forgotten, 100-plus hours of footage of the concert dubbed Zaire '74. "Stewart Levine, who was one of the main organizers, was like 'Right on, brother, this is the film that we wanted to make,'" says Levy-Hinte. The film assembles material from the three-day music festival that was meant to accompany Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's October, 1974, bout for the world heavyweight title. The famous "rumble in the jungle" was delayed six weeks when Foreman cut his eye during training. But the festival organized by promoter-musician Levine, trumpeter Hugh Masekela and boxing promoter Don King had to go on. There were the logistics of bringing star performers from Brown to B.B. King to the Spinners to Kinshasa, the capital city. And while Zaire's autocrat Mobutu Sese Seko had underwritten the heavyweight match, he didn't fund the festival. It was paid for by a group of Liberian investors. As for the film, according to Levy-Hinte, the company behind it, International Records and Films, overspent and went belly up. That left Leon Gast, the original director and producer, with a decade-long legal battle to gain control of what was shot (including material by such notable documentary filmmakers as Albert Maysles). He finally won the legal battle. But then spent another 10 years shaping the footage into When We Were Kings , the Academy Award-winning documentary that concentrates almost solely on the Ali-Foreman match. "I think that was such a successful film and so exhausting that they were very happy to push [the festival footage] back in the vault," says Levy-Hinte. "I was working as an editor on that film, and I remembered all the wonderful aspects of the footage that wasn't explored. In fact, thematically, the whole concert was really never given its due. So a couple years back, I approached [music manager and film producer] David Sonenberg, who was Leon Gast's partner in this and a friend of mine, and he gave me his blessing and not much else." But Levy-Hinte felt a duty to get the material out to the public, and he would still like to release all the available footage of the festival on DVD, if he could find backers. "As with all these great musical events, Woodstock and Monterey Pop, they enter the public imagination through the film itself. And certainly when they were making it, there was no sense that the film wouldn't get made in the natural course of things, and that it would be out the next year, and that there would be albums and probably a whole other tour of the bands. I'm sure there was enormous planning around that. But it all just fell apart," says Levy-Hinte. But the added power of the footage was the significance among some of the black American musicians of playing in Africa for an African audience. As King says in an exclamatory whisper in the film, getting star performers to come "6,000 miles from home, that was blackness That was the strength" "Somebody asked me, What are you gonna bring back? Are you gonna bring back souvenirs? Somebody wants cloth and all like that. What I want to bring back is the feeling," says singer-songwriter Bill Withers. But it's Brown who puts it best: Talking directly to the camera, he emphasizes that "when you walk out of this movie, or if you walk away from your television set, if there's one thing you walk out with in your mind, when you get up and walk out and look down the street, you say to yourself, 'Damn right I'm somebody'" Still, like the best cinéma-vérité of the era, Soul Power covers the gamut of emotions at Zaire '74. "Certainly for the Spinners, or for James Brown and his band, and I think also for Bill Withers, … it was a really powerful and profound experience for them," says Levy-Hinte. "But for other people, it was a gig. That's just the way the world works. "People have asked me, Why don't we have a clearer message? My feeling is that, you know, the promoters had a message but I think it's contradictory. It is this coming together and bringing people back to their roots, but also there's a larger commercial consideration. In a way, I wanted to show it all." And to show it, finally, after all these years. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
