Sept 12, 3pm, Black Militancy in Cinema:
The Final Comedown (1972)
by
Black Militancy and Revolution in Cinema
Sept 12, 3pm, 2021
The Final Comedown (1972) Oscar Williams, 1hr 23m
Free Screening & Discussion: Register Now
The Final Comedown is a 1972 film, considered “blaxploitation,” written, produced and directed by Oscar Williams, starring Billy Dee Williams and D’Urville Martin. Based on the 1967 play by Jimmy Garret, We Own The Night, whose title came from a poem by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, the film is an examination of racism in the United States and depicts a shootout between a radical black nationalist group and the police, and the development of the incident’s origins through flashbacks. The radical group, never identified by name in the film, closely resembles the Black Panther Party.
The film premiered in Chicago, 27 Apr 1972, produced by Billy Dee Williams Enterprises and Oscar Williams and Associates, Inc. and was distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.
“Angry, powerful piece of counterculture filmmaking, with much less in common with its 1970’s blaxploitation than European political cinema, almost as if it picking up when Godard + Gorin and Peter Watkins left off, embracing a pseudo-documentary approach that all builds to a rousing shootout sequence in the final ten minutes pitting revolutionaries against cops.”
Writer/Radical Arts Advocate, Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a former theater director, actor, and screenwriter best known for his “raw, provocative, and demanding” 2002 film As an Act of Protest, a controversial drama about the horror of systemic racism and oppression that acknowledges the revolutionary thrust of Franz Fanon.
One of the youngest actors from NYC to attend the Juilliard Conservatory in 1994 and inspired by August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand,” he initiated the very first Black American Theater Seminar in Lincoln Center in 1996. With his theater company at the National Black Theater, he revived classic dramas such as James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, in memory of Amadou Diallo. He has taught and created works abroad, always connecting the tissue of Capitalism and Racism and how it fundamentally destroys mankind. His recent published interview/analysis on such themes was featured in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He has received honorariums from Princeton University, Chapel Hill/UNC, as well as SC’s virtual cinema, The Luminal Theater for his writing on Bill Gunn.
Currently he is developing curricula that equates radical and revolutionary proclivities in cinema with the power of American protest music under the title “Visual Liberation.” He writes and continues to champion the unheralded works of cinema” and especially the black rebel dramatists who have approached theater and cinema as aesthetically or politically as radical as the best of our musicians or poets. His podcast “Visual Liberation” goes live September 15, and his essay on William S. Burroughs will be included in a book in September 2022 published by Satori Rebel Press.