Vagabond Beaumont Alexander’s classic Audio-Visual Terrorism and guerrilla film-making at its most potent.
Like my own cinematic revolutionary attempt made in the turn of the century As an Act of Protest, Machetero sought to blow the mind like a grenade and rouse the ‘logic-of-the-soul’ as to the horrors, complexities and simplicities inherent in our human duties as a result of colonization and racism.
“Machetero is about terrorism and terrorists, how they are defined and by whom…It is a film about the cyclical nature of violence that is perpetuated by those who choose to oppress and those who no longer wish to be oppressed.” – Vagabond
The PAN-Latino/Indigenous and Black struggle and yearning for liberation are conjoined like Siamese Twins. We both share a Leftist view of the world from our inherent understandings of the Caribbean (we are both West Indians, my family largely from Trinidad – his from Puerto Rico) and while our direct influences and approaches have been different (I come from classical theater, Vagabond hails from the fine arts world), we share a view of the world and what love is through our appreciation of DIY punk ethos, rock & roll, and those who think way outside the established academic norms. We are also New York natives who tried to inject ourselves and our generation with the dust-mites from our & the previous generation’s approach to growing up and exploring the world around, both good and bad, and while we may have faltered to get our generation fully on board — our attempts have been righteously and fantastically executed. High quality cinema with no money; priceless ideas and talent…verve and conviction. That’s where Vagabond is coming from and he could not operate any other way.
“Success is getting someone else to believe in you. Not you believing in yourself.” – Vagabond
Over the years, I have come to learn a lot from Vagabond, and he is one of the few born in the bone filmmakers still in the trenches, trying to make sense of radicalism and meaning, the poetry in science fiction…and the immorality of mere “happiness.” He is a romantic and a film-addict. And like all addicts he simply seeks to reconcile himself with this urge to get his “fix”….so he can fix the mind.
Machetero is a punk-rock-garage band-movie that Abel Ferrera might have drooled over in his youth if his punk sentiments were as blisteringly politically avant-garde as they may be ‘controversially’ social. In splendid rawness and just the right balance of stylistic panache, Vagabond moderates his work with a documentary sobriety and yet a “other-worldliness” presentation very much rooted in his own personal brand of science-fiction which has always had an enormous inspiration for him I feel, where as I have only looked upon sci-fi as a curiosity but never understood it in my bones. I come from Method Acting and drama and was a devotee of the Theater of the Absurd; he uses our ‘space oddities’ and the world’s political landscape as a towering backdrop; his externals are my internals. I use dialogue the way he visually creates atmosphere…perhaps we both meet somewhere in the middle where surrealism and radical ideas converge? He needs to make films, I need to write words. He opts for the moving image, whereas I want to halt or destroy it. He understands the pictorial, I relate to the textual. We both love sound. As traditionalists, he’d like Scorsese, I’d prefer Cassavetes. He can paint and draw, I am colorblind. But we both appreciate poetry, rawness and having guts verses having might. We are both for the underdog and no matter what despise Goliath.
With an excellent soundtrack and bold photography, the movie also features an outstanding cast: the always charismatic Isaach de Bankolé , the superbly honest Not4Prophet (of punk-band Ricanstruction) as well as gently Naturalist performances by Kelvin Fernandez and Dylcia Pagan that help to both round out and sharpen the film’s layered acting styles, given more complexity to the movie’s stylized neo-realism.
The movie was hailed by socially conscious artists such as Chuck D and Sam Greenlee. It has had international critic support and yet remains largely maligned and dismissed here at home, in NYC. I personally have known people who simply can’t get on board with our mode and style of filmmaking – and so our own artwork become ghettoized and blacklisted. Machetero is a victim of a whole other virus that we won’t get into at this very moment.
Machetero is one of the great films of the digital revolution and the cinematic one…and part of a movement that was largely missed. A defining film of my generation, it was the A side to my worthy B side of our shared “cinematic” single and sheds beautiful light and time and space on those profoundly disturbed by injustice and obsessed with fixing it.
Here is the Link to the insightful 2013 announcement when Machetero had finally received a dignified DIY screening in NYC’s Lower East Side:
https://nothingtobegainedhere.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/machetero-diy-nyc-theatrical-release/
Kangalee's Cave 