Visual Liberation: Where It All Began

Visual Liberation is decolonizing the gaze and conception of movies and celebrating the underdog’s vision of life as it pertains to challenging racism, misogyny, and capitalism on screen…and in life.

The Brecht Forum’s poster for the 2002 Visual Liberation Film Festival: a program of radical humanist filmmaking in NYC.

Visual Liberation (or “Cinematic Decolonization”) refers to movies that are made with the purpose of freeing both the audience and the creator’s minds, freeing them of the shackles of mental oppression, the remnants of a colonized (brainwashed) mind.  Whether they are mainstream, downstream, commercial movies or obscure films — it doesn’t matter. But they must exhibit some kind of genuine revolt within their frames. And they must not be films with a corporate agenda exploiting social unrest and “issues” that are fashionable, which is what Hollywood and advertising have done, rendering true revolutionary fervor obsolete, ironic, or safe.

What we forget – or perhaps never directly acknowledge– is the fact that what we regard as a “movie,” in the traditional American Hollywood sense, is a conception of the Western World’s White Ruling Class. It’s disturbing that, instead of trying to evolve one’s own aesthetic and ideas of how to usurp the rules dictated and imposed by Hollywood filmmaking, filmmakers with a social conscience attempt to make “important” message movies by using the very same rules and techniques and beliefs created by the hallmark of racism and misogyny: Hollywood.

Visual Liberation is at once personal, political, and radical in both and style and content. These are simply movies made as “Protest Films” the way protest music is made and oppose capitalist and xenophobic values (Hollywood) and regards socially conscious cinema as a combination of radical acting, writing, directing, editing, etc. 

Entire roster/program for the 2002 Visual Liberation film festival at the Brecht Forum, notice the variety of movies.

Visual Liberation is an ever-changing list of films and discussions about movies that could potentially be regarded as literal “protest” films.  The goal of this is to remind ourselves that true insurgent art does (and can) exist within the marginalized and oppressed classes who don’t need permission to make films, that marketing companies don’t own history and socially conscious films don’t need to be dictated to and produced by Corporate Media companies in order to be “important”. 

Dennis Leroy Kangalee has written, theorized, and executed “protest cinema” and now after nearly 20 years later of having the honor of closing the Brecht Forum’s Visual Liberation film festival in 2002, his ideas and ruminations on narrative filmmaking and revolution have developed into a series of sketches/essays that becoming the blueprint for a podcast dedicated to reinstating the venom of insurrectionary art and the danger of ideas/emotions presented on screen; celebrating well known scenes from beloved mainstream films to depictions from the outer edges of our society, removed from the radar of the zeitgeist and always acknowledging the power of those under acknowledged films that rightfully deserve their place and critical assessment -alongside the best of Rap and Punk rock albums.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned about the podcast and the program notes that go live in September, 2021.

Visual Liberation: Where It All Began

Visual Liberation is decolonizing the gaze and conception of movies and celebrating the underdog’s vision of life as it pertains to challenging racism, misogyny, and capitalism on screen…and in life.

The Brecht Forum’s poster for the 2002 Visual Liberation Film Festival: a program of radical humanist filmmaking in NYC.

Visual Liberation (or “Cinematic Decolonization”) refers to movies that are made with the purpose of freeing both the audience and the creator’s minds, freeing them of the shackles of mental oppression, the remnants of a colonized (brainwashed) mind.  Whether they are mainstream, downstream, commercial movies or obscure films — it doesn’t matter. But they must exhibit some kind of genuine revolt within their frames. And they must not be films with a corporate agenda exploiting social unrest and “issues” that are fashionable, which is what Hollywood and advertising have done, rendering true revolutionary fervor obsolete, ironic, or safe.

What we forget – or perhaps never directly acknowledge– is the fact that what we regard as a “movie,” in the traditional American Hollywood sense, is a conception of the Western World’s White Ruling Class. It’s disturbing that, instead of trying to evolve one’s own aesthetic and ideas of how to usurp the rules dictated and imposed by Hollywood filmmaking, filmmakers with a social conscience attempt to make “important” message movies by using the very same rules and techniques and beliefs created by the hallmark of imagistic racism and misogyny: Hollywood.

Visual Liberation is at once personal, political, and radical in both and style and content. These are simply movies made as “Protest Films” the way protest music is made and oppose capitalist and xenophobic values (Hollywood) and regards socially conscious cinema as a combination of radical acting, writing, directing, editing, etc. 

Entire roster/program for the 2002 Visual Liberation film festival at the Brecht Forum, notice the variety of movies.

Visual Liberation is an ever-changing list of films and discussions about movies that could potentially be regarded as literal “protest” films.  The goal of this is to remind ourselves that true insurgent art does (and can) exist within the marginalized and oppressed classes who don’t need permission to make films, that marketing companies don’t own history and socially conscious films don’t need to be dictated to and produced by Corporate Media companies in order to be “important”. 

Dennis Leroy Kangalee has written, theorized, and executed “protest cinema” and now after nearly 20 years later of having the honor of closing the Brecht Forum’s Visual Liberation film festival in 2002, his ideas and ruminations on narrative filmmaking and revolution have developed into a series of sketches/essays that becoming the blueprint for a podcast dedicated to reinstating the venom of insurrectionary art and the danger of ideas/emotions presented on screen; celebrating well known scenes from beloved mainstream films to depictions from the outer edges of our society, removed from the radar of the zeitgeist and always acknowledging the power of those under acknowledged films that rightfully deserve their place and critical assessment -alongside the best of Rap and Punk rock albums.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned about the podcast and the program notes that go live in September, 2023!

For inquiries about workshops, lectures, or tailored seminars for your school or program please email kangaleearts@gmail.com.

Vagabond’s “Machetero”

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/