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Letitia Wright as Black Panther activist in the episode "Mangrove"
Photo: Capital Pictures / ddp images
In a year in which films and series somehow became one in the stream, it is fitting that one of the cultural highlights is everything at the same time, miniseries as well as film series: "Small Ax" by Steve McQueen.
The series comprises five films on the history of black immigrants from the West Indies (primarily Jamaica and Trinidad) to London, which at the same time break the rules of a series.
Three episodes each only last an hour, while one lasts over two.
Party film follows court drama, plus two film portraits.
The films are set between 1969 and 1985. Each episode works on its own, but only together do they begin to shimmer and sound: Figures of contemporary history emerge and at the same time fit into the portrait of a community, as television does in this one Complexity has not yet created.
ARD, ZDF, please do it immediately!
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Steve McQueen
Photo: Insidefoto / imago images
McQueen, himself the son of immigrants from Grenada-Trinidad, directed and co-wrote all episodes.
With the racism drama "12 Years A Slave" in 2013, he was the first black director to win the Oscar for best film.
Nevertheless, one would not have expected a risk like »Small Ax« from him, because artistically the Briton developed more and more towards convention since his radical beginnings.
In retrospect, his previous films now appear like necessary preparatory exercises for "Small Ax".
Everything is there, the preoccupation with the British story from "Hunger", the character studies from "Shame", the racism analysis from "12 Years A Slave" and the narrative efficiency from "Widows", but now combined in a unique project.
The beginning of the series that Amazon Prime bought from the BBC and unfortunately only offers the original for sale is the furiously condensed court drama "Mangrove".
It takes up the process of the »Mangrove Nine«, the nine blacks who had to answer in 1970 for alleged violence against police officers.
Comparisons with "The Trial of the Chicago 7" suggest themselves, but they make Aaron Sorkin's film look bad, because McQueen achieves much greater impact without show dialogues and a star line-up.
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Production design from »Mangrove«
Photo: Capital Pictures / ddp images
The Mangrove was a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill that has repeatedly been the target of random police raids.
Clashes between police and protesters protesting the raids eventually resulted in a historic trial.
At the end of the trial, which largely ended in acquittals, the presiding judge stated that there was "racial hatred on both sides" - the first public recognition by a state institution that racism was widespread in the police force.
Anger and lust for battle are the emotional accents that »Mangrove« sets.
In the second part of the series, which should definitely be viewed in the given order, McQueen balances it out with pure euphoria: Set on a single evening at a reggae house party among blacks, "Lovers Rock" captures exactly the dramaturgy of a night from first tentative steps and looks on the dance floor to wild dancing and fumbling.
"Lovers Rock" is the only purely fictional film in the series and its most dramaturgically loose.
The way emotions and moods lead through the story is typical of »Small Ax«, because McQueen and his brilliant cameraman Shabier Kirchner pay close attention to the fact that the worlds of their protagonists are also sensually accessible and that nothing appears on display in a museum.
Which does not mean that there is nothing to learn or to discover with a closer look.
The title comes from a song by Bob Marley.
"If you are the big tree / We are the small ax / Sharpened to cut you down / Ready to cut you down".
And like so much in the series, the title of part three, "Red, White and Blue", could not be understood without a specific book: "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack" Schwarz vor) by Paul Gilroy.
Published in 1987, the cultural scientist shows how fundamentally racism has shaped recent British history.
"Red, White and Blue" accompanies the black police officer Leroy Logan (John Boyega) as he tries to fight the racism of the police from within.
The Guardian portrayed Gilroy, who is a close friend of McQueen, on the occasion of Small Ax, while the New York Times traced the history of the music genre Lovers Rock, which gave the second film its title and soundtrack.
Such impulses to search for individual people, to listen to unknown music, to discover books, are constantly being sent out by the films.
You should definitely follow them - and reach for the books by Alex Wheatle, for example.
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Author Alex Wheatle
Photo: Simone Padovani / Awakening / Getty Images
Wheatle is a successful British author for young people, honored even by the Queen.
He was supposed to tell the Writer's Room of "Small Ax" about his experiences at the Brixton Riots, the unrest against police violence that rocked London in 1981 and subsequently Wheatle was imprisoned.
What he reported about his childhood and youth as a black orphan in the British care system, however, turns out to be so moving that it became the fourth part of "Small Ax": "Alex Wheatle".
Like “Red, White and Blue” before, the short episode tells not of the professional breakthrough of its protagonist, but of the formative years before.
In the exact reverse of the story of the policeman Logan, Wheatle does not have to find himself in a white environment.
Raised in the English provinces and abused and shamed by his white tutors, he has little relation to black culture.
How do you speak as a black man?
Wheatle can only marvel on his first trip through Brixton, which is traditionally Caribbean and where the authorities have transplanted him.
And then he has to learn.
How black people speak, how to dress, what music to listen to and what drugs to take.
In spite of all external attributions, being black is something that does not "naturally" arise.
Finally, "Small Ax" goes back to the beginning, to the children and to McQueen's own biography.
"Education" takes up the scandal surrounding the special schools, which were raised in London in the 1970s to specifically separate children of West Indian migrants - because they are "learning disabled".
McQueen himself, as he says, got to know the dark side of the British school system because of a reading disorder.
Without this experience, the complex children's characters from "Education" would be unthinkable.
When the children meet a black woman in their special school for the first time, they are irritated.
"Are you black?" Asks a girl in disbelief.
The woman comes from an initiative that is fighting against segregation.
"Of course I am," she replies, and it sounds out of the classroom into the world: "I am black and I love being black."
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