“The Autopsy" Found Profoundness in Friendship and the Right Actors to Build it.
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“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.” - That's the way David Fincher's seminal detective vs serial killer showdown “Seven” ends. In its own way My favorite episode of Guillermo Del Toro's captivating horror anthology “Cabinet of Curiosities” will end that way too. The episode is titled “The Autopsy”. It is a masterpiece of television horror. A bit of noir, a bit of a procedural, a bit of a buddy movie, and surprisingly a great superhero movie about the “super” in us when we have something worth fighting for, that ultimately proves the elegant co-existing relationship between what is ugly and what is beautiful. A great deal of which is accomplished by way of craft in direction and Goyer's language, and to my focus here - the graceful, poetically large performances hiding in the well detailed husks of normality.
The dread in “The Autopsy” is existential. It's both very specific and nebulous as bodily invasion usually is. It is specific in its terror, the taking of our bodies without our consent (The very idea of being both intimate with something and also non intimate because the thing has no interest in the knowing of you) and unspecific in its horror, the varied, multi-layered and ultimately nonsensical fear of death. The balm for the tension caused by these two competing themes is very specific, it is the indomitable spirit of friendship, of connection, which in this story is one thing the enemy never counted on, never saw coming, and neither do we. It is at this intersection of fear and security our protagonist Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham) arrives at one Sheriff Nate Cravens (Glynn Turman) to take up the sword and prepare for battle. Neither we nor the protagonists know what they are here for and this makes for another tension as the story unravels these two become aware of each other and so too do we. The specter of death around and on the shoulders of both protagonists and antagonists, and this friendship, refreshing in its organic purity- is what makes the episode, and what makes all of this abundantly clear is in the performances of F. Murray Abraham and Glynn Turman.
The noir element makes it so the story unravels backward and forwards in time. Detail upon minor detail is discovered and piled up one after another until they coalesce into a clear understanding of what exactly is happening, still the thing we are introduced to right after the inciting incident is two friends reconnecting after years. Why? Because the writer and director want us to feel the connection between these two. The villainy and the heroism, the horror and the pleasure, intertwined and separate. The complexity is the central force of the narrative, and more importantly what is behind it. It is tied to their friendship and not just the bond in and of itself but what kind of bond. It's one built on principles and honesty the unusual kind that allows for unusual honesty wherein one cannot take themselves too seriously, where to some it could be seen as ugly to say as much. “You're so thin I could use you as a whip”. Interesting on two levels; it's bluntness and its inherent bite and how Winters will come to be Craven's whip of sorts. Its also in the way Dr. Winters upon being asked what’s going on with him thinks on it only a moment before telling his friend he has stomach cancer, (that most insidious and cruel villain) and most endearingly, and maybe most important to the story the way Dr. Winters corrects Sheriff Craven when he insists he is “cursed by God”. Bathed in the warmest most relaxing light of the episode F Murray Abraham's Dr. Winters reminds Sheriff Craven directly that “he's just not that important, that's ego”. This (ego, arrogance) becomes a repeated theme. Turman relays a horrid story and ugly sentiments in glorious lighting, the mortifying and the beautiful always hand in hand, toe to toe in a dance. Murray's reaction is swift, Abraham says the words “thats ego” with a genial plainness tat belies his intention even before he continues with the rest, still, Glynn Turman is taken aback. Abraham says; “Who are you to claim special qualities of sin from the rest of us?” (Pouring himself a drink he had earlier scolded his friend about) “If you're cursed we're all cursed (beat) and I meant that in the nicest possible way”. As he says the last line Abraham gives Turman a cheery salutation with his drink. Turman holds a stern face a couple seconds, (his eyes already betraying the fact that he knows he has heard the truth ) but cracks before he can even give it any legitimacy and the laughter tumbles out of him already half into it's summersault. Its the kind of everyday poetry that escapes most storytellers, the kind that needs two actors with their skill and their sense of the grandiose and the simple to make it work. The details of what marks true friendship are often portrayed in wonderfully grand gestures to make them feel more powerful and robust to the audience, so that they resonate. Slow motion, a freeze frame of the moment, and close ups are all consistently used as signifiers of the moment. But Prior and Goyer trust the elegance of the moment (the ability to talk in this sort of straightforward fashion is a marker of deep friendship) and the grace of their actors to illuminate the poetry without pomp and it works
There is something to be said for the almost magical air of complex simplicity both Abraham and Turman bring to their characters. In both F Murray Abraham's Dr Winters and Glynn Turman's Sheriff Craven we find two actors who can cut through the fog of what classism has told us about the middle class, age, power, or nobility. A small town sherriff using words like “Maudlin” and “Posse Comitatus” doesn't feel right to common conceptions around the type of person holding these jobs. You need an actor like Turman who can bring a sense of grandeur to a school teacher who dies feeding a gremlin a candy bar to be able to pull off giving the common man an authentic sense of gravitas. Old men arent commonly heroes either. You need someone who inspires cunning and brilliance with an air of vulnerability like the man who once played to the hilt an insecure but talented hater in Amadeus in order to achieve a properly smooth subversion of the tropes and make a withered cancer ridden old man feel righteous as exactly the adversary this particular evil needed to he extinguished. There are all these tiny gears at play in their faces, hands, and bodies connecting you to both their seriousness and their playfulness. They're down home sensibilities, and manners, and their immense intelligence, and how that ultimately bonds them. A hand gesture, the jutting out of a lip, a lazy but deep sigh that lives only in expression. Each “tells” on just how important life is to them, how how precious their friendship is, and subsequently how precious humanity is to them. When Abraham shows concern for his friend he grips his cup tighter. Turman’s response to Abraham asking “if the situation is as bad as that” (in reference to his pouring a drink) is a sophisticated facial expression that more than anything undergirds the level of communication they’re on where most things don’t need be said. While Craven and Winters regard each other with deep affinity and professional courtesy, they care about people in general despite being in two professions not known for this type of care. In movies/TV and I would guess sometimes in real life the common refrain for people in these career fields (Coroner/Police) are things like “remain detached" “don't get too close to the case” “Don't get too close to the victim" “Don't make this personal”. The autopsy goes opposite not only in taking it and making the personal important, but making it central to what gives them an edge. Cravens speech about his own “uselessness” is a dead give away to just how much he wants to be of use, of service. Their powers are not only in the cliché powers of deduction but in attachment and explicit constant empathy. Sheriff Craven's complete bafflement at the heartless nature of the murders, comes not just from a clinical more sterile want of understanding what the hell is going on, or the obsessive desire to get his man, but from a deep respect for the sanctity of life, shown in how this thing tears at him. Every time someone disappears or is found dead Sheriff Craven reacts freshly as if it were brand new. Dr. Winters feels it too, even though his job requires a less emotional connection, there is still a very philosophical and poetic respect for life. He politely asks each body for forgiveness as he opens them up, a detail that shows and tells on the level of empathy the character has for humankind far better then any speech could. Abraham’s provides a majestic refined touch to the expression of these small pleas which directly addresses the discourse we have around how victims are treated in true crime as after thoughts. Here are two men deeply wounded by and not merely angry or enraged by the loss of life. That same empathy, combined with the fortitude of his friendship with Craven, supersedes the murders, the stomach cancer, and their egos. Dr. Winters who upon revealing the nature of his affliction and it's impending doom remarks “We're all headed to the same destination” maybe reserved and capitulating about his own death, but about his friends life or the treatment of others as insignificant, he is not for play. When the story finally arrives where it arrives it is that friendship with Craven, that kinship with humanity that motivates him to sacrifice the unthinkable, to keep going even as each pain is more excruciating than the last. Abraham's cavalier response to his impending doom - not just with the cancer - but in the face of the monster, as compared to his response once the monster tells him of its plans for his friend is discernably different. From that point on his resolve becomes more ..well resolute. This is so explicitly relayed and so beautifully understated it dulls even the sharpness of some gnarly mutilation and the tragedy of Winters sacrifice somehow ends up feeling…good.
The notions that those who hold power or authority or who are chosen by some version of divine right, blood, entity, or position in a hegemonic system, are the ones who need to save us is far too common of a narrative that doesn't really empower us. The power of “The Autopsy is then two fold; A. It lends power to the idea that heroism is in the hands of the common man as well. That we can all fight and win and scrap and thrive, even while being honest about the cost. B. It brings catharsis with that win. By the end of the episode, just when it seems death and gloom have won over we find our Daniel Webster has outsmarted the Devil and in that has won the day or at least a reprieve for humanity as represented in their friendship, a friendship illustrated by way of nuance and fine stitching. Craven’s power was in his reaction to being powerless, which shows his character. He willingly accepts help, growls, hurts, drinks, but he doesn't punish anyone else for his shortcomings. He doesn’t start lashing out on the town, throwing power around and arresting errant “punks". He mourns these losses and resigns himself to the idea that he may be up against something bigger than him while (without actually making a decision to do so explicitly) continuing to work the case. Winters sees this and offers his own life (which is a death sentence and a divine sacrifice) to stop this monsters task, but again mostly to save his friend who to him represents everything right with humanity. That's cathartic. In film and television catharsis, a release of tensions arriving from emotions held in suspension for any elongated amount of time can be powerful, maybe one of cinema’s most potent weapons as well, but its power is in having had tension in the first place, holding it for as long as possible for the third of your story. Too many times catharsis arrives with little stress. The characters don't feel genuinely threatened, the stakes don't feel genuinely impressed upon, death is never really on the table until the very very end, and no one is ever really truly dead until their contract is up and then there's just a new “Dread Pirate Roberts”. So Catharsis may come but it comes in a form that is dimmed. Something akin to a candle in the sun. When it's done right though, when the stakes are clear, concise, and impactful. When the tension has a vice grip on the audiences imagination, when death is absolute and then suddenly, out of the darkness, you show a hand reaching in to pull us up out of the abyss, well then that story, that catharsis it sticks, and that release is never really forgotten. To make the gist of that impact the sword of that death blow friendship? That may not be new, but it is refreshing and more to the point it’s not far from the truth. To have two actors with as much poise, elegance, passion, intelligence and charisma lends it even further weight. There is a desire that you have right from the gate because these are two actors you want to see win, then through the skills they embody the characters with it extends to the characters they create. Their on screen chemistry injects a richness to the authenticity of the love between these two that friends that says it more profoundly than had the words been actually uttered. The philosopher Epicurus said of friendship; '“The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration also enables us to see that even in our limited conditions of life nothing enhances our security so much as friendship”. “Nothing enhances our security so much as friendship” is a proper ending to a show where the darkness in every single way imaginable seems poised to win. It places the episode firmly in the same sphere that made “Seven” so appealing to me, which is that it isn't an argument for all of humanity as beautiful and worth saving in and of itself, it's an argument that those places where humanity as one of nature's best ongoing experiments does work, works so profoundly, so beautifully that it makes all the rest worth saving. And in these dark days a much needed balm if nothing else.
ROMA is a labour of love, not political treatise, and it's better not worse for it.
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Not too long ago in a galaxy pretty much right here, (it was definitely this galaxy) I was an avid Tyler Perry hater. Mere mention of Tyler Perry's name around me, and my joints would stiffen. my bowels would loosen, and my pupils would roll counter clockwise in opposing directions from each other. As a self proclaimed cinephile blackbelt Z level.. (Okay, Okay! get off my back it was a brown belt, and I made up the last part) As a self proclaimed cinephile, having been introduced to cinematic history, and knowing through my own experience of how many times black people throughout cinema had been reduced to certain kinds of tropes all too easily recognizable in certain attributes of Perry’s plays, I found Perry's films to be poorly directed, shot at best like a journeyman, full of platitudes, and more specifically, angled towards making white people laugh. I know now that the latter half of that criticism is unfair. While I still feel Perry is a particularly bad director, (and feel in the future if he continues making films he should leave helming over to someone more technically gifted) upon interrogation, my feelings on Perry's movies we're indebted to my feelings towards white people. My fears more specifically. Being a member of an oppressed class can tend to put an extra body, an extra voice inside your head. It’s a phenomenon particular to those of us who live under the hegemony of any dominant structure, class, or normative ideology. In this case the standardization of whiteness, makes everything else feel abnormal, this has the effect of causing one to alternate between voices, which in turn leads to genuine questioning as to which voice is actually your own as an artist, and as the consumer of said art . This double-mindedness spoken of before by DuBois, and Baldwin, and hooks, I especially feel in certain places, forums, or mediums. I could sit in a room surrounded by mostly white people , with another black person being in the room, and portions of my mind automatically place one of them inside my head as a silent narrator, nudging and telling me which words of mine, or of the other person in the room might work as forms of resistance, or forms of compliance. Informing my decisions as to whether this other black person is being acknowledged as speaking for me simply by being black, and whether or not I agree with the messaging, and anywhere in between that spectrum. The point being while watching Tyler Perry movies, I frequently criticized his films based solely on my fears of what it was that Perry was saying or who it was that Tyler Perry was representing, or who it was these movies were for, and how those representations played to white people, more than whether they were or were not a true representation of the people that Tyler Perry wanted to represent, and whether or not this was actually Tyler’s voice, his intent, never mind whether or not they were actually entertaining. I realized the fallacy of insisting that the way in which Tyler Perry sees black folk was inherently wrong without examining or even asking first, if it is possible that the opinion of black folk like my VERY OWN FAMILY (who enjoyed his films) was valid, or giving it credence. It was , is the very definition of condescension, as well as an erasure of those very black folk, and of the range and dimension of representation of black folk. It seems we might be arriving at yet another somewhat binary point in cinematic criticism, where due to a system, and mode of delivery which seems to impede upon our artistic sensibilities about the art form, we are insisting upon a very narrow way of filmmaking. I say “yet another” because this was the same kind of thought process that I believe brought about auteur theory, which I believe got a lot right and quite a lot wrong about filmmaking. After all any insistence of one voice in a process which is inherently collaborative is in and of itself a problematic pronouncement for various reasons, which is not to say that it is all wrong either. Insistence upon a very specific political vein in filmmaking as inherent to the films value or excellence is equally problematic. My point here is film and storytelling is rarely a-political, but it is also not merely political. This is the crux of my argument against Richard Brody, and a few others who have written articles with a very particular point of emphasis in their critique of Alfonso Caurón's “Roma.”
If there is anything I want to bring to my criticism, it is the sensibility of the artist, and a humility about what it is I do. Most of these critiques, actually all of these critiques (Brody being the most well known) seem to center around the idea of what Caurón owes the audience, but nothing of what the audience owes Caurón. What I believe the audience which of course includes us critics owes the creator or the artist is the willingness to decipher as truthfully and authentically as possible, what it is the creator intends to do, and from there decipher how well they did that, and to some extent determine in our opinion whether or not that intent is worthy of praise. I ask myself as much as is possible to discern, what is it Caurón’s film intends to do? I say that Cauron’s film is the cinematic version of a love letter, a poetic birthday card, or one of those social media dedications we so often see on our feeds. I do not mean this as a form of disparagement, but of appreciation for what it means to both Caurón, and to the subject of his love in his token of appreciation. In the Bible, when Paul would write letters to the various churches, these letters usually featured some sort of authorial intent. Some of them about love, some of them about the more technical aspects of what it means to be a church member. No one looked at the beauty that lies within these letters, and then questioned why Paul isn't, including definitive and specific strokes interrogating the social political strife that was going during the time. That is because understanding the intent of or motive behind something is critical to properly assessing its value. The film is a dedication, a letter , its impact meant to reside firmly in the romantic and the sentimental not in the realist examination of class struggle analysis. The cranky dismissal of the impact of this film reads to me like one of those rants about how those social media dedications are really about the person posting them, and not about subject of them. The recognition of the polished nature of the storytelling, only lends credence to what it supposed to be. It is Caurón using his craft, his skill, to tell his beloved how much she meant to him. It’s a cinematic scrapbook of his memories, collected and painted with love and no one wants to hear the guy in the back grumbling about how it didn’t have all the parts where she, and the whole of Mexico suffered to raise his little bratty ass in his dedication to her, or how it didn’t include any in depth examination of her interiority.
Portions of this critique and many of the critiques beyond Roma also seem to have a particular kind of criticism that seem to run clearly within the spectrum of that dubious claim that style, in an of itself lacks substance. As i've said many times, style is substance within and of itself. Miranda from the devil wears Prada when she gives that a very famous line about how clothing comes to be.
I say that the work in the expression that goes into declaring a sort of authorial intent is an art. Anything, or anyone from within the realm of fashion would tell you that there is a difference between fashion and style, style being at the higher end of that spectrum, because it usually represents or says something about the author themselves. Only in cinema and only of late, because in most of the early works of film style was very important, and many time these films style - be it expressionism or cubism were part and parcel to the substance of the story. I take deep exception to any idea that things that speak to the aesthetic of something, or aesthetically of something mean less, when that could be very much so part of the authorial intent, or of what makes something powerful, of what allows something to speak to us. For instance, what Mr. Brody, again writing for the New Yorker bemoans in Chloe Zhao’s “The Rider” was a scene of magnificent poetry for me for all the reasons he found it dismissive…
““Brady’s knowledge of horses is remarkable; Zhao shows him putting his knowledge into action, and does so in scenes that are largely tightened, truncated, edited down to illustrative sidebars, and their brevity is governed by their silence. Brady offers a few calming, encouraging, or exhorting words to the horses as he trains them, but Zhao never gives him—never gives Jandreau—the cinematic space to say what he’s perceiving, planning, seeing, and doing. In the first display of his prowess as a horse trainer, Apollo’s owner asks Brady how he learned to do it. Brady credits his mother and father with teaching him everything he knows, then adds, “I’ve learned a lot looking down between those ears.” And that’s it—not another word, in the whole film, about his understanding of the ways of horses or the specifics of what he’s doing—why he slaps the horse’s flanks with the reins, why he gives a horse a gun to sniff, why he pushes a horse one way and then another. For that matter, when Brady teaches a friend to ride competitively (another scene with an intriguing documentary center), Zhao doesn’t bother to hear from Brady about the skills that he’s imparting, about his underlying understanding of what’s involved in riding a bucking bronco.””
It is because the scene spoke to me without words without these technical aspects, that I could appreciate it more. Too many times that's done in my opinion so that you can impress upon me the knowledge that you have of this particular field, when, most of the time I'm gonna dismiss that information anyway, to get to the heart of what I need to know about this character, about this emotion, and about the conjoining of both. You can throw all the Wall Street and F-14 Tomcat fighter jet lingo at me while watching ‘Top Gun” or ”Wall street,” but I will remember next to none of that, and none of it will matter anywhere near as much to me as some of the striking imagery, or the emotion behind some of the silence. Unless we are viewing an almost a completely different film with a completely different mission, we don't need to know what the political circumstances surrounding Cleo's abortion are, in fact I’m sure including them in this case ends one of two ways ; as a distraction, or as incomplete and underwhelming.
Just because we do not see proper representation in its fullness within the industry, it does not then become the job of individual directors to tell stories they are incapable or insufficiently prepared to tell. I've seen a couple of cases recently this year with this sort of insistence that is very incomplete to me. This jamming of political ideologies into films or more importantly into filmmakers has the potential, ( and I do mean potential, this is not anywhere near something guaranteed to happen) to stifle the creative process, decrease variety, and make performers out of directors. I am one of the few people who disagreed with the idea that the character “Hattie” the african american slave from the book and the original film should have been placed in Sofia Coppola's remake of “The Beguiled” Ira Madison also wrote an outstanding piece saying much of the the same for the same reasons here. There is nothing in Coppola’s repertoire that said that she had the range to discuss that kind of story in any way that would have not ended in a disaster, so it was best to do exactly what she did. Never mind that the beguiled is not about the antebellum south anymore than Marie Antoinette is about the French Revolution. It's a story that chooses to sharpen its focus into the micro rather than the macro, telling a very specific story about women, and about power. Insisting these movies dive from their own specific focus to extend outside of it to magnify what amounts to almost an entirely different movie , is I think the wrong message to send to future filmmakers and to current ones. It was not Tyler Perry's fault, nor his cross to bear that the industry around him refused to give proper representation to the diaspora of the black experience (something they are just now doing with people like Barry Jenkins, Ava Duvernay, Dee Rees, F. Gary Gray, and Ryan Coogler on the scene). I truly believe that had they been released today , Tyler Perry's films would have fit quite nicely into this current year, providing nice juxtaposition, and a healthy depiction of the various forms of black families, of black love , of the black experience in America. Every bit as important to a well rounded black cinema experience as is the work of Barry Jenkins. I say this to say that the same thing goes for Alfonso Caurón. Like Perry, Caurón owes us no debt to tell a story in a way that he did not see it. I think its incumbent upon the critic in order to be true to his /her/their duty to the art and to their own audiences to ask them to be realistic as to whether the problem their having is a problem of the film or one of the industry. In this case I think there is ample evidence that A. we barely have stories about Mexico at all, B. That when we do these stories are mostly tales of Mexico’s crime and corruption problems even when well intentioned. C. That maybe due to all of that, even a well intentioned, incomplete, but loving, romanticized, depiction of a working class maid, wrapped in moving images of emotional authenticity from memory might be a welcome sight. Saving the criticism of whether or not we have enough films that depict the struggle of the working class as faithfully as they do honorably for the various studios that have not green-lit or highlighted the work of the authors best fit to tell those stories. An argument made spectacularly here.
Director Sofia Copola opted out of telling a story she knew she was not prepared to tell, and instead chose to make us aware of the effect of the loss of social and financial currency gained in slavery.
There is a story of what middle class workers have gone through all around this world, and especially in places like Mexico to be told, and it most assuredly need to be told and with as much aplum, and consistency as is these kind of stories, but it shouldn't be told by somebody who clearly doesn't have the range to tell that story. It's not Caurón’s responsibility to tell that story. It's upon the industry to allow for other people who want to tell those stories and are frankly more equipped to tell those stories, who have lived that experience that it may be conveyed responsibly. The artist’s responsibility to me will always lean further toward the the personal, the political can be found in that expression, and politics can indeed be personal, and if the personal can be used as an aesthetic as it is charged in Brody’s essay than it is still worthy of pursuit as aesthetic is not inherently without its own value. So, then what we must be asking seeing as though even the lack of politics is a politic in and of itself, is to discern the source of this lack of politic. It is clear that some would suggest the source comes from a place of dishonesty, an attempt to avoid the more supposedly honest socio political constraints his maid lived under to assuage his own conscious. Cinematically purging himself of guilt by telling this more favorable story of the long suffering but stoic and noble servant . It’s a fair argument, especially outside the context of the art itself. We know there is a well documented tendency by those anywhere near the proximity of power to alleviate themselves of guilt from their role (be it covert or overt) in the systemic oppression of others. by offering such platitudes as a reckoning. It would be disingenuous I think to refute that this played some role in Caurón’s production here, and yet I argue that the source is still honesty. To start, that Caurón’s film is honestly personal. It is not a film that seems to desire to want to engage in social commentary and then haphazardly excuse itself from the important particulars. Rather it affirms itself not from a subjective standpoint, but objectively as more honest to tell the story you do know, rather than to trying to tell the one you don’t by neither experience, memory, or identity. When one critiques movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit”, for reasons very similar to the argument made about Roma even though Bigelow’s approach is much closer to what it is Brody is asking of Caurón, it seems to me to obscure the obvious…
Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” was roundly criticized for its erasure of black women, and fetishization of black pain.
Poverty, blackness, browness, queerness, womanhood, they are not altogether impossible to understand by those outside of it , but they are best understood from either a first person point-of-view or from a firm and level playing field. Demanding faithful and loyal authenticity is somewhat ridiculous to ask from a man who not only was a child during the time, but so firmly detached from her experience as a woman, as a brown woman, as a member of the working class, that even a genuine attempt to go research the details of Cleo/Libo’s life, jumble them all together, and then try to tell the story that includes the kind of minutiae of not only her experience but that of Mexico’s at the time would I guarantee come off as ham fisted. As an African American I've seen this paternalized brand of filmmaking before, and on a regular basis, most recently in The Farrelly Brother’s Th Greens Book, and Martin Mcdonagh’s “The Three Billboards. When well-intentioned well-to-do white people try to tell stories about black pain or the black experience, or anyone outside of their well curated bubble it rarely works out well. It's not to say that it can not work - again, there are no absolutes here, but that there are far more Amistad’s, than there are “Color Purple’s”, more “Glory”’s than “A Soldier's Story”. Usually the difference between those films is again authorial intent, and proximity to experience, because the true author of those movies, (the ones that work) are those who have lived the experience, in those cases Alice Walker (The Color Purple), and Charles Fuller (A Soldier’s Play”/Story). The experience can then be shuttered through the lens of somebody who then may somewhat understand that experience (as a jewish american for example) so that it's not completely diluted, but the original parts of that experience are filtered through the mind of somebody that is directly related to that experience.
Though Directed by white men of Jewish decent both “The Color Purple” and “A Soldier’s Story” maintained their integrity because of their authors direct proximity to the identity or experience.