This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Charlie Ahearn's documentary, Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).

FILM/TV Sep 20, 2013 at 1:31 pm

Photographer Jamel Shabazz Captured (and Continues to Capture) New York Cool

KATHY FENNESSY

 

• Jamel Shabazz, Rolling Partners, Downtown Brooklyn, 1982

JAMEL SHABAZZ:
STREET PHOTOGRAPHER
(Charlie Ahearn, 2013, 74 mins)

Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer celebrates two of modern America's finest contributions to the world: street photography and hiphop culture.

As his barber friend, Tony, puts it, Shabazz's black and white and color photographs from the 1970s and '80s captured "life in its purest form." 

On the basis of the slightly faded, if arresting images that dance across the screen, he was also capturing style: Kangol caps, Puma kicks, Lee jeans, Double Goose jackets, and other markers of NYC cool.

Hiphop ambassador Fab 5 Freddy (TV Party, Yo! MTV Raps) describes Shabazz's subjects as "the cool cats on the corners on the street." 

In that sense, they remind me of the style photographs Amy Arbus, the daughter of Diane Arbus, took for The Village Voice in the 1980s and '90s, except Amy gravitated more towards the punk, new wave, and cabaret set. 

Shabazz also had a preference for subway backgrounds, which means that his photographs memorialize graffiti almost as much as they do people—along with the Radio Raheem-size boomboxes of yore.

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Through the images, Shabazz talks about his life, his work, and the characters he met along the way. Interestingly, he started out by following the same path as his father, a naval photographer. 

After a stint in the military, Shabazz became a correctional officer at the infamous facility once name-checked by Jim Carroll, and didn't publish his work until the 1990s in Trace and The Source, which led to gallery shows, and the bestselling anthology, Back in the Days. (Soul singer Sharon Jones also worked as a correctional officer at Riker's Island before her music career took off. I suspect there's a lot of untapped talent in that world.)

Director Charlie Ahearn doesn't break the mold with this profile, which he bills as "a video," and nor is that his intention. He allows Shabazz to explain himself, so his subject sets the tone, but his respect for the man comes through loud and clear, and it's hard not to feel the same way in the presence of an inner-city historian who has so much love for the people who surround him—even the crack addicts, the prostitutes, and the juvenile offenders who ended up at his wing on Riker's.

Shabazz also maintains an interest in military veterans, Masons, and members of the Nation of Islam. As influences, he cites Malcolm X and photographer-turned-filmmaker Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree, Shaft). 

For all the talk of hiphop, though, the documentary is largely devoid of music—other than a few beats by Cresh Fraze and footage from a series of marching bands—and focuses more on regular folks than on celebrities, with the exception of speakers Bobbito Garcia, KRS-One, and Fab 5 Freddy, who also appeared in Ahearn's classic 1983 film Wild Style.

Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer played at the SIFF Film Center yesterday (with Ahearn in attendance). DVD release TBA. Shabazz also appears in Cheryl Dunn's street photo survey Everybody Street.

Carnival of Souls: Dissolving the Line Between the Grind House and the Art House

This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections on October 15, 2016.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS

(Herk Harvey, 1962, USA, 78 minutes) 

In one-feature filmmaker Herk Harvey's artful head-trip, Carnival of Souls, the line between the grind house and the art house bends and warps until it completely dissolves. 

The 1962 film, which wouldn't see formal release until 1989, starts like most youth-oriented pictures of the time as two thrill-seeking drivers race to see who can go the fastest, but when one car slides off a bridge and into the river, things shift into a very different register. The vehicle sinks beneath the water, and that appears to be the end of that. 

While the townspeople try to figure out how to dredge the car from the river, passenger Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss, a cool blonde with a strangely sympathetic manner) emerges from the water, dazed but unharmed, claiming she has no idea what happened to her companions.

 

Afterward, she leaves Lawrence behind for a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City, necessitating a long drive through dark roads. Not least because of her job, to which she feels no Christian connection, the eerie music that swirls around her fits perfectly, especially when she starts to see a strange man (played by Harvey) who may or may not exist. 

 

The pale, spectral figure follows her to her new rooming house, conveniently located next to an abandoned carnival (Harvey used an actual location, the Saltair Pavilion, which was consumed by fire in 1970).

Aside from the intrusions of her boozy neighbor, Mr. Linden (Sidney Berger), her days are going fine until Mary exits a department store dressing room to find that no one can see her. The phenomenon only lasts momentarily, but it leads her to a psychologist who believes there must be a rational explanation. He also gets her to admit that she isn't looking for a boyfriend. No desire for male companionship? She must be nuts! 

 

 

 

The experience emboldens her to explore the depopulated carnival grounds, a mesmerizing sequence in which cinematographer Maurice Prather shoots Mary from every conceivable angle. She's a tiny figure in a cavernous room and a black shadow against the afternoon sun. 

 

In its desolate beauty, it's The Trial meets The Last Man on Earth (striking compositions compensate for clunky foley work). Though Mary emerges unscathed, the spirit of the carnival appears to have possessed her, so she keeps running and running and running until she can run no more. 

As with Charles Laughton, who invested The Night of the Hunter with Expressionist atmosphere, Harvey's only film left an indelible mark--George Romero claimed it as an influence on Night of the Living Dead. 

Mary’s struggle against the dying of the light also takes on feminist form. As she tells Mr. Linden, "In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand, but in the daylight, everything falls into place again," suggesting that she isn't just fighting to live, but to do so free from societal obligations.

It's hard to imagine female-driven horror films, like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others or David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, without its precedent, but Carnival of Souls exerts a haunting, strangely affecting spell all its own. 

 

Carnival of Souls is available on DVD and Blu-ray through The Criterion Collection. Images from The Criterion Collection and Ciné-Histoire.