50 years later… ‘Passing Through’ gets its due. Mighty, weighty, fulfilling, perfect and Amazing. The soundtrack by Horace Tapscott, I get chills thinking of it. This film is the most Afrofuturist, a tale creative free black music, grounded in the everyday struggle of the exploited black worker/musician, a musical Battle of Algiers, a font of mysticism and recovery of lost unappreciated knowledge. Larry Clark as director, employed the efforts of the pantheon of future black film icons, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Hailie Gerima, Jamaa Fanakaa, all the filmmakers scholar Clyde Taylor christened, “The LA REBELLION.” Black film school nerds running a counter-narrative to the domination of unfulfilling black action genre mired in delivering fake catharsis, uplifting the underbelly of the black working class often from the book of IceBerg Slim.
Passing Through is a black internationale, an anthem, a call to arms from South Central to Guinea Bissau, Mozambique. Raging, beautiful, effects rendered by painters hand, it’s young and brash, a shining light that will never be diminished.
Like so many independent works, the flaws are many, usually related to budget, time constraints and lack of resources. But we can’t imagine a world of my cinema life, without the existance of this film. No more than we could not have the sound of Eric Dolphy, or Charlie Mingus, Mahalia Jackson and Jean Carn and Robert Johnson coursing through our souls. https://www.newyorker.com/…/one-of-the-greatest-movies…
