Bushman
First screened in June 2024 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: David Schickele. Cast: Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, Elaine Featherstone, Lothario Lotho, Ann Scofield, Jack Nance, Donna Michelson, Timothy Near, Patrick Gleeson, John Dotson. Screenplay: David Schickele. VOR:⑤
This particular migrant experience rarely surfaced in its era, or ours. Inventively structured and executed. What might have sunk it lifts it further.
A real shame if not a tremendous surprise that this slippery docudrama about a Nigerian émigré in 1968 San Francisco never got a US commmercial release until this year—though I'm happy to say the Chicago International Film Festival programmed it at the time. Bushman harks back to creative nonfiction films of the later 1960s like David Holzman's Diary and Portrait of Jason that speak in a voice of first-person testimony while also registering an overtly or implicitly complex relationship between subject and filmmaker, script and improv, director and speaker, fact and fabulation. Bushman unsettles those seeming dichotomies as a way of evoking Paul Okpokam's awkward in-betweenness, his dislocated perspective as double outsider from the faraway, war-torn homeland he has left and the superficially friendly but exoticizing, brutalizing country where he's in a state or non-assimilated traction.
Bushman is remarkably genial in tone and limber in expression given its potentially heavy subjects, not least because of Paul's distinctive voice and sensibilit as well as filmmaker David Schickele's artful camera and canny use of form as storytelling. Image and sound often stand at odds, in another ongoing parallel to Paul's tug-of-war between two barely reconcilable cultures, each nonetheless riding the choppy waves of 1968 in their own ways. Only recently rescued from a half-century of obscurity, this triumphant restoration also offers a rare look at Black San Francisco, at an immigrant experience that's mostly loose and light-hearted until it very much isn't, at future Eraserhead star Jack Nance as a horny would-be seducer of Paul, at the famous San Francisco State University strikes that helped revolutionize college curricula across the nation, and at a film that got amputated midway by calamitous personal and social events. Schickele finds an eloquent way to bring Bushman to an apt and provocative conclusion without even slightly disguising how it was kept from being the film it ought to have been ...one of many reasons that the movie we got is so powerful and unique. Grade:A–
