Movies into Film
Denis Charles: An Interrupted Conversation
Directed by Véronique Doumbé
USA, 2002
Denis Charles (Photo: Ndolo Films)
The 75-minute video Denis Charles: An Interrupted Conversation often feels more like an intimate home movie than a documentary. It's a portrait of a jazz drummer made by a director with little appreciation for the music and no interest in jazz mythology (i.e. there are no shots of smoke-wreathed nightclubs and none of people standing wistfully out in the rain). While that might sound disastrous, Véronique Doumbé has managed to piece together a deeply moving film.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another occasion when I experienced such an emotional upheaval in a movie theatre. Interrupted Conversation chronicles the ups and downs of the West Indies-born percussionist who became an avant-garde cult favorite through his work with Steve Lacy and Cecil Taylor in the late 1950s. Doumbé gathered a lot of performance footage, but she doesn't always integrate the interviews and the music organically. We often don't know what the connections between people are, and even more mysteriously, Doumbé neither interviews Taylor nor comments on his conspicuous absence. Early on, the director introduces the tap dancer Roxane Butterfly, a European émigré who traded fours with Charles in the 1990s, her hoofs and his snares. It's tragic that there's no footage of their impromptu collaborations, yet in a way that lack of documentation is nearly the filmmaker's point. Why isn’t there more? Doumbé never directly poses the question—she gets us to ask it ourselves.
You don't have to a free jazz aficionado to share the sense of outrage this movie quietly works up. As an indictment of institutionalized racism and the poverty it perpetuates, Interrupted Conversation hits the mark that Far From Heaven aims for but misses. The distinguished tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp makes a couple of observations that shock like cold water in the face, notably his statement (I'm paraphrasing) that America's “solution to the Negro problem” was simply a matter of brainwashing with money. Shepp cites both a high-profile black athlete and “the crackheads wearing Nikes” to illustrate his thesis.
I don’t want to suggest that Doumbé stacks the deck; she doesn’t. There is much joy and beauty here, especially in the scenes where Charles, who became a new father while approaching age 60, reads Dr. Seuss to his young daughter Arkah. And late in his career Charles welcomed up-and-coming musicians, such as drummer Susie Ibarra, who had been inspired by his earlier recordings. In the film’s craftiest cinematic display, Doumbé interweaves a duet between Charles and Ibarra throughout the recollections of witnesses; we hear stories of his survival through drug addiction and homelessness, and ultimately, his music testifies, too. – NPT
February 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com