Here is a unique document: a 1971 work by US musician and film-maker David Schickele, long neglected but now restored and reissued. It is a vividly beautiful and dynamic monochrome work resembling something by Godard or Cassavetes but with something special and specific; an amazing real-time transcription of the life of a young black man in San Francisco in the fraught year of 1968.
The focus is Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a young Nigerian nonprofessional actor playing a lightly fictionalised version of himself called Gabriel: enrolled in college in San Francisco, hanging out, having romantic relationships with black and white women, trying to earn money. Scenes from Garbriel’s life are interleaved with an interview he is apparently giving to an off-camera questioner, speaking with warmth and articulate charm about his experiences back at home and in the US, and how as an African national he is considered an exotic outsider in the US, and almost exempt from the racism dished out to black Americans, who seem white to him. All a terrible irony, considering what is to take place.
Okpokam’s character is scripted, or at least storyboarded, to experience wrongful arrest and deportation – but this is what indeed happened to Okpokam in real life mid-way through shooting. So about three-quarters of the way into the movie, the screen cuts to black and then the picture returns with various stunned-looking people explaining what’s happened and piecing together through audio recordings and still photographs what Okpokam’s fate is to be; it is a startling coup de cinema.
Okpokam had appeared in Schickele’s previous film from 1966, Give Me a Riddle, a documentary study of recently independent Nigeria, through the eyes of a US Peace Corps volunteer. The docu-realist approach carries on in Bushman. Schickele and his crew follow Gabriel around on the streets, where at one stage a young guy playfully jumps up in front of the camera and larks about like a kid – and Schickele keeps it in.
Alma (Elaine Featherstone), a beautiful black woman he’s involved with, leaves San Francisco and goes back to Watts to join the political struggle. Melancholy, lovelorn Gabriel has a brief fling with a young white woman (Ann Scofield) who patronisingly fetishises his blackness, but he has a more intense affair with Susie (Timothy Near) and the movie achieves an achingly languorous eroticism with closeups of his skin and hair as she brushes and caresses him. Gabriel already had a rich gay guy coming on to him: this is Felix, played by Jack Nance, the actor who was later to achieve indie immortality in the films of David Lynch.
Bushman is about sex, power and the white imperial rules of Britain and the US. It is lightly sophisticated in its fragments of dialogue. I loved Susie’s shrugging off of her partner’s suspicions about her relationship with Gabriel, and his remark: “A sentence understood is more intimate than a kiss.” This is stylish, energised new wave film-making. As for Okpokam, after his deportation back to Nigeria, he taught, wrote plays and died in 2018, but achieved an intense, unique kind of hidden greatness in this film.