Movie review: 'Sing Your Song'

Harry Belafonte, with historian Taylor Branch, enjoy Q&A session after screening of documentary film Sing Your Song. (Photo by Alison Harbaugh, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival)

Belafonte, movingly,

tallies life’s bananas

Documentary film on legendary performer

brings lyrical ending to Md. Film Festival

On the screen, Nelson Mandela is stepping off a plane in his first visit to the United States when he recognizes a face in the crowd on the tarmac below. He walks over and embraces the man, who recalls Mandela’s greeting: “Hey, Harry boy.”

In the front row of Baltimore’s Charles Theater Sunday night, Harry Belafonte was smiling at his own recollection – and remembering.

It was magic, courtesy of the 2011 Maryland Film Festival and Belafonte himself in bringing the stunning new documentary on his life to Baltimore as this year’s closing event. And in lining up early for the sold-out show (my wife Bonnie’s insistence), we found seats one row behind and four seats away from him.

It was difficult at times to turn my eyes toward the screen when I could see the reflection of its light in Belafonte’s right eye, the occasional smile, or look of intensity at the passing of his 84 years – from his birth in New York, abandonment by his father and being sent by his mother to be raised by relatives in Jamaica, to a life in the forefront of America’s civil and human rights movements.

I knew little of his life story, yet Belafonte has always been part of my own life. Growing up in the 1950s, his was perhaps the first real black face I can remember from television. And there he was again, up on the big theater screen – singing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and in a prime-time Revlon-sponsored special.

His music is part of this nation’s collective memory, like the “Banana Boat Song” (all right, call it “Day-O”). But what was not part of my memory was the uproar over his 1960s TV appearance with British singer Petula Clark, because she was touching his arm. Or his touring the country, including the South, in a show with the popular white dancers Marge and Gower Champion and enduring the frequent humiliations bestowed on traveling African-Americans at hotels, restaurants and restrooms.

The focus of “Sing Your Song” is far less on Belafonte the performer, as on his use of the forum provided by his celebrity to address social ills here and across the world – work he is continuing through outreach to young people today.

Interviewed after the screening by Baltimore historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, Belafonte said he “grieved” for others whose celebrity led to tragic downfalls, and that having to choose between time spent with family and being away for art and activism was “not an easy road to walk.”

Sometimes, the road meant inspiring civil rights marchers in Alabama or Mississippi. Later, it was protesting war or Apartheid, or seeking ways to address famine killing uncountable thousands in Ethiopia (think the song “We Are the World”).

There are moments in which he is questioning the civil rights views of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, trying to influence the racial awareness of Bobby Kennedy, and of helping and befriending Martin Luther King Jr. And, curiously, there was his role in Barack Obama becoming... anything. Belafonte was among a group of celebrities whose support helped fund scholarships for Kenyan students to come study in America... one of them the young Barack Obama who fathered our current president.

Not that Belafonte is expressing satisfaction these days with the younger Obama who, he said Sunday night, he hopes will find his moral center. “I am waiting for Barack Obama’s moral sense to be awakened.”

Still, Belafonte saw a parallel between the spark of hope ignited in young people by Obama’s campaign theme of “Yes, We Can,” and that of the spirit underlying the civil rights movement’s “We Shall Overcome” some two generations ago.

He prefers taking an optimistic view of the slow march of time, with a patient observation that “history moves at its own pace.... In that measure, there are ebbs and tides, highs and lows.”

“I think,” he said, “I still live in a time of hope and progress.”

Taking a few questions from the audience, Belafonte was asked whether there was anything in his life that he would change.

“Yes, I would rather have been a Rockefeller.”

After the laughter and his admission of being facetious, Belafonte had a better answer: “You cannot look at the whole journey as anything but a blessing.”

He added, “I would not change anything. Changing anything would mean I would not meet some of the people I have met.”

He saw the experiences of his life as a chain of moments of circumstance, and its course as set by his decisions responding to them. “It has been a remarkable journey, and I am so blessed that it came my way.”

The film -- produced by a team including younger daughter Gina Belafonte, and directed by Susanne Rostock – has been purchased by HBO. Film festival director Jed Dietz said the cable giant’s plans complicated efforts to bring “Sing Your Song” to Baltimore, but any problems were overcome through the local connection of historian Branch and cooperative push by Belafonte himself.

He said he had initial misgivings about the film project, “concerned that my fame would get in the way of the message.” But he was assured otherwise by his daughter – and the film that resulted is enthralling.

Belafonte noted that the documentary footage was culled from some 800 hours of film, and said he hopes that talks with HBO may lead to more exploration of that “treasure trove” for a series giving wider berth to some of the rich story lines.

He left by a back alley door, accompanied by a small group including his wife Pamela, Branch and festival director Jed Dietz – but Bonnie and I managed to talk our way through the same exit route. And it gave me a chance to ask Belafonte a question I had been pondering in the flicker from the screen and its reflection in his eye: “They say that people, in dying, see their life flash before their eyes, but what is it like to watch your life flash by for two hours on a movie screen?”

“It helps me remember,” he said.

And was he watching from a first-person point of view, or third-person as does the audience?

“I watch from many points of view,” he said.

Not least of them, judging from his remarks in the theater, was the philosophical point of view of a man who seems to have learned from and grown with every moment of his 84 years.

What about (Socialist) Bob

Baltimore leftist
would have enjoyed
his last turnout

Baltimore’s best-known socialist attracted what may have been his largest crowd Wednesday afternoon, but wasn’t around to enjoy it.

A. Robert Kaufman, a far-leftist who had been tilting at societal windmills for more than half a century, died on Christmas Day after more than three years of declining health – a result of being stabbed by a deranged boarder in a building he owned in a rough westside neighborhood. He was 78.

More than 100 people from varied walks of life offered condolences to Bob’s elderly sister – his sole survivor – and heard tributes from former newspaper columnist Mike Olesker, from influential African-American minister Marion Bascom, from a printing company entrepreneur who for many years had Bob as frequent customer, and even from a young man who described himself as a revolutionary socialist inspired by Bob’s example.

I probably met Bob no more than twice, but talked to him regularly over the course of nearly four decades on the city desk of The Baltimore Sun. He called frequently, hoping to talk to editors. I was the guy usually answering the phone. It was a curious relationship. I’d hear what he had to say, and send a brief message off to whatever editor he wanted to reach (but who had no time or inclination to chat with Bob). Usually just a sentence, kind of a tweet, about this demonstration, that hearing, his latest filing for elective office.

There was hardly a public office that Bob didn’t run for – mayor, council, congress, president. The point was never about winning. It was about the forum that comes with candidacy, the chance to espouse his views that in the short run of a campaign or a decade were largely ignored or brought him mostly derision.

Crazy stuff, you know – starting in the late 1940s, as a white Jewish teen-ager joining in civil rights picketing outside a whites-only downtown theater. He opposed war, opposed the death penalty, favored legalizing drugs, spoke out for universal health care and affordable car insurance, and wanted big business to share the wealth.

Sometimes it was a chance to criticize the political system when, deemed a minor candidate, he would be barred from an election debate.

He was roughed up and stuffed in a trash can back around 1960 outside Baltimore City College, by a mob of students who also tore up his socialist leaflets. I missed the ruckus, but Olesker, who was in my 10th-grade homeroom, recalled seeing the mob that day. It might have been Bob’s biggest crowd before Wednesday’s memorial, we joked.

Bob was uncompromising in his beliefs. If there was movement on his issues, it was society that did the moving – as witness the election of a black president, debate on universal health care on Capitol Hill, growing disenchantment with the latest war, city council eyeing the high cost of car insurance for Baltimore residents.

But in his last two years, living in a nursing home, Bob was pretty much a spectator badly in need of a kidney – his own kidneys having failed as a complication from the knife attack and subsequent infections. He had nearly died after the attack. More recently, he had a stroke.

Olesker, in his remarks, said Bob “could really make people uncomfortable because we were not living up to our ideals” – and neither was America.

“He was bigger than most of the religions we practice,” said Reverend Bascom. “He was a consummate humanist. He walked where most of us feared to walk.”

After the brief program, horticulturist and retired veterinarian L. Bruce Hornstein, a friend of Bob since their childhood days, observed, “He was a pacifist, and he was fearless.”

For more on Kaufman, including his obituary and photos, check out these entries at The Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.kaufman28dec28,0,4426848.story
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.vozzella31dec30,0,4271671.story


Another passing

After the Kaufman remembrance, I drove across town to attend another memorial gathering – this one for longtime friend Mark Owings, who was among the handful of founding members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. He was the most gentle, soft-spoken human being I have ever known.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, I found myself at age 16 becoming close friends in high school with future novelist Jack Chalker and traveling by Trailways bus with him and a few other fans of the genre to attend meetings of the Washington Science Fiction Association. I suggested starting a club in Baltimore, and the first official meeting took place in the tiny basement of my parents’ Royce Avenue rowhouse.

We also started holding an annual regional science fiction conference, which initially attracted a few dozen people, but grew to major proportions over the years – 1,500 or more, and filling hotels. There’s even been a couple of larger world science fiction conventions here.

While I drifted away from active membership, Jack and Mark remained involved in BSFS and collaborated on a couple of book projects that drew on Mark’s strength as a bibliographer: The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers and The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography.

Jack died nearly five years ago. Now Mark, on Dec. 30, at 64 – mere weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The last time we had our picture taken together was in 2003, at BSFS’ 40th anniversary party – held in its spacious clubhouse, a former East Baltimore Street movie theater building.

I offered this comment at the party:

“I have proof that time travel exists. There’s just two drawbacks – it only goes in one direction, and it happens too fast.”

RIP, Mark. And tell Jack I said ‘hi’.