Singer, activist Brown fills the screen
Local director betts documents a dynamo
Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News
Friday, May 5, 2006
When Oscar Brown Jr. died a year ago at age 78, Richard Harrington, a Washington Post staff writer, wrote an appreciation that said the singer/activist "melded soul, jazz and musical theater into a body of work that always deserved far more recognition than it got."
If you see Denver director Donnie L. Betts' Music Is My Life, Politics Is My Mistress, a documentary about Brown's life and career, you may well agree. Betts' film gives you plenty of opportunity to form an opinion: It includes extensive interviews with Brown at various stages of his life, as well as footage of Brown performing. In all, it paints an impressive portrait of an activist's life.
Music Is My Life, which plays at the Starz FilmCenter for a week, serves as an introduction for the uninitiated and a refresher course for those already familiar with Brown's work. Betts, 53, met Brown at a workshop at Denver's Cleo Parker Robinson dance studio.
"He said that an artist has a responsibility not only to entertain but to educate," said betts. "I said that was the kind of artist I wanted to be."Later, Brown performed in Denver and betts asked the singer whether anyone had done a film about him. Brown threw out a challenge, suggesting that betts get started. He did, conducting his first interview with Brown in 1999.
The film also attests to Brown's amazing versatility - in his work and in his politics. He was an unapologetic socialist and had been a member of the Communist Party, yet watching the film, you understand that the iconoclastic Brown was never anything less than his own man.
"I consider myself well-read," said betts, who attended California State University, Fresno, and the Yale School of Drama. "But with Oscar, well-read wasn't enough. He was a free-thinker, too. That could be intimidating, but it made me more diligent in what I did.
"I learned so much by just having him as a film subject. He made you study. He required me to read a lot about Marxism and socialism in order to have a decent conversation with him."
In the film, betts conducts a variety of additional interviews. Among the artists and writers we see: Abbey Lincoln, Nichelle Nichols, Amiri Baraka and Studs Terkel.
The sum of all this has been effective: Music Is My Life has won awards at a variety of Pan-African film festivals, and it took the audience award for best feature-length documentary at last year's Starz Denver International Film Festival.
"I think the film is a wonderful profile of an artist," said Ron Henderson, artistic director of the Denver International Film Festival. "We get a lot of submissions of films from independent filmmakers, and I felt like this one was extremely well-done."After you see the film, you may come away buoyed by Brown's personality, his inability to hedge and his instructions: "I've always lived by this golden rule: Whatever happens, don't blow your cool."
Music Is My Mistress, Politics Is My Life
When and where: through Thursday at the Starz FilmCenter
Information: www.denverfilm.org or 303-820-3456
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