My Five Year Plan

Jamaa Fanaka’s career arose out of the same confluence of post-civil rights black pride and urban despair as Charles Burnett’s. They were friends and fellow students at UCLA, then an affordable film school that allowed a number of important black independent filmmakers an opportunity to produce films that expressed the visions of an Afro-American society in transition. Fanaka’s films play at the edges of ‘blaxploitation’ - they acknowledge generic tropes of outrageous violence, crime, revenge, and urban culture. Their soundtracks pervade with low-rent funk. Yet Fanaka’s work is no Blacula or Foxy Brown. This resolutely independent filmmaker produces intelligent, moving melodramas about the nature of life in black California, the relationship between the sexes, the divide between two black Americas, the urban and the rural Southern, and the relationship between pathology and politics.

Having recently watched two films by Fanaka that played as part of TCM’s extraordinary Underground block (Saturdays at 2AM), I am ready to suggest that he is an important, vital filmmaker whose work calls for serious reevaluation. Here are some brief observations on the two:

Emma Mae

Emma Mae is the story of the title heroine (the astonishing Jerri Hayes), a hayseed who finds herself neck-down when Jesse(Ernest Williams II), the drug pusher she’s hooked up with upon moving to Los Angeles, winds up in jail for assaulting a cop. Faced with finding bail money for the man she loves, the desperate Emma Mae attempts a number of legit enterprises before coming to terms with a white political structure that doesn’t want her to succeed. She plots a bank robbery with remarkable knowhow and shows everyone what a little country girl can do. The final sequence, in which Emma Mae reconnects with Jesse, is devastating, extraordinary cinema - an indictment of an urban society that would allow gangs to establish themselves as neighborhood institutions and a powerful vision of one person’s ability to rise above urban despair and reassert herself as a positive contributor to black society.

This all sounds like garden-variety blaxploitation plot, but Fanaka’s strength is in his intelligent understanding of the relationship between black men and women, especially as it relates to crime and power relations. And what’s astonishing - and welcome: as one dumb IMDb reviewer noted how little exploitation there is to this blaxploitation film. Instead, it’s a vision of a strong woman forced to do wrong and her crisis of conscience upon her realization of her mistake.

Penitentiary

This film examines another unfortunate institution too often an element of black American life - prison. The film follows the wrongly imprisoned Cordone (Leon Isaac Kennedy), who finds himself embroiled in a conflict with a gang of criminal toughs as he trains for prison boxing matches with the hope of catching the eye of the warden’s brother-in-law, a boxing manager. The film is raw, brutally violent stuff, grimly shot with high-grain, muted colors, and a high amount of hand-held camerawork. The film is more formally interesting than Emma Mae - in a number of sequences, characters speak toward, look at, and directly address the camera (one prison ’sissy’ even blows us a kiss) - but less forward-thinking, even at times regressive.

Unlike Emma Mae, Penitentiary reasserts violence as the principle means by which black men can achieve success, and for this reason it is a troubling film. It is also troubling for its nauseating racial depictions - the brutish, sexually aggressive prison gang against which the light-skinned Cordone (and his light-skinned friend Eugene (Thommy Polard)) find themselves up against is composed entirely of dark-skinned men. And the portrayal of women is misogynistic, without a doubt.

A few sex scenes between otherwise unseen characters are clearly drawn in in order to attract exhibitors, and the emphasis on fighting seems to undermine the power of the film’s nuanced explorations of the meaning of masculinity. You see - as much as this film troubles me, I cannot dismiss it out of hand, because Fanaka’s extraordinary sensitivity to gender concerns (in Emma Mae the title character’s ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ qualities, in Penitentiary the question of masculine and feminine ‘performance’) nearly redeems it. The film is vile, but the visionary beneath it, who is clearly compromising his vision in order to sell his film to an audience who won’t accept the incisive honesty of Emma Mae, shines through.