Charles Burnett’s “Namibia”
Opened Wednesday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the 15th Annual New York African Film Festival, Charles Burnett’s “Namibia: The Struggle For Liberation” about the country’s decades-long fight for independence from apartheid-ruled South Africa that gets inside the messiness of international and national political games, the covert collaborators who make the road to independence a journey of two-steps forward, one-step back.
Children throw rocks at a patrol car, are rounded up by black policemen and tossed onto their backs like sacks. Yet the kids still wriggle and fight with all their might, arms grasping towards Burnett’s lens as if for salvation. The director chooses a close up on bound hands twitching rather than the victim’s body being whipped, more disturbing than the sight of the lacerations themselves. The camera traces the flow of blood as it trickles down a leg into the sand following a public beating. From the smallest detail to the biggest revelation, Burnett is always hyperaware—of foggy windowpanes and the bright desert light, of the enormity of mass exodus that results from a forced relocation, of the sand and smoke blowing over dead bodies like a shroud, of the difference between being inside a foxhole or looking down on a mass grave, of the colors and sounds and heat of an environment that seems to court oppression of every stripe. Burnett is not content to show but uses images to force us to feel.
