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.
