England / Sweden
Shown in 1969
CREDITS
- dir
-
Bill Brodie
- prod
-
Bill Brodie, Hasse Seiden
- cam
-
Hasse Seiden
- source
-
Grove Press, Inc.
OTHER
It is well known now that these are times of political commitment, and one of the most pervasively emotional areas of discontent revolves around the war in Vietnam. The cinema of protest developed in this decade, and it has now become so much a part of our lives that it is imperative to have such works included in any presentation of world events. At a time when there is so much interest in Black thought in America, this film should prove to be a sort of thunderbolt, illuminating areas of the American Negro character that have not been so directly and honestly expressed before. Terence Marvel Whitmore, ex-Lance Corporal in the U.S. Marines, is one of the group of military deserters now living in Sweden. He is originally from Memphis, Tennessee and a Black man. He served in Vietnam, won a Bronze Star and became a deserter quite by chance. How all of these things happened are told by Terry Whitmore himself, and the result is a masterpiece of documentary cinema. The camera just sits there, and Terry talks and talks. As he does so, a panorama of experiences are relived and enacted vividly, because this man is a born raconteur. He is an Everyman, and behind the semi-jocular remarks, there is common sense and a realization of the ambiguities in American social attitudes toward which so many Black Americans have had to show patience for over a century now. Terry Whitmore, for Example is the most moving sort of tragicomedy: it proves the stupidity of war and the pathos of racial bigotry—it transcends all of the platitudes by which we live. There is, finally, its humor, that characteristic of the American Negro which is, perhaps, the quality that sustains the entire race through the nation's sociological storms and political disappointments from generation to generation. When we hear a wounded white soldier tell his black rescuers, "You know what? I never thought I'd see the day I'd be so glad to see two splibs!"—then what is there left to feel or say, face to face with the present?
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #343
Director Sally Potter was the first person to be honored with the Festival’s Satyajit Ray Award. In 1993 she was interviewed onstage and her new film Orlando was screened. In 2005, she turned the tables by interviewing Peter J. Owens Award recipient Joan Allen.
