DuVernay: Selma (2014)

Selma is a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic made for the era of Ferguson and Eric Garner, featuring David Oyelowo as King and revolving around the 1965 Selma to Memphis Voting Rights March. In fact, it’s the first King biopic full stop, or at least the first biopic made for cinema, although the focus of the film is not exactly King’s biography so much as his political and ethical personality. For the most part, Ava DuVernay steers clear of the more sentimental King that’s been handed down to us by the mass media, instead presenting him as a consummate strategist, who’s quite militant in his sense of demonstration, organisation and visibility, particularly when it comes to raising “white consciousness” through  tactical media exposure. Among other things, that tends to collapse the conventional distinction and tension between King and Malcolm X - it can't help but shrug Spike Lee off a bit in that respect - as well as between active and passive protest more generally, as the film goes to some lengths to detail how much action actually went into King’s brand of nonviolent protest, as well as how much it was aimed at orchestrating, manipulating and exposing white violent protest. For that reason, the demonstration scenes tend to be the most electrifying in the film, a situation that’s enhanced by a slightly bland screenplay, albeit a blandness that seems more about getting a bit of breathing space from the King legend than anything else, or perhaps giving the legend itself a little bit of room to breathe. It feels right, then, that the biopic omits King’s assassination, since it’s not exactly about mourning his legacy so much as reminding us how urgently we need to keep it with us, not just because of what may be the greatest Civil Rights agitation since King’s own era, but because so much of the United States' self-determination now seems to depend on finding the right balance between active and passive protest in the way that King made his mission, at least as the film tells it. In some ways, then, it has more in common with the earliest King documentaries – especially Sidney Lumet’s King: A Filmed Record, Montgomery to Memphis – than with more recent films, since, for all its elegiac, period drama trappings, it’s aiming for the immediacy of found footage, or trying to segue King back into contemporary found footage, culminating with the music video by John Legend and Common that plays over the closing credits, and its reminder that "when the camera panned up, King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up."