Dina Iordanova continues her assessment of Steve McQueen's powerful show Mangrove and how the events remain relevant today.
Circulation
l always find it of interest to observe the relationship of a film’s mode of circulation to its impact. So I feel there are several aspects that could be better in the circulation of Mangrove than its current release on the BBC iPlayer (after airing on 15 November 2020 on BBC One) and on the Amazon platform outside of the UK.
First, the film is not distributed in cinemas — and this is not because many cinemas are closed. It has been planned as a TV/platforms only release; with no theatrical distribution. l can only speculate as to why, and indeed this may seem a minor point in the times of Covid-19. However, Aron Sorkin’s film on the Chicago 7 -- a direct comparator -- was in cinemas as well as on Netflix, even if mainly criticised.
Secondly, Mangrove had been on the main competition list at the Cannes festival, but then there was no proper festival. Thus any buzz (or award) that Cannes would generate, did not materialise. Well, Mangrove later ‘opened’ other festivals — New York, London...even if these also only took place online.
However, l seriously doubt these have the clout of Cannes, even at the time when Covid-19 has paralysed the whole festival circuit.
And, third: The BBC, having co-produced it, has released Mangrove in Prime Time on a Sunday night (15 November 2020); the film is now available to view at their IPlayer. This sounds like a release as wide as it can get. But is it, really? Many people will see it, but then there are other substantial groups that will not. The way the BBC is set up currently makes it a paid platform -- and one that is significantly costlier than others -- that costs £157.50 per annum for a compulsory license.
Effectively, Britain’s national broadcaster is behind a significant pay wall and there are many groups that have no access to it. This includes, as of August 2020, all those over 75-year-olds who previously were eligible for a free license (the change is estimated to have affected 5,000,000 people in the UK. (I have no data on how many of them have decided to pay up for the license).
In addition, those who live in university accommodations— international students, visiting scholars — do not have access to viewing the BBC (nor any live television) unless they pay for the service; it is not included in their rent so most of them opt to subscribe to the much cheaper Netflix and do not view anything on the IPlayer whilst based in the UK.
Those in hospital care also have no access to the BBC -- if they are to watch it, they are asked to pay for a special service. Yet another dimension of the iPlayer is geoblocked and one can only access it from the territory of the UK -- thus those who pay the BBC license fee but go abroad for a period, cannot access it even through a personal log in. This is somewhat strange in the age of advanced technology. By comparison, writing this from Italy, l have full access to everything on their national broadcaster’s app, RAIPlay, even if I have never paid a cent for accessing their service.
So whilst the corporation is investing in producing a significant film as MANGROVE, I think there are many limitations in what they do to facilitate access to the work.
Reactions
I watched Mangrove online whilst abroad in Sicily, and there were few people around me with whom I could have meaningfully discussed the film. So I turned to searching the web and social media. Writing in the BFIs flagship magazine, Sight and Sound, Alex Ramon had described SMALL AXE (of which Mangrove is the first episode) as ‘a BBC and Amazon Studios-produced five-part anthology series exploring Black British experiences from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s.’
Ramond had observed that one of its main achievements was to mark ‘a return to the kind of distilled, focused storytelling and socially relevant themes that distinguished BBC’s Play for Today.’ As to the first installment, ‘the film’s urgent, intelligent portrait of collective activism and resistance lingers’ and whilst connecting us to the past, Mangrove enlightens and empowers us in the present,’ Ramon, wrote (2020). I found his review quite balanced, but I thought it was withholding well deserved praise.
So I wrote about how much the film had moved me on social media, and reactions came in quickly. British friends -- some of them coming from families that had immigrated to Britain, came into the discussion. One of them -- a Londoner of Pakistani origin who did graduate studies in America and who now teaches overseas -- said he was feeling angry that no films like this were on television ‘when growing up in Inglan’ [sic] in the 1970s. Other Britons spoke of it as ‘painful but essential viewing’.
A Jewish friend from New York, a veteran in film studies, compared Mangrove to Julie Dash’s classic Daughters of the Dust (1993), thus suggesting that the film is likely to be embraced for teaching by a wide international community. Other American friends described it as ‘stunning,’ ‘a tour de force,’ and said that ‘it needs to be widely distributed and viewed.’
But my excitement did not last long as, on the same day, I came across a piece where Steve McQueen was renouncing the ‘blatant racism’ of the film industry in Britain (McQueen, 2020). He has worked predominantly in America for the past decade, and, having returned to the UK to make the five Small Axe films, he had come to realise that British television and film-making teams were still predominantly white. Nothing much had changed and there were almost no black people on film crews -- even where the film being shot was meant to challenge matters of racial (im)balance in society.
So McQueen was compelled to insist on quotas: in a society where 14 percent of the population belongs to the BAME community, it was essential to ensure an infrastructure that would guarantee a proportionate access to jobs, training and apprenticeships, he claimed. ‘Every British production should have a quota in place for actors and crew’ [...] ‘British production companies, financiers and the US studios working here need to make a decision about what side of history they want to be on.’
I wonder how many of these recommendations are being actually implemented?
References
25 April 1968. BBC Radio 4, 25 April 2008. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/1968/riversofblood.shtml
50 Years On: Rivers of Blood. BBC Radio 4. 14 April 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z08w3?fbclid=IwAR0I0x2sJBy7cifCyeXpZVKRaubrG05B272Fjd0wpv_IflrxpTq5ArjGMHg
McQueen, Steve, ‘The UK film industry has to change. It's wrong, it's blatant racism.’ The Guardian, 20 June 2020. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/jun/20/to-see-race-and-class-at-work-in-britain-just-try-a-film-set-steve-mcqueen?
Ramon, Alex. ‘Mangrove relays Black British struggles of the past’, Sight and Sound, 19 November 2020. Available: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/mangrove-steve-mcqueen-small-axe-black-british-collective-struggle?