Name: I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1982-03-03
Duration: 1 h 35 min
Rating: 7.5
Cast: James Baldwin, David Baldwin Jr., David Baldwin

Now available again in a 4K restoration, Baldwin visits the South and it's as vital now as in 82

Logically, I know this probably has a couple of minutes or interactions that make this drag even at its relatively brief length as a documentary. It doesn't matter really when the parts that make up the whole are so vital and disturbing and, when this was made in 1980, still a terribly live issue, and the filmmakers take a back seat to letting the subjects lead the material rather than crafting narration and typical talking-head interviews.

The Civil Rights movement? King's Dream? All of the (seeming, actual, somewhat) progress made? This documentary argues persuasively that it was largely surface level, with aspects of integration crippling parts of the South (ie the Blacks may go to the downtown White part of Atlanta, but would the Whites go to the Black owned parts of the city? Shrug, and there go those places). And as Baldwin goes from place to place in the South (and Newark, which my God you take for granted sometimes how desolated that place was left in the wake of 1967), he bears witness to people who were major figures in the movement, from the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth to the relative of Chaney the slain man in the killings in Mississippi in 1964.

And, despite and/or because it is 1980 watching in 2024, it doesn't feel like ancient history. This is still in the here and now, there's still jails being filled because of crime (and often disproportionally from minorities despite low crime rates), and unemployment and economic disenfranchisement never goes away, and as much as you may have criticisms of one leader (Carter) there's another just around the bend that spells much more dread than you can imagine (Reagan).

There's tremendous Archival footage mixed with Baldwin, as if in a sort of (forgive using this expression) Shoah/bearing witness sense, experiencing and observing the places where battles were waged and the 'Great Society'mafe things change while things stayed status quo in other respects. He also talks with his brother David and that helps to give the filmmakers a place to come back to throughout (as an even more personal place for discussion).

It is a bit rambling in structure as a documentary, but again it's hard to hold that against the bulk of what does work here, like there are some stretches, the whole Philadelphia, Mississippi section, the visit to Selma, that are exceptionally shot and edited and argued, like among the most engaging of any 1980s documentary. The message comes down to this: as a country, how many times will the opportunity to go down the proverbial right road lead to going down the wrong road?

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

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I Heard It Through the Grapevine

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