By general consensus, according to my very informal survey, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) film cited as the best of fest — five days in, anyway — is Raoul Peck’s stunning and inventive I Am Not Your Negro, which imaginatively addresses texts by James Baldwin and swatches of history to convey the strongest study/indictment of racism I’ve ever seen. One of the salient features of Peck’s cinematic strategy is its heavily film-centric content, blending documentary reportage on various front lines — from the 1963 flashpoint Birmingham church bombing to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson — with film clips dating back to the silent film era. Via this strategy, viewers are hit by little depth charges and instant responses, from racist roles for blacks to a singing, whiter-than-white Doris Day starkly juxtaposed against harrowing photographic reminders of lynchings in the South.
Never underestimate the power of film to move a public, in ways both immediate and deep memory-etching.
The ongoing power, mass mythology, and collective-conscience-defining nature of film (even in the age of diminished attention spans, personal-screen obsession, and TV’s ascendancy) blends in with social and political issues, sometimes without being overt about it. That’s a message broadcast and writ large at the SBIFF, which makes the possibility of using the festival as an avoidance tactic against ugly, prevailing Trump-era realities virtually impossible. As usual, the 32nd annual SBIFF, strategically timed during award-season hoopla, is well stocked with Hollywood names in the houses — Denzel Washington, Ryan and Emma (Gosling, Stone), the understatedly magnificent Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams, Oscar-nommed directors and writers — but there’s so much going into making SBIFF the major festival cultural event in town.