View Clips From Harry Belafonte Documentary “Sing Your Song”
Below are clips from Sing Your Song, a Harry Belafonte documentary we told you about earlier, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will also make its debut at the Berlin International Film Festival.
A detailed synopsis from the film’s website states:
Over the past half century, hardly a day has gone by when some clever stranger on the street has not called out, “Day-o!” upon recognizing Harry Belafonte wherever Belafonte may find himself in the world. He never fails to return a gracious smile. At the heart of these day-o’s that seem to greet him coming and going is a recognition and acknowledgment not only of him, but identification with a shared time and place, a community of shared experience.
In his new biographical film documentary, SING YOUR SONG, Belafonte recounts that he was performing at the Village Vanguard in New York City when the great Paul Robeson visited him backstage and offered this counsel: “Get them to sing your song and they will want to know who you are.” he said, and if they want to know who you are, you’ve gained the first step in bringing truth and insight that might help people get through this rather difficult world. Get them to sing your song and you get them to feel what you feel. Your passion becomes their passion. Such is the power of art.
At the heart of any biographical texts lies the question, who is he or she? And while getting to know who Harry Belafonte is, the leitmotif of SING YOUR SONG, the more profound questions the film probes are who are we, especially as artists, and what meaning do we find in our work and commitments?
Harry says he never saw himself as a singer, not in comparison to the great vocalists of his day. He’s an actor, the proof of which, he jokes, is the fact that he convinced so many people he was a singer. In the theater he found “a place of social truth and profound influence,” and it was there that he first made the commitment to use art as an instrument of resistance and rebellion, as a counter to racist propaganda and inspiration to others. But it was as a singer – the first ever to sell a million records – that he realized the platform and power that art afforded him. As he observes in the film, along with building a career and raising a family, and in the midst of the accolades and successes that came his way, there were always the larger concerns for freedom, justice, equality and human dignity. Before discovering Paul Robeson – a renaissance man of immense talents, who sacrificed everything in the fight for freedom and justice – there was the indelible imprint of his mother’s instruction, that he should never awaken in a day when there wasn’t something in his agenda that would help set the course for the undermining of injustice. And it is that larger concern at the center of Belafonte’s life and work that attracted Paul Robeson as a mentor. It is the gravity of that compassion, passion, and caring that drew Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., into Belafonte’s orbit and Belafonte into King’s. As Coretta Scott King said, “Harry saw our struggles and made them his own.”
Like Robeson, Belafonte has paid the price for his activism. Rather than compromise with bigotry and prejudice, he has walked away from the money and exposure that compromise would have afforded him, as when sponsors of the groundbreaking and hugely popular 1959 television specials, TONIGHT WITH BELAFONTE, balked at his attempts to integrate them. Similar battles with Hollywood film producers over content and race led him to turn down other lucrative offers. Celebrated and recognized with Grammy, Tony and Emmy awards, he was subsequently blacklisted by Hollywood, harassed by the House Committee on un-American Activities, spied on by the FBI and threatened by the Klan, state troopers and Las Vegas mafia bosses.
As with other Belafonte projects, SING YOUR SONG offers a critique and alternative vision for America. It is also an implicit critique of the uses of contemporary film and television, as it sets in high relief, important issues not being addressed in African American filmmaking today and not explored since EYES ON THE PRIZE aired on public television in 1987 and 1990. In addition to those questions about identity – about who we are – mentioned earlier, there is the question, how deep are we willing to dig into our history and experience? And what price are we willing to pay?
SING YOUR SONG is, in a sense, Belafonte’s essential song. Like the folk songs he feels most at home in, the film’s subject is the human condition, the struggle against injustice and our yearning to be free. Like the simple Jamaican folk whom Belafonte first heard cry out, “Day-o!” we’re all looking for daylight to come. We all want to go home and to lay our burdens down. But the night of human suffering is long, and at times it seems there are too few with the vision and courage needed to take up the struggle for freedom, justice and equality on behalf of those whose own cries are too weakened with hunger and want or have been drowned out in the ongoing din of commerce.
“I’ll tell you something,” Belafonte says against an opening montage of suffering, protests, gang violence and war. “There are a lot of people out here who are really pissed off.” The montage, which integrates scenes from his own life, flashes before our eyes with a powerful urgency as the drums call the people to organize. “Somewhere in this moment,” he adds, “all that I have known, all that I have felt, all that I have experienced, demand of me to say, what do you do now?” Though he asks the question of himself, we are again invited to identify with Belafonte’s passion and point of view, to feel what he feels and ask of ourselves, what do we do now?
Celebrity and circumstances seem to have conspired to have cameras trained on Harry Belafonte most of his life, documenting every aspect of it from the time he began performing as a young man. Distilled from more than seventy hours of interviews, eye-witness accounts, movie clips, excerpts from FBI files, news and archival film footage and stills, the one hundred minute portrait makes its point quite powerfully, but also hints at details, depth and more to the story that might yet be excavated from those remaining hours of unedited material.
As was said in CITIZEN KANE, no one word can describe a man’s life. Nor can you sum up a man’s (or woman’s) life in an hour and a half or two or three hours. At best, you can convey something of his or her character. SING YOUR SONG does that and more. It also questions identities. One suspects that Belafonte finds his true identity, not in the actor, singer, celebrity or activist, but outside of himself in something much larger – in our shared humanity or the process of perfecting it. As Yeats wrote, “There are no strangers here.” We meet ourselves coming and going. It is in recognizing ourselves in others that we can begin to set the agenda for undermining injustice. And that, ultimately, is what SING YOUR SONG is about.
Also below, you’ll find a Sundance Channel interview with Harry and the film’s director, Susanne Rostock, along with his daughter Gina Belafonte who’s a producer on the project.
