![]() But such scenes-depicting a wide range of settings, from homes and bars to streets and stockyards, meeting halls and government offices and the sepulchral menace of the meat-packing plant’s confines-never feel merely illustrative, or like dutiful translations of the script. The movie contains an extraordinarily large number of scenes, many of them short-a mere wink of an event that proves to have outsized importance. By telling the story with such thoroughgoing subjectivity, Duke represents history in the form of first-person experience-of personal memory that reflects collective events and, for that matter, treats the two domains as inseparable. The film also includes his retrospective voice-over narration, in which he analyzes the political and psychological aspects of what he learned from the events he lived through. The entire movie is dramatized from the penetrating perspective of Frank, who appears in every scene. ![]() It also depicts, in fine-grained yet high-relief detail, the widespread and unchallenged racism of daily life in Chicago and in the nation at large.ĭuke’s directorial imagination endows the very act of historical representation with political power. (A vast amount of research clearly went into writing it the unusual writing credits attribute the story to Elsa Rassbach, the adaptation to Ron Milner, and the screenplay to Leslie Lee.) At the same time, “The Killing Floor” presents, in fascinating dialectical wrangles, the large-scale political events of the time: the maneuvering of the federal government to maintain peace among workers while protecting big-business interests the reliance of those interests on stoking ethnic divisions (not just racial ones but also those between longtime citizens and recent immigrants) and conflicts of class and culture within the black community. Many of them are officials of one sort or another, including the union leaders John Fitzpatrick (James O’Reilly) and Jack Johnstone (Patrick Nugent), and their intricate set of motives, and political and social calculus, are built remarkably into the film’s action. The resulting tensions contribute to the Chicago race riots in the summer of 1919, which has a devastating effect on Frank and his family, and on the entire South Side community.Ī title card at the beginning of the film states that the story “is based on actual events,” and that the names of the main players have not been changed. The meat-packing workers’ union drive continues nonetheless-and laid-off black workers are hired by the owners as scabs, in the hope of breaking the union. But, after the war ends, soldiers return home to reclaim their former jobs, and black workers are the first to be laid off. ![]() His family is able to join him in Chicago. Frank gets recruited for the union, and the shop’s head organizer, Bill Bremer (Clarence Felder), teaches Frank to become a butcher. He’s also courageous, not hesitating to face down a white worker who menaces him with a knife. He wants, in the short term, to earn a better wage so that his wife, Mattie (Alfre Woodard), and their children can afford to move north and live with him in the long term, he wants to master a trade with a promising future. The industry is in the midst of a major unionization push, and black laborers had resisted joining, owing to distrust of the white-led unions (which previously had excluded them), and for fear of losing hard-won jobs (white employees fired for union sympathies had many more alternatives than black employees did).įrank is energetic, perspicacious, and ambitious. (They know that the U.S.’s entry into the First World War has left jobs to be filled, as men go off to fight.) Finding cheap lodgings on the city’s South Side, they’re sent by a politically connected middleman (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to a meat-packing plant, where they’re plucked by a white foreman from a crowd of applicants and put to work-to the dismay of many white workers. It’s set between 19 and is centered on Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a young black man from the rural South who, in the company of his best friend, Thomas Joshua (Ernest Rayford), heads to Chicago by freight train in search of work. To even say what the film is “about” is to get caught in its prismatic complexities. ![]() Filming history responsibly is one of the fundamental challenges of the modern cinema: How to reflect the gap of time separating filmmakers from the events they’re depicting, while still managing to depict those distant events with emotional immediacy? (These questions were of less concern in the era of classical cinema, when filmmakers took for granted their ability to represent all forms of experience, recent or ancient.) Bill Duke’s first feature, “The Killing Floor,” from 1984 (a digital release from Film Forum), displays an ingenious approach to the matter, bringing a straightforward story and a distinct historical period movingly, passionately to life. ![]()
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