Freedom Fighters

I have a newfound appreciation for Richard Attenborough, having just seen his film Cry Freedom. I encourage everyone to see it. It is the story of Steve Biko (an advocate of black consciousness and anti-apartheid activist) and his relationship with Donald Woods, a newspaper editor. This was made before the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and therefore had to be fimed in Zimbabwe. It is an unequivocal statement against apartheid and articulates razor-sharp points about racial injustice mainly through Denzel Washington's portrayal of Bantu Steven Biko.

There are moments in the film that are a little hokey, but the overall poignancy of the movie is enough to overcome that.

There are two things that were of interest to me in watching the movie:

1) Given the 1987 production date, it seems that they could not film in South Africa, and they were not able to use many South African actors. At least that was the case for the lead actors, Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline, who are both well-known American actors. This returns me to thoughts that I have long pondered regarding sociopolitically salient identities (e.g. race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality) of an actor and the identities of the characters they play. What does it mean for an American actor to play a South African character? How does the casting reflect a given commerical and artisitic climate in the production of film during a certain time? If an actor is playing across certain sociopolitically salient identities that are crucial to a character, how does their perception of that "other" identity affect their interpretation of a character? Indeed something like blackface is an important example to consider. Does it even matter if an actor is playing across identity in light of the fact that acting itself is a medium inherently about playing something other than one's self? And this is not the only Attenborough film where this is an issue. Certainly Gandhi would be another example of this with a half Indian- half white British actor, Ben Kingsley, playing Gandhi (although his birth name was Krishna Bhanji and his paternal family was from the Indian state of Gujarat, the same state Mahatma Gandhi was from). People apparently thought Kingsley was good enough to give him an Oscar.
This is what happens for many multiracial actors who are more often that not in roles that have them play one part of their racial identity without the other depending on which part is convenient or what they "look" more like. Really, when is the last time that you saw a pointedly multi-racial or multi-ethnic character? It seems that in the conception of mainstream media, writers and producers can't often imagine beyone mono-raciality or mono-ethnicity in the backstory of a character.
Though in some sense we may view identity transgression in dramatic performance a form of liberation. I'm not sure it allows actors to totally transcend identity, but it certainly calls the sanctity of identity into question. If someone can perform an identity to the point we believe it (or we may suspend belief) then the lines we draw around identity--and what we use to define ourselves--are often more fluid or can be challenged more than we may think, perhaps to great positive, progressive effect. But what price do we pay for challenging those parameters we use to define certain identities? What insecurities are brought to bear, what tenuousness is exposed, what bedrock is shaken to its core?

2) Attenborough must've had a thing for dramatizing escape. First, he starred in The Great Escape. Half of Cry Freedom is about Donald Woods fleeing South Africa for political asylum in Britain. Not an expert on Attenborough, I just wonder if any of his other films (either acted or directed) show a proclivity for escape dramatization. It makes me question how close escape is to freedom. How do we distinguish the two? And connecting this to earlier questions: what is the significance of acting as an escape (but not necessarily freedom) from the burdens of one's own identity?

I guess the bottom line is to go see Cry Freedom for yourself.