A Soulful Expression:

Authenticity, Race, and the Reimagined Documentary in Wattstax

In August of 1972, the annual Watts Summer Festival culminated with a seven-hour concert of performances by some of the top black musical talent of the era: Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, The Staple Singers, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, to name a few.[1] Co-sponsored by black recording company Stax Records and featuring a slate of its most notable recording artists, the concert, dubbed Wattstax, commemorated the 1965 Watts Riot in a celebration of survival and determination of spirit following the community's near-destruction seven years earlier. Emceed by the PUSH organization's Jesse Jackson, Wattstax concert tickets sold at a dollar apiece or were distributed free of charge, enabling over 100,000 residents of Watts to take part in what would become a landmark event at the festival. The concert generated proceeds in excess of $73,000, which Stax donated to local and national charities and to the coffers of the Watts Summer Music Festival. To all involved, the event was unmitigated success.

In part, the Wattstax concert was designed to promote the entry of Memphis-based Stax Records as a new commercial force in the Southern California recording industry. By 1972, Stax had opened a West Coast office for its music operation in an attempt to penetrate the notoriously guarded Los Angeles entertainment complex. Perhaps more significantly, however, Stax used the concert to poise the company for a riskier venture into the realm of motion picture production, an additional objective for its move West. For its inaugural foray into filmmaking, Stax resolved to create a feature documentary of the musical event. For assistance with its newly formed Stax Films division, the company enlisted Wolper Pictures, a Hollywood company specializing in film and television documentaries, and hired director Mel Stuart, who was still fresh from the success of his feature, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, to guide the film to fruition. The result was Wattstax, a lyrical collage of musical performance, candid conversations with Watts residents, and comic, biting commentary from a then little-known comedian named Richard Pryor.

Released in February and March, 1973, throughout the U.S., Wattstax hit theaters at the height of the Blaxploitation movement, a short-lived eruption of black-produced motion pictures, and amidst tumultuous debates over problematic representations of African-Americans in these popular films. Critics accused the controversial narratives of exploiting audiences for commercial gain, glorifying violence, depoliticizing black goals, and creating and perpetuating stereotypes of blacks as criminals and pushers. Advocates defended the films as realistic reflections of the spiritually depressed and economically desperate condition of the black ghetto under white oppression. Indeed, the pages of black press, from the Chicago Defender to Ebony to Jet, were regularly dominated by debates over what constituted "realistic" images of black life in early 1970s cinema.

Wattstax represented one of a handful of documentary films made during this period about black community, with black creative and technical involvement, and was the only black documentary released commercially at the time to notable financial success. The film directly engaged some of the salient issues under debate within Blaxploitation—the criteria for "realistic" black representation, the role of music in African-American culture (and, with Isaac Hayes as the ultimate star of the film, the role specifically of Blaxploitation soundtracks in the contemporary black consciousness), and the function of the city space as a site of both communal pleasure and crushing containment. Indeed, like Blaxploitation films, the film asked, at its core, what it meant to be black. Yet, unlike the black action films, Wattstax garnered widespread and unequivocal praise throughout the black press (and in much of the mainstream press) for its realism and authentic portrayal of black life, a response prompted, in part, by its claims to truth as a documentary form.

However, film scholars—perhaps because of the rarity of the film—consistently and conspicuously have overlooked Wattstax as a unique and fertile site for exploring discussions of authentic and "realistic" black representation in early 1970s cinema. Though black documentary is not a new form, Wattstax introduces a new variable into debates sparked by Blaxploitation—that of the nonfiction film as a conduit for authentic representation—while opening avenues for investigating the role of black documentary aesthetics in negotiating and producing an authentic black film text. Reviews published in the black press suggest that for black audiences, the film both embodied the hardships and extremes of ghetto life while providing a sense of inspiration and hope that stopped short of a suspicious or false call to uplift. The film thus captured those elements of Blaxploitation deemed reflections of reality, including the need to resort to criminal behavior when faced with oppressive forces, while steering clear of negative stereotypes that demean the race and shut down the possibility for positive change. Ultimately, these responses suggest a reading of the film by historical (black) audiences that recognizes the generic form of the film as exceeding the conventions of straightforward documentary, instead offering an aesthetic rendering of the black experience itself, "a soulful expression of the living word," which resonated as a "true" document of their lived understanding and advanced an alternative, subversive vision of black life.

In what follows, I will investigate historical responses to Wattstax as an authentic document of black experience, recognizing that "there is no single truth of community, nor is there an unmediated relationship between film/video and reality," and that " 'truth' is both a personal and collective construct influenced by political and historical factors."[2] Rather, drawing upon the belief that "it is important to distinguish between the documentary filmmaker's sense of mission, the audience's reception to the work, and the critic's analysis of documentary in the wider frame of film history and theory," I will concentrate on language activated by reviews and reactions in the press to shape a shared historical notion of "authenticity" and "realism" in the early 1970s spectatorial experience.[3] I first outline a brief production history of the film to ground the stated motivations of the filmmakers in producing an authentic black work. Next, I establish the positive responses to Wattstax in the black press as a reaction to its "realism." I then investigate critical reviews of the film in the mainstream press and investigate those factors that complicate the film's status as an authentic document in black life. Finally, I draw on evidence of black artistic and folk traditions as informing the aesthetics of Wattstax, a development which counters criticism of the film and restores the status of the film if not as thoroughly authentic, then as a newly emerging aesthetic form which strives to capture a specifically black perspective.

More Than a Black Woodstock

Though the concept for the Wattstax concert originated as a black musical response to the success of Woodstock, when Stax Board Chairman Al Bell and Creative Vice President Larry Shaw conceived the film, they envisioned a work that would exceed the limits of a mere pictorial record of the concert and instead treat the event as a springboard for an exploration of the role of song in the contemporary black experience and for a "broader depiction of ghetto life as reflected by the music."[4] Rather than create a conventional documentary based on mainstream, politically benign standards, the Stax team aimed to blend live musical performance with community voices to produce a "true picture of a portion of the black experience" and to explore the music not as a superficial soundtrack for the visuals, but as a fundamental and integral pulse in the everyday lives of African-Americans.[5] As Al Bell explains,

The concept was, black music is a reflection of what goes on in the lives and lifestyles of the people. We were trying to cause that to happen in that film so you could listen to the song and then see visually what was going on... As you heard the artist sing, you recognized the role of that song in black lifestyle, in black lives, and in black culture... It then became, in one sense, a mirror for African-Americans to just look and see themselves and it became a piece that let the rest of the world know what was really happening... We purposely kept that piece in with the guy who said, 'If I can't work and make it, I'm gonna steal and take it,' so that the message would be gotten across because that's what was going on in the lives and lifestyles of those kinds of people that were part of the African-American experience.[6]

From its inception, the film was conceived by its makers as a "true" reflection of black life in the ghetto that would serve as a source of identification for black audiences and a site of edification for audiences outside the inner-city.

The vision for Wattstax, then, was shaped by tendencies common to the historical development of black documentary film and to the emerging black documentary aesthetic of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Historically, black documentary has strived to define the African-American self in alternative, corrective, and subversive ways to the narratives of black life perpetuated by dominant culture. As Janet Cutler and Phyllis Klotman explain in their concise introduction to African-American nonfiction film,

Rather than using documentary as a form of visual anthropology that investigates the 'other,' African-American documentarians tend to express an identification with their subjects and a sense of shared concerns... Instead of defining antimonies between the outsider film/videomaker and the insider subject, ...African American documentaries illuminate communal values and subjectivities.[7]

Though the film production team consisted in part of white producers and a white director, Stax, along with Mel Stuart, ensured that man-on-the-street commentary from Watts residents would be obtained by black crews to preserve a black vantage point. Twelve black or predominantly black crews scoured Watts to acquire footage of conversations and interviews that would "illuminate communal values and subjectivities" of the particular Los Angeles inner-city milieu.[8] The filmmakers, then, sought a rewriting, re-imagining, and re-emerging of black Watts life in the wake of the destructive conflagration of 1965, a more "authentic" take on "what was really happening" in the contemporary African-American experience. Indeed, like the appropriation of the "X" rating into "rated 'X' by an all-white jury" in the advertising of Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, Stax endeavored to underscore its commitment to authentic representation by reformulating the "R" rating for Wattstax to stand for "Real" in its marketing campaign.[9]

The financing and creative control of black-themed films by white producers launched no small amount of criticism against Blaxploitation films—indeed, the term "Blaxploitation" grew to refer to the financial exploitation of black audiences perpetrated in part by white producers—and called the verity, value, and purpose of black representations in those films into question. As a partly white-produced and white directed film, particularly a film that appeals to "the real" with its nonfiction rhetoric, Wattstax risked a similar critique. However, though Wolper Productions maintained the right for final decisions "on all creative and business matters relating to the Picture," in an unusual contractual turn, Stax Films retained the "absolute right of prior approval of film or narration which is included in the Picture which relates to Black relationships and feelings; words or phrases having a special Black connotation; and, if the Picture has a narrator, approval of the narrator and the accuracy of the narration scripts as to the music contained in the Picture."[10] In its representations of black experience, then, the film preserved an ample degree of creative black authorship, a criterion for authentic representation, according to critics, in other black-themed films of the period. Nonetheless, responses to the film in the black press made scant mention of the incongruity of black control in the creation of the film, overlooking any problematic elements of the film's production in favor of the power of the film's content. Indeed, reactions in the press suggest that the film's foregrounding of emotionally potent performances by the period's black musical icons and spiritual leaders, along with the raw intensity of commentary by Richard Pryor and the city's ordinary citizens, signaled a black creative contribution of sufficient measure to supersede concerns over a lack of full black participation on the production side

A Soulful Expression of the Living Word

The film's overwhelming commercial success, especially for a black documentary feature, speaks, to some degree, to its resonance with audiences. In its second week of wide release, Wattstax ranked fourteen on Variety's "50 Top Grossing Films" chart, just under Sounder.[11] By its fourth week, it ranked eight, surpassing Black Caesar for a total gross of $598,456.[12] On May 10^th, the film opened the Cannes Film Festival, enjoying such popularity that it was selected to screen at the Montreaux Jazz Festival on July 1^st.[13] By November 24^th, 1973, after slightly over nine months in release, Wattstax had grossed $1,300,300.62, a figure that took most industry insiders by surprise and proved profitable to Stax.[14] The film's financial success was aided by Columbia Pictures, the owner of its distribution rights, which helped form the "Wattstax Consortium," a group of black marketing and merchandising talent hired to promote the film in tandem with the studio. Headed by Stax Creative Vice-President Larry Shaw, who previously had spearheaded the black-targeted promotional campaigns for Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, the consortium undertook "one of the biggest promotional efforts in Columbia's history," [15] directed at both black audiences and a potential white audience.[16] In fact, the film's unprecedented promotional efforts broke from studio policy by holding preview screenings for college students, family and grassroots organizations, veterans hospitals, and integrated groups of media representatives, a benefit traditionally reserved only for critics and VIPs. The promotion, then, was designed specifically to generate word-of-mouth in advance of the film's wide release, a tactic that served in part to boost initial audience attendance. Nonetheless, the film's overall grosses suggest that audiences sought out the documentary in favor of feature films, and that the film's substance moved spectators powerfully enough to compel them to pass on the recommendation.

Advance screenings, as well as the film's opening in both downtown theaters and "non-inner city" sites (in many markets), resulted in attendance by audiences of mixed races and a significant number of reviews in both the mainstream and black presses.[17] Though the mainstream press often took a critical stance on Wattstax, particularly in drawing comparisons to such contemporaneous cinema vérité "concert" films as Don't Look Back (1967), Gimme Shelter (1970), and the film's obvious precursor Woodstock (1970), the press (both black and mainstream) often recognized echoes of Blaxploitation themes in the documentary and positioned it generically in contrast to those fictional movies. An ad run regularly during the film's release quotes a review from Words and Music that calls it "the first beautiful non-exploitative Black film in a long, long time!"[18] In the short-lived publication World, Hollis Alpert reviews the film in context of popular critiques of contemporaneous black fiction films:

The so-called black films that have been proliferating during the past couple of years are, for the most part, recastings of formulas that have worked well for the white film establishment... The films are made for distinct audiences and thus cater to wish-fulfillment fantasies and stereotyped conceptions; the coin is simply flipped to the other side. But finally a film has been made that gets close to the contemporary black experience. It's called Wattstax...[19]

Thus, the press and, likely, audiences, acknowledged Wattstax as an alternative vision of black life, a vision with similar concerns to its fictional counterparts, but rooted less in fantasy and fiction as in "reality," thereby opening up the possibility for a new, authentic vision in the documentary form.

The lavish praise conferred by the black press, however, offers more detailed insight into the issues of black representation at stake in Wattstax. Emphatically and unambiguously, reviews in the black press, and to some degree in the mainstream press, lauded the film for its beauty and its appeal to "the real." Drawing to some extent on the "Black is Beautiful" rhetoric of the 1960s, Chicago Defender reviewer Earl Calloway described Wattstax as "a profound experience that pin-pointed the black experience in musical commentary that was more beautiful than one has ever seen. It projected the creative expressions of downtrodden souls, frustrated emotions, scorched pride, and bruised characters with gripping intensity."[20] Mike Mattox, in the arts review journal Black Creation, called Wattstax "real: real music, real funny, real sad, real happy, and real good to experience."[21] WAMO radio personality Chuck O'Neal hailed a preview screening of the film, contending that "We will enjoy this film as it portrays our reality of how we relate to one another, but future generations will see this film as a documentary of the social transitions happening in the United States with Black people."[22] These reviewers' positive attention to the multiplicity of emotions and transitional experiences expressed in the film, from pride to frustration to despair to optimism, as comprising "gripping intensity" and the "real," suggests that for these audiences, "true" black identity issues not from a solitary, homogenous source, but from a multifaceted, communal amalgam. As such, the film conveys communal values, but through a fragmented set of subjectivities. The film, then, meets the criteria for the definition of black documentary espoused by Mark Frederick Baker and Houston A. Baker, Jr.: "Black documentary is any film or video (whether made by a black documentary or not, whether 'fiction' or 'nonfiction' under traditional academic definitions) dealing specifically with the situation of African personhood in America in its myriad transmutations."[23] More importantly, however, for these reviewers, authenticity stems in part from the film's experimental impulse to fragment experiences while underscoring a shared sense of place, a recognition of the multifarious subjects that comprise the black experience and the heritage and legacies which unite them. The film thus attempts to address "omissions and distortions perpetrated by both Hollywood cinema and social documentary" as well as by dominant cultural narratives about black life, resulting in a greater degree of realism.[24]

However, in perhaps the most insightful and analytical review of the film, Vernon Gibbs poetically describes the historical underpinnings of the socio-political role of music played out in Wattstax text in his full-page feature in Essence:

It was the music that carried us shaking, the music that called out softly from somewhere no one could touch. It was the music that buried itself somewhere so far inside they couldn't reach it. It was that beat that kept us driving under the lashes of the sun, the preacherman stomping out his bugaloo promise of a different future. It was the rhythm that moved through those dusty chainstops, the rhythm that shuffled broken feet one more step... Happy feet to hide scars of the long toil, it was something powerful enough to preserve the creative genius of the race... Wattstax is an assertion of the music. It is pushy and presumptuous and makes it own demands because that's what today's nigger is all about. Wattstax drives home that link very early in the film, because today's arrogant, assertive Black man isn't an overnight phenomenon created by ideology. Today's nigger is the child of sweat and blood and death and bitterness.[25]

Gibbs reveals the significance of Wattstax as binding the historical roots of music as an uplifting force under the oppression of slavery and destitution with its contemporary role as an expression of protest, anger, and dissent, and its continuing function as source of assertion, self-definition, and inspiration. He goes on to discuss the ways in which the film authentically captures the rhythms and spirit of black life:

And there is laughter, and a creeping warmth that fills the body because, here at last, is an honest appreciation of US. This time it clearly shows most of the things that make us important to ourselves and it shows all of the things that have developed because we just couldn't disappear into the wasteland of America. The film has our beat, our movement, our smiles, and our bitterness. It is a look at things as they are.[26]

For Gibbs, Wattstax was the first film (implicitly in contrast to Blaxploitation pictures) to "realistically" represent contemporary black culture, with its anger, its hope, its communal sense of self, and with a recognition that music may be "the vital element of black heritage."[27] The film, in not only giving image and voice to black community, but in offering resistance to dominant narratives of black life, thus foregrounds and illuminates an alternative black vision that "release[s] counter-legendary energies of collective black voicings and allow[s] [the traditionally black] uptown to enter official economies of community in America."[28] Authenticity, here, resides not only in the resonance of "truth," but in a subversive, counter-hegemonic affirmation of cultural identity, a declaration of blackness that is "pushy and presumptuous and makes its own demands."

Yet the mainstream press was not remiss in noting the power of the film for the black community and, perhaps more importantly, for white society. Variety's review called it "one of the few presentations that can live up to its claim as a 'Black experience'."[29] In Newsweek, film critic Arthur Cooper claimed "what raises this Al Bell-David Wolper production to such impressive stature is the way it evokes an almost palpable sense of place by juxtaposing the entertainment set pieces with scenes that explore the present reality of Watts. It's ironic—though perhaps appropriate—that the clearest view we have had of this Los Angeles community should come from a movie about music."[30] Although the black press appears to see little irony in a musical dimension to a documentary about Watts, Cooper goes on to position the film's impact for white spectators: "The movie's deeper message seems to be that the act of overcoming is painfully gradual. Watts still remains a scar of national neglect. Apart from reminding us of that, however, 'Wattstax' is also the blacks' soulful celebration of themselves and their welcome gift to white America."[31] Hollis Alpert, in World, describes musicians onstage "shimmering in costumes that might once have been worn by Ethiopian princes, celebrating the emergence of a black pride that paradoxically was born out of... riot and looting. Wattstax does what ...documentary should do: find the essence of what is being documented, convey the feeling of that experience, and, in the fullest and best sense of the word, educate."[32] Although these reviews smack of patronization and betray to some extent their authors' lack of understanding of the culture and history from which the film sprang, they nonetheless acknowledge the film as (re)defining black reality in a way that engages contemporary issues of social concern to white America. And though these reviews may resist the black press's interpretation of the film as a challenge to authority, they embrace the film as a "clear" document of the "essence" of black life, a potent message to white America from its black "other."

A Slick Souvenir Program

While reviews in the black press unfailingly praised Wattstax, the mainstream press remained generally critical, pointing most notably to those aspects of the film which undermined its claims to veracity and authenticity. In the most scathing review of the film, the New York Times' film critic Vincent Canby described the film as "prefab" and a "slick souvenir program rather than... a motion picture documentary on the order of 'Woodstock,' a film that assumed the shape of the event recorded."[33] In the opening of his article, he cites the concert's sponsorship by the Stax Organization and "the Schlitz Brewing Company, the (I assume) mostly white manufacturers of the beer that made Milwaukee famous" as well as the fact that "all of the performers at the concert were Stax employes [sic]."[34] He thus issues a two-pronged critique of the film's embedded commercialism, questioning Stax's self-serving financial interests in producing the film (and concert) and the motivations of a white-owned, Midwestern sponsor in subsidizing the event. Yet, although he denounces the commercial aspects of the film, he remains hesitant to call the film "fake"; instead, "it just has the air of something too carefully laid out in advance. It's so busy being glossy and optimistic that it doesn't even allow its performers time to create on screen a measure of the excitement they might have created in person."[35] Although not totally inauthentic, Wattstax, in Canby's view, fails to capture the full force of the concert experience and raises questions as to the film's true purpose.

Yet Canby was not the only critic to challenge the film's claim to truth and community service by highlighting its commercial impulses. The Newsweek review, however positive, nevertheless pointed to the "commercial plug" for Stax in the film's title.[36] In New York Magazine, Judith Crist dismissed the film, concluding that "a serious study of Watts would be welcome, but the commercialism of this pop-sociology-and-song document vitiates its value."[37] The critiques of the film's self-promotional tendencies as undercutting the power of its message are not without merit. As Klotman and Cutler emphasize, "for [African-American] documentarians and their audiences, 'non-commercial' signals 'authenticity': that assumption is part of the rhetorical structure of the works."[38] Wattstax, as a Columbia-released feature with reverberations of corporate interest in its title, explicitly departed from non-commercial rhetoric. For audiences familiar with the public affairs television program Black Journal or the social documentaries produced by former Black Journal producers St. Clair Bourne or William Greaves, as well as the myriad other independent documentaries available to black and white spectators at the time, the overt commercialism of Wattstax may have mitigated their reception of the film as an authentic document of black life.

Certainly, Stax Records entered into the venture with specific expansion and profit motives in mind: although large portions of the proceeds from the concert, the film, and the related double albums were donated to charities, Stax nonetheless earned significant profits from the project. In addition to establishing Stax as a multi-purpose entertainment firm on the West Coast, Stax heads viewed the Wattstax marketing campaign as "the company's spearhead for the young white market of middle America" and an opportunity to expand their customer base.[39] The concert and film served not only to celebrate black community in Watts, but as an advertising venue for Stax's roster of artists. Indeed, in recalling the film's premiere in Los Angeles, Larry Shaw remembers spending "a lot of money promoting our commercial called Wattstax."[40] Furthermore, Stax personnel in Memphis and citizens of the city who had long celebrated the presence of one of the most successful black recording companies felt betrayed by Stax's move into California and its decision to donate proceeds to charities in regions outside of Tennessee. For regular Stax musician Duck Dunn, "it was a direct affront: 'Whose cause was it—Wattstax or Al Bell's? Were they doing it for the people in LA, or were they doing it to promote Al Bell in LA? And what did they ever do for Memphis? Not a goddam [sic] thing."[41] Black audiences, inside and outside Memphis and Los Angeles, likely would have been aware of Stax's shift in location, which may have prompted a questioning of the company's motives in producing the film.

Nonetheless, if Stax's self-promotional involvement mitigated black audiences' acceptance of the film as an authentic document of the African-American experience, reviews in the black press offer little evidence, and at least one article in the white press credits Stax with defining the event as "real." In the black press, critics consistently lauded the company for its efforts, and Stax took great pains to present its actions as designed specifically to serve the black community. In Black Creation, James P. Murray quotes Larry Shaw explaining the Wattstax marketing campaign: "'Instead of ripping Blacks off,' Shaw said, noting criticism of other films about Blacks, 'every program we conceived was geared to helping the community. We wanted to bring the same sensitivity to our post-production activity that we used in putting the film together.'"[42] Although commercial motivations informed the conception of Wattstax, Shaw further positions the economic role of the film in affirming a black ideology, as quoted in Essence: "'I may be criticized for exposing us to the general populace,' Shaw adds jokingly, 'because some of us choose to keep how beautiful we are a secret. But it is my opinion that "Black is Beautiful" has power, and even if it has to be exuded at the box office, we'll do it that way.'"[43] The marketing of a message of black pride may have posed ethical concerns for some journalists in the press, but here Shaw emphasizes the need for—and force of—legitimating such a message through commercial channels. Hollis Alpert further credits Stax as the dynamo that made Wattstax possible: "The cameras have caught a moment in history. It probably couldn't have been done, however, without the participation of Stax Records. For they provided the performers, their own contract artists—among them the Emotions, Little Milton, the Staple Singers, Kim Weston, Jimmy Jones, and, the most adulated of all, Isaac Hayes."[44] Stax's high profile charitable donations—to the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, the Martin Luther King, Jr. General Hospital in Watts, and Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity)—also underscored its position as a servant of community for audiences.

Interestingly, Stax's explicit self-promotion may also have served to overwhelm any concern over white involvement in the film's production. Little space was devoted to questions of race in the production of the film in either the black or mainstream presses, except to emphasize the significant role of black technicians in shooting and editing the documentary. Wattstax was widely accepted as a "black film" or "black documentary," no doubt in part because of its association with Stax Records and the company's securing of creative control over the black-themed elements of the film. Unlike many white-produced Blaxploitation films, Wattstax could claim a higher degree of black authorship and visionary leadership, thereby maintaining its commitment to realistic representation.

Yet criticism from the mainstream press further complicated the film's claim to authenticity in pointing to the fact that some performances in the film took place at locations other than the Wattstax concert. Though most critics homed in on the insertion of a nightclub show by Johnnie Taylor and a gospel performance by the Emotions at a small Watts church, few reported the glaring fact that in the film's wide release, some performances passed as Wattstax footage which actually were recorded elsewhere. Most notably, Stax was forced to remove Isaac Hayes' original performances of "Shaft" and "Soulsville" from the final release print of the film due to a contractual conflict with MGM which prevented Hayes from performing any music from Shaft in another motion picture. As a result, Stax flew Hayes back from a tour in Europe and rerecorded him on a soundstage designed to simulate the Wattstax bandstand, this time performing a new song, "Rolling Down the Mountainside," and reinserted the performance into the film. Though Variety reported MGM's threat of lawsuit, the shift in the film's content went otherwise unnoticed in the press.[45]

However, a number of cuts not performed at the concert conspicuously were included on the subsequent album releases. Over half of the second double album released in conjunction with the film, The Living Word: Wattstax 2, "including all of sides three and four, was not actually taken from the Wattstax event. According to Al Bell, this was done consciously to use the overall Wattstax phenomenon as a marketing tool for some of the company's artists who had not actually played the concert. This concept had limited success. While the first Wattstax album sold just over 225,000 copies, sales of The Living Word: Wattstax 2 disappointingly stalled at the 37,000-unit mark."[46] This failure may have indicated customers' unwillingness to accept these recordings as authentic documents of the original event. Complaints in the press over the inclusion of numbers recorded outside of Wattstax may similarly have reflected a reluctance to accept the film as wholly "real" (especially for those critics who expressed greater appreciation for the non-Wattstax performances), and certainly those audience members familiar with the setlist for the original concert would have rejected the switch of Isaac Hayes numbers as inauthentic representations of the initial event. Nonetheless, despite the multitudinous factors that problematized the "realism" and authenticity of the Wattstax text, the film continued to be hailed as a true "soulful expression of the black experience," prompting Black Creation to endorse it as "easily the most relevant and probably the most respected Black produced film in 1973."[47]

A Potpourri Pinned on to the Benefit Concert

Critical reviews of Wattstax enumerated a number of valid weaknesses with the film and often legitimately called into question the film's adherence to reality. Yet reviews in both the mainstream and black presses returned repeatedly to the notion that Wattstax was "much more than just a documentary." Citing the film's use of collage as a formal structuring device and its mélange of music, humorous commentary, and "just-folks" conversation, critics both praised the film's aesthetic form as an expressive artistic style and condemned it as incoherent chaos. Although the mainstream press most often described this filmic form in pejorative terms, their focus on the formal structure of collage, along with the black press's embrace of the film as a pure form of black expression, points to a recognition, however unconscious, of an emerging "authentic" black documentary form.

Although the black press seldom described the aesthetic style of Wattstax in filmic terms, the mainstream press was quick to delineate its formal shortcomings. Judith Crist called the film "a potpourri pinned on to the benefit concert" that "intercuts the performances of some first-rate and some ordinary entertainers with rap-sessions among Watts citizens and commentary by Richard Pryor."[48] Jon Landau, in Rolling Stone, described it as "one-third Richard Pryor monologue, one-third interviews with a handful of Watts citizens, and one-third an all-day-all-Stax concert... It is not an unpleasant film to watch—curiously for one that provides little information or entertainment."[49] In an article titled "Pryor Highlight of 'Wattstax' Collage" in the Los Angeles Times, critic Dennis Hunt notes that "instead of a standard concert documentary, director and coproducer Mel Stuart has fashioned a cinematic collage of songs and chitchat... This is a fragmented, skittery film... The interviews and music are edited together in helter-skelter fashion and there is no narrator to bring clarity to the chaos."[50] Vincent Canby claims that the film's structure prevents the musical numbers from building "to any sort of emotional climax. Instead, the film keeps cross-cutting to less-than-incisive interviews with various Watts residents... It may be because of this context that the concert appears to have been a good deal less than exciting."[51] Indeed, one of the primary complaints from the mainstream press involved the film's truncating of musical performances, which were "presented all too briefly and incompletely," in favor of clips of everyday conversation.[52]

Yet responses in the black press, and some laudatory reviews in the white press, provide a significantly divergent and distinctly positive reading of this formal structure. Despite the shortening of musical performances, Vernon Gibbs notes the film's use of a nearly continuous background score:

The technique of providing a constant background of music is one of the things that raises this film above the level of some of the other documentary-musical explorations that have come in the past. The result is a constant movement over which the colorful facets of Black life transpire. The camera goes into barber shops, bars, restaurants, hairdressing parlors, churches and nightclubs, seeking people at work or engaged in pleasure; catching indignation and rage, finding philosophers and prophets. It catches the natural sparkle of the concert-going crowds who flocked in the Los Angeles Coliseum for several hours of some of the best Black music available, and because it doesn't confine itself to a mere recording of that event but tries to look into the push of history that such an event represents, it is a major event in the development of Black cinema.[53]

Again, Gibbs positions Wattstax as a culmination of black history and culture, situating the film as a socio-political document whose aesthetic form serves its content. Furthermore, he views the music in the film not as fragmented, but as points of departure for reflective social commentary. Indeed, for black audiences, pleasures in the film may have resided less in the completeness of the music but in the integrating of musical performance with its cultural valences in common conversation. Mike Mattox touches on this technique, calling Wattstax "a film document about Black people and their music, rather than simply a visual record of Black music. The Black artist is treated as a voice of the people and the beat, mood and lyrics of each song is used as a departure point for relaxed, natural conversation among people living in the community."[54] Variety picks up on the film's experimental impulses as well, describing it as "far more than a rock documentary. Director Mel Stuart, interpolating much footage of casual black chatter and vernacular social comment, has made a rousing, rhythmic collage of contemporary black attitudes."[55] In addition, the aesthetic form of the documentary was a conscious decision on the part of the Stax creative team, as Larry Shaw explains in Essence: "'Before the film was put together...Stax recognized our need of the black community. The film media affects attitudes and behavior. The content of the movie had to be respectful of the people; the fact that it is a movie, the fact that it has music, we deliberately chose music with a message. We had to take the music and put it into story form and a logical presentation.'"[56] Thus, the filmmakers envisioned an expressive, ideologically-infused aesthetic form to carry the film's cultural and historical content, an impulse recognized, even if disparagingly, by both the black and mainstream presses.

An Emerging Black Documentary Aesthetic

Although the argument could be made that Stax abbreviated the musical numbers in the film in part to sell albums which contained the full-length performances, the collagic nature of the film, consisting of musical numbers which launch into themed comment from Watts residents and Richard Pryor, and its embrace by the black press as a uniquely expressive aesthetic style, suggest that Wattstax, like a handful of other documentaries, served as an emblem of an emerging black documentary aesthetic in the 1970s, informed by resistant and avant-garde impulses. In this period, evidence in the black press signals the importance of documentary tendencies to black cinematic practices in both fiction and nonfiction film. Certainly audiences recognized the documentary elements on display in Blaxploitation films, such as the tour of the ghetto in Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, or the presence of the Harlem pimp K.C. in Superfly, but responses to other films of the decade prove more revealing. In a review of Sounder in Ebony titled "Amateurs give film air of documentary," the film's budgetary reliance on location shooting and non-actors was praised as contributing to the film's success:

The rural setting, the costumes, and the acting are all so realistic that the film takes on the qualities of an excellent documentary and the viewers find themselves relating to real people rather than to actors.

Not a particularly expensive film... Sounder was filmed in nine weeks entirely on location in Louisiana and many of the roles were played by local residents with absolutely no acting experience... all actors, both amateur and professional, performed well...[57]

The review thus suggests that the movie succeeded not in spite of its limited budget and reliance on documentary-style production values, but because of those qualities—its appeal to realism rendered its message more powerful.

Perhaps more significantly, a feature on St. Clair Bourne's documentary Let the Church Say Amen includes a curious but enlightening description of the film's aesthetic. "Though shot in documentary style," the review reads, "'Let the Church Say Amen' is based on actual events and uses real people instead of actors."[58] The confusion in this account likely stemmed from Bourne's innovations in the nonfiction form in this period and represents a recognition of the evolution of documentary practice in black cinema. A filmmaker who cut his teeth in documentary as a producer for television's Black Journal, Bourne formed his own company, Chamba Productions, to create independent documentaries in his own vision. For Let the Church Say Amen, Bourne "departs from the pure documentary form used in journalistic or educational films, and imposes a plot on the real life situations faced by a young Black graduate from a Seminary venturing out on his maiden voyage."[59] Bourne's departure from traditional nonfiction forms represented a deliberate attempt to diverge from conventional formats and forge an alternative black documentary aesthetic. In an interview in Black Creation, Bourne describes the shift in his style as a movement from "a director/technician to a director/artist" with a commitment to making films with "an artistic statement as well as providing information so that both form and content are important."[60] He subscribed to a specifically East Coast mode of African-American filmmaking, saying that "the brothers in California are into a spacey-Hollywood thing. The brothers here [in New York] have more of a nationalistic flair. They see film as another way to say something Black... I thing [sic] one of the problems with the coast is that there is no one to talk to in terms of developing a Black film aesthetic."[61] Thus, concurrently with Wattstax, Bourne was fostering an alternative, even resistant, non-commercial black documentary practice, fusing an expressive form with content of specific import to the African-American collective consciousness.

Similarly, William Greaves, former Executive Producer for Black Journal, was gaining attention in the early 1970s for his documentary work on black issues. A fiercely independent filmmaker known for his radical stance, Greaves attributed his success in film production to his defiant style. Quoted in Black Creation, he explains:

I have earned something of a reputation of being an independent...It is because of this independence that we have been successful and when we are approached to do films, there is not too much of a tendency to constrain us... Secondly, because the impact of our films often trades on its being innovative and independent in thinking, we are accorded a degree of freedom. Again, Black Journal under my executive producership was considered very militant and a radical kind of show... It came to pass that the shows were of sufficient quality and spoke of information that not only the black community wanted to hear but the white community was utterly fascinated with.[62]

Speaking specifically of the social documentary, Greaves asserts that "it's in the public affairs sector that you get both the professional [sic] and the candor. Expression, they call it 'Black Consciousness.'"[63] Again, Greaves' cinematic philosophy aimed to merge a transgressive innovation of style with educational content to simultaneously express a unique black vision while forging an entry into dominant discourses. He endeavored to interpolate marginalized perspectives and voices into conventional narratives, thereby inventing and reinventing the black experience for mainstream (white and black) audiences.

Thus, Wattstax emerged during a period of revolution in black documentary form and shared in its resistant and avant-garde impulses. Like the documentaries of Bourne and Greaves, Wattstax sought an aesthetic means for expressing African-American social concerns. In mingling of nonfiction and experimental tendencies in the film, including collage, found footage of landmark events in black history, the overarching narrator replaced by Pryor's comic performance, and autobiographical presentations from Watts residents, the film both captures individual subjectivities while underscoring the collective black experience to produce a document that challenges and revises dominant social narratives. As Paul Arthur argues in "Springing Tired Chains: Experimental Film and Video,"

While documentaries often cast the representation of marginal subjects as exemplary, as individual cases intended to illustrate a general condition, the avant-garde tends to problematize broader social truths as inextricable from individual consciousness. Refusing to posit an authoritative knowledge separate from that of personal experience, avant-garde film and video operates under an injunction to create aesthetic templates adequate to the presentation of inner, as well as external, realities.[64]

Reactions in the black press often hailed Wattstax as an expression of the "spirit" of black people (indeed, the film's tagline was "A Soulful Expression of the Living Word"), a response that suggests audiences were engaging with the film's presentation of "inner and external realities." The absence of an authoritative narrator additionally resists normative presentations of power, enabling the substance of the film to issue from the people, individually and communally, in an "exploration of identity as a bundle of multiple, overdetermined, and contradictory strands" in defiance of suspicious "rhetorics of evidence, argument, and univocal explanation" typical of conventional documentaries.

Furthermore, the film's patterning of musical acts juxtaposed with comic performance and street conversations points to the film's roots in the primacy of the oral tradition in African-American culture, an additional element in defining the aesthetic as uniquely a black form and positing it against dominant storytelling stylistics. Arthur maintains that "black film and video's invocation of role-playing, verbal storytelling, song, and poetic recitation is grounded in an autobiographical impulse, the desire to re-create one's own story rather than the stories of others... an insistence on first-person narrative separates this work from the avant-garde's parodic engagement with Hollywood performance styles" and, in the case of Wattstax, from most mainstream forms of fictional and documentary film.[65] The thematic echoes of the music in the conversational portions of the film also evoke a call-and-response motif inherited from black jazz and gospel forms of music, an audio-visual adaptation of the musical device into the filmic format. Like Bourne's later biographical sketch, In Motion: Amiri Baraka (1982), Wattstax attempts syncopation in editing to create musical-visual flow, including visual edits executed in pattern with, but slightly off the beat of, the musical soundtrack, and the repeated insertion of a snappy one-liner by Pryor as rhythmic punctuation. Indeed, "quotation, repetition, and the preeminence of human speech in rhythmic structures are etched with affinities to non-European and indigenous black performance traditions."[66] Thus, the film's formal structure emanates from distinctive African-American artistic and cultural traditions to produce an aesthetic deeply entrenched in black expression.

It is these features—a formal structure driven by avant-garde values and bearing roots in African-American traditions, and subject matter of immediate cultural and historical import—along with the presence of key black leaders and musical stars, that responses in the press point to when lauding Wattstax as "real," "authentic," or "true." While "authenticity" remains an elusive term, especially in its applications to film forms inflected by concerns of race, historical examinations of responses to Wattstax reveal a cultural resonance of the film with black audiences (and, to a degree, with white audiences)—a perception, at least, of "truth." It is thus the integration of resistant and revisionary stylistics with documentary footage of a groundbreaking community event that bring Wattstax close to the status of an "authentic" black document. Despite criticisms from white reviewers, and self-serving factors which problematize the sincerity of the filmmaker's motivations, Wattstax reimagined the documentary form to capture the impact of a vital historical moment in black community and assert a heterogeneous black identity into mainstream cultural consciousness. Its willingness to portray black community at its most raw and despondent, as well as its most triumphant and jubilant, speaks to a holistic sense of spirit. "The final summation, however," writes Vernon Gibbs, "is that survival is more than leaders, more than doctrines, and ideals. It is a matter of spirit. Wattstax is a summation of that spirit."[67]