K.B. SOLOMON, the renowned Paul Robeson re-enactor, performs at the next Marxist Movie Series screening: Native Land.
This classic 1942 pro-union, anti-racist, anti-fascist docu-drama was the final film by the leftist collective Frontier Films and of Paul Robeson, born April 9, 1898. Fed up with Hollywood’s celluloid stereotypes of Blacks, Robeson quit the movies. But before doing so, the iconic African American athlete/singer/actor/activist narrated and sang “American Day” and “Dusty Sun” in the independently produced, anti-KKK Native Land.
Native Land was directed by two of the New Deal era’s top progressive filmmakers, Frontier Films’ Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand. Both were cameramen for 1936’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and worked on 1936’s Redes (aka The Wave, about poor Mexican fishermen), and the 1937 Spanish Civil War documentary Heart of Spain. Hurwitz directed the 1948 doc about racism, Strange Victory.