David Schickele’s Bushman opens with Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam), a young Nigerian immigrant, walking down a San Francisco highway and conspicuously balancing a pair of shoes on his head while trying to thumb a ride. The image announces the film’s neorealist intentions, alluding to postwar Italian films’ on-location, street-oriented settings, and even puns on the title of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine. Which isn’t to say that Bushman intends to turn neorealism on its head exactly. Rather, it aims to consider how the contexts the bred neorealism might relate to the late-1960s, when the United States was at war in Vietnam and Nigeria was in year two of a civil war following its decolonization in 1960.
After a playful opening sequence in which Gabriel is picked up by a motorcyclist (Mike Slyre) who looks as though he just stepped off the set of Easy Rider, the...
After a playful opening sequence in which Gabriel is picked up by a motorcyclist (Mike Slyre) who looks as though he just stepped off the set of Easy Rider, the...
- 5/20/2024
- by Clayton Dillard
- Slant Magazine
About an hour into the brief and dazzling Bushman, the central character announces, “I need a hamburger,” and then the screen goes black for a few seconds. When the movie resumes, it’s no longer a drama enlivened by a streetwise documentary sensibility, but a work of straight-up nonfiction. Relying on stills in this last stretch but maintaining the visual fluency of the preceding story, the final 10 minutes recount why director David Schickele stopped filming for a year: He was working instead on securing a release from prison for his wrongfully imprisoned leading man.
There are strong parallels between Gabriel, the onscreen outsider, and Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, the man who plays him. Both grew up in a Nigerian village. Like Gabriel, Okpokam was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. Schickele’s screenplay was to have ended with Gabriel being deported after falling into trouble with the law.
There are strong parallels between Gabriel, the onscreen outsider, and Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, the man who plays him. Both grew up in a Nigerian village. Like Gabriel, Okpokam was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. Schickele’s screenplay was to have ended with Gabriel being deported after falling into trouble with the law.
- 1/31/2024
- by Sheri Linden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
What’s the border between ‘unseen’ and ‘underseen’? As a canister of images and a time capsule of the eyes that saw them get into the can, David Schickele’s Bushman (1971) exists on this spectrum of availability—mostly underseen in its time, mostly unseen in ours. But these visual designations are also a part of the film’s interests and strategies: what places and people get seen, underseen, ignored? And how does time unsee them, even before posterity enters the picture? Under Schickele’s playful direction spanning the space between fiction and reality, David Myers’ careful black-and-white photography, and a central performance from Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam at once light and deadly serious, Bushman centers a San Francisco and seventies from an exile’s eyes. Under the care of a new restoration from Kino Lorber and Milestone Film and Video, we’re thankfully invited to re-see the underseen.
Here’s...
Here’s...
- 1/12/2024
- by Frank Falisi
- The Film Stage
Meta documentary “Bushman” is receiving a 4K restoration and, for the first time, a multi-city theatrical release.
Director David Schickele’s 1971 film began as a fictional comedy starring his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, following the “adventures of a well-educated Nigerian immigrant in San Francisco,” per the official synopsis. However, after Okpokam was wrongfully accused of a real-life crime, “Bushman” shifts to being a documentary about how Okpokam was imprisoned before being deported.
Filmmaker Schickele shot “Bushman” in 1968 after returning from the Peace Corps. Schickele’s is billed as being in the docu-fictional style vein of John Cassavetes’ “Shadows.” Kino Lorber and Milestone Film & Video supported the 4K restoration, which will screen January 15 at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival.
The 75-minute black-and-white film was shelved for decades after its initial release but is regarded by film scholars as a milestone of Black representation in American cinema, especially...
Director David Schickele’s 1971 film began as a fictional comedy starring his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, following the “adventures of a well-educated Nigerian immigrant in San Francisco,” per the official synopsis. However, after Okpokam was wrongfully accused of a real-life crime, “Bushman” shifts to being a documentary about how Okpokam was imprisoned before being deported.
Filmmaker Schickele shot “Bushman” in 1968 after returning from the Peace Corps. Schickele’s is billed as being in the docu-fictional style vein of John Cassavetes’ “Shadows.” Kino Lorber and Milestone Film & Video supported the 4K restoration, which will screen January 15 at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival.
The 75-minute black-and-white film was shelved for decades after its initial release but is regarded by film scholars as a milestone of Black representation in American cinema, especially...
- 1/10/2024
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
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