Of course I’m talking about the new Ryan Coogler film, Sinners. It’s the topic of the moment and an aesthetic roadmap for enduring these trying times.
One of the many things I love about this film is its perfect timing. What’s happening to the country has us on an emotional knife edge. Now here comes two-plus hours of story that has completely captured the zeitgeist.
With his comrade in arms and the arts, Michael B. Jordan, Coogler is serving creativity, beauty, depth, history, mythology, spiritual intelligence, dance, music, drama, horror, and excitement as mainstream entertainment.
Forget food for thought. This is a banquet. We get to be challenged, to question, to learn, and then to chop it all up together. The social media streets are turning into town halls.
Brother Ryan filmed it in IMAX 70mm, so I thought it best to see it in an IMAX theater for the full intended experience. The sound and color, the scope and framing are so rich and lucious. I was completely focused so as to catch the layers of nuances in acting, dialogue, music, and visuals.
The film delivers a tale of several “religions”: Christianity in two forms (Irish Catholicism and the Black Church), African spirituality (Hoodoo), Vampirism, Indigenous spirituality, and the Blues.
It is this last one, the Blues, that is at the heart of the film, of the people in it, the culture that gestated it in America, and from which it was birthed in Africa. The lineage of music and dance formed over the years is brilliantly depicted in the middle of the film. So powerful that the building bursts into flames.
“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.”
— Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three
There are manifold explanations of the film being offered, and having only seen it once so far, I’ll just share one of the connections it sparked for me.
Several weeks ago, when legions of Americans began marching in protest against the new administration, African Americans were posting videos of line dancing en masse to the song “Boots on the Ground.” So I asked my good friend, the scholar Dr. Kokavah Zauditu Selassie, a.k.a. Mama Koko, to explain the pull of the line dance.
The Electric Slide, the most basic of line dances, traces the four positions of the dikenga dia Kongo, or Kongo Cosmogram, four distinct delineations of a person’s soul journey in life.
It begins on the horizontal line called the kalunga, which is the balancing plane for all existence. The dancer starts at the center and then moves three steps to the right to kala, returns to the center, and then moves three steps to the left to luvemba before returning to the center again.
Then the dancer walks three steps backward to the realm of the ancestors, returns to center, and walks three steps up toward the north, or the space called takula. Then the first 90-degree counterclockwise turn occurs. Dancers continue this way to complete the four 90-degree turns to 360 degrees, or a circle.
Subsequent line dances have taken variations of this pattern connecting birth to puberty to adulthood to eldership. It turns out that, by sitting out the protests (after all, we did our part – yet again – at the November elections), we’ve been following an ancient call to rest, regroup, and reconnect through unified movement and rhythm. It is a cosmology that accompanied African people from the Motherland to this land and links the past to the present and the future.
Sinners provides us space to ruminate and debate; to imagine, envision, and celebrate. The film illuminates the way through the darkness of unknown potential by following songlines of ancestral memory. It is a fount of living waters from which we can feed our minds, nourish our souls, and arm our spirits for whatever is ahead.
Where dem fans at?
