Soul Power

Soul Power

93 Minutes

The 1996 Academy Award-winning documentary When We Were Kings,brilliantly edited by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte returned Muhammed Ali and George Forman’s 1974 Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight championship fight in Kinshasa, Zaire to the public consciousness. What the critically lauded film didn’t show was at the time that the fight was being organized, South African trumpeteer Hugh Masekela and record producer Stewart Levine had the great idea to pair the fight with a music festival.

Since the music festival and the fight, Levy-Hinte has dreamed about revisiting the 125 hours of Zaire Music Festival film footage that never made it into When We Were Kings. After reviewing hundreds of rolls of film, he created Soul Power, a four-angle verite documentary on the development and construction of this mammoth project. The four-pronged result is a National Geographic-like glimpse into the lives of Zairians, outbursts and ramblings by Mohammed Ali, the minutia involved in setting up an enormous concert on another continent, and the phenomenal performances of musicians such as James Brown, B.B. King, The Spinners, Bill Withers and Salsa Queen Celia Cruz.

Many of the African American artists, in candid interviews, expressed mixed emotions about visiting Africa, clearly moved by “coming back home.” However, the bitterness expounded by Ali with respect to “the whites,” prevailing “injustice,” as he claimed that “blacks and whites are not brothers” jarred me. If the music, costumes, hairdos and lingo don’t take you back to the ’70s, the wrenching emotion of boundaries created by skin color will definitely do the trick, although Levy-Hinte could have given more screen time to the underlying racism of the times.

However, the biggest disappointment in Soul Power lay in skimping on the musical performances and the lack of present day perspective. The buildup of the work behind the effort combined with the enthusiasm of watching the performers prepare for both the trip and the festival made me anxious to see more musical action. Over a 12-hour, three-day musical event, it is hard not to share the same excitement as the frenzied crowd as they watch these brilliant artists, but we only see one, or in some cases part of one, performance per artist. It felt like a tease. And what would B.B. King and Sister Sledge and any of the others who are still with us have to say about that experience and whether their views and feelings would be any different if the festival was today? Was that festival life altering? How? Have they returned to Zaire?

Levy-Hinte should have tapped into his editing talent and deleted some of the telephone fretting, some of the stage building, as well as other uninteresting footage (James Brown waving and saying goodbye for what seemed like five minutes) and added more in-depth conversations and a lot more musical performances. I left thirsty for more.

by Jane Hruska