The 1993 movie “Posse” is centered on the lives of Black people—townspeople, cowboys, even sheriffs—in the 19th-century West. “It’s a wild and picaresque adventure that’s made taut by a steadfast and passionate sense of principle,” tnyfrontrow writes.
Whether in art-house films or in Hollywood spectacles, there’s no conflict between audacious style and confrontational politics, which converge to grand yet scathing effect in Mario Van Peebles’s “Posse,” from 1993. It’s one of the great modern Westerns, and it’s now streaming widely, including on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel.
“Posse” is centered on the lives of Black people—townspeople, cowboys, even sheriffs—in the nineteenth-century West. It’s a wild and picaresque adventure that’s made taut by a steadfast and passionate sense of principle, provided as much by the filmmaker as by the film’s protagonists, not least because Van Peebles also stars—as Jesse Lee, an involuntary recruit in the Spanish-American War.
What is the story that needs to be told, and how does it get told? This is the overarching tension of “Posse.” The film’s flamboyant and rowdy action is held inside a framing device of an unnamed, elderly Black man reminiscing about the group of six, dubbing them the “original posse,” and delivering a history lesson: almost a third of all late-nineteenth-century American cowboys—and half the original settlers of Los Angeles—were Black.
The story that Van Peebles tells is a vast excavation of the crimes and sins on which the United States is based. It’s a tale of military adventurism, colonial expansionism, crony capitalism, deceitful political maneuvering, the repressive sham of law and order—and the underlying premise of white supremacy on which these abuses depend.
The pivot of Jesse’s haunting memories involves his father, King David , who was murdered for building a school emblazoned with the slogan “Education is freedom.” Jesse is, in effect, a man of the book, toting around a small and precious volume containing a poem about the life of an enslaved man that begins “Nicodemus was a slave of African birth.” .
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