In the Streets

By JAY COCKS

Right On! and Skezag are two cries of pain from the ghetto streets, brutal nonfiction films about what it means to be poor and black. In Right On!, three young men who call themselves the Original Last Poets face the camera with coolly controlled rage, chanting their lacerating lyrics of defiance, a street-corner compendium of jive, gospel and blank verse. "Die, niggas," sings one, "die, niggas, so black folks can take over!" Producer-Director Herbert Danska photographed the group on the streets and rooftops of Harlem and the Lower East Side, but his attempts to interweave their poetry with documentary footage never becomes a clear pattern. The intensity of the words turns the street scenes into redundant illustrations adding little to the raw emotion of the chant.

Skezag (a slang term for heroin) is a relentless portrait of three junkies who shoot up in front of the camera and drift off into their heroin fantasies of incoherent hostility and depression. Before they do, Skezag records a long conversation between Film Makers Joel Freedman and Philip Messina and a smooth-talking hustler named Wayne, who claims that he is not really addicted. Two friends of his eventually enter the claustrophobic scene: Sonny, quiet and morose, and Angel, who talks a political line. Casually and inevitably they all take heroin. Returning to the ghetto, they realize anew they have gone nowhere; the heroin, like the streets, is its own dead end. The film closes on that despairing note and on Wayne's abrupt realization that he is fully hooked. Real life has been only slightly kinder for the three junkies. Angel has shaken the habit, and now tours with the film, lending whatever help and information he can in post-screening discussions; the other two are in jail. But as Right On! and Skezag both make clear, there are ways to be imprisoned without once being behind bars.

. Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.