James Farmer

CBS News looks at Malcolm X, focusing on his public life from 1959 to his assassination in 1965, suggesting that his death was a great loss to the nation. The film intercuts archival footage of Malcolm and interviews with family, friends, colleagues, scholars, and writers. CBS documents Malcolm's move from being Elijah Muhammad's deputy in the Nation of Islam to his embrace of Islam: his new links with the civil rights movement posed a real threat to the powers that be. CBS details his death after secret FBI acts to increase the rift between Muhammad and Malcolm. Maya Angelou, Dick Gregory, and Andrew Young offer trenchant comments. "He was our manhood," eulogized Ossie Davis.

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.