Red Bone Guerrillas (2003) wears its shagginess with pride. It begins with a title card proclaiming that it’s rated “NS”: no script, no second takes. All the dialogue was improvised by its cast. Along with three people, God is credited with the lighting. Pierre Bennu, who both shot and directed the film, embraced the grime of early 2000s mini-DV as an essential building block. The film’s stylistic attributes go hand-in-hand with its digressive and unpredictable structure.
Red Bone Guerrillas is divided in three parts, each separated by a year. It begins in the acting class of Broadway star Magenta (Mitch Robertson). She’s an egomaniac who refers to herself in the third-person and instructs her students to behave as if they were covered in urine and peanut butter. In very little time, they get fed up and organize themselves as a street theater group. Working as Red Bone Guerrillas, they don costumes and makeup to perform outside, encouraging passerby to question media narratives. Their aim is to infiltrate TV talk shows and reveal their essential phoniness. One of their members, Bonita Evans, makes a documentary about their experiences.
Bennu’s film satirizes Hollywood and mainstream TV’s stereotypical representation of Black people, picking up on similar ideas explored in Bamboozled (2000); the film’s troupe is quite similar to Bamboozled’s self-conscious rap group the Mau-Maus. The wittiest moments in Red Bone Guerillas see Bennu interpolate and re-edit TV clips into the film. In one scene, news footage is edited alongside a Michael Jackson interview so that it appears he is speaking about the group, and at other times, some smart and crude edits place the troupe on the covers of Newsweek and Rolling Stone.
While the rough-hewn nature of Red Bone Guerillas occasionally hinders the film—its sound levels bounce back-and-forth at extreme volumes, and its narrative drops some major threads along the way—its radicalness as a humorous and trenchant work of criticism is unquestionable. The film addresses the control corporations exert over images of Black Americans with both wit and tact. In Red Bone Guerillas, the dangers of the media are laid bare, evident to both the plot’s participants and the film’s spectators.
Red Bone Guerrillas screens tonight, May 21, and on May 30, at Spectacle.
