Bushman
David Schickele / United States / 1971 / 73 min
A Nigerian man embarks on an adventure in 1960s San Francisco in this rediscovered sensation, which blends documentary and fiction, and manages to collapse and reinvent itself along the way. The greatest rediscovery of the last year, screened in a newly restored version.
Reality doesn’t just surpass fiction in ‘Bushman’ – it overtakes it, and you have to see exactly how with your own eyes. A Nigerian man arrives in the hippie capital of San Francisco in the late 1960s and befriends a biker and his pals. It’s a time of rebellion, cosmic love and revolution. However, if ‘Bushman’ is a time capsule (and it is), the traditional roles are reversed: Here, the African guest becomes the lens through which the film (and we) view the American myth with an anthropological gaze, before the film takes another completely unpredictable twist in its final third – but this time reality is, in the director’s own words, ‘faster than fiction’. Drawing inspiration from revolutionary African cinema, European cinéma vérité and American New Wave, it should have been a classic. Instead, it was forgotten until it was re-released last year in the new and restored version we are showing here, which was received as a sensational rediscovery at the historic film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato.