Inside Street Fighting Men With Director Andrew James
By John Saeger
In a year where socioeconomic strife has entered the forefront of the national consciousness, a new film from director Andrew James informs the ongoing conversation by allowing viewers to walk in the shoes of its subjects. His documentary Street Fighting Menfollows the lives of three African-American men in Detroit. The trio represent the past, present, and future of a city plagued by longstanding problems. The stylistic choice, and their stories, result in a powerful exposition on inequality.
The no-frills cameras of Street Fighting Menplay passive observers of each of the three men. Its first subject, James “Jack Rabbit” Jackson, is a retired Detroit police officer who proactively surveils his neighborhood and participates in community efforts to turn around the Motor City. His story was originally profiled in a Detroit Metro Timesarticle. The 2010 piece details his surveillance work, including an interaction with a drug dealer that prompted Jackson to wait outside his home with a shotgun.
Luke Williams is emblematic of Detroit’s “present.” Despite being short on financial resources, Williams is trying to restore a vacant building. Scenes from the film show Williams as he scrapesto earn enough money to pay contractors and make the house a home.
Detroit’s “future” is represented by Deris Solomon. The film encounters the subject after he became a father. Solomon’s newfound responsibility drove him to enroll in Young Detroit Builders. The program offers education and professional training for low-income young adults. Street Fighting Men reveals the obstacles and temptations Deris faces as he embarks on this new path.
Without using title cards or extraneous media, viewers are largely left to their own devices to piece together each of the men’s lives. The technique promotes audience focus on their different paths and results in a greater understanding of the group’s experience. In an interview with The Philadelphia Globe, James discussed his own road as a filmmaker and his new documentary. Before he directed Street Fighting Men, the director’s background with movies began with his own take on a Hollywood classic.
Like so many children, movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones captured his young imagination. He even made his own version of The Empire Strikes Back in middle school. James turned an unfinished basement into a movie studio to recreate the epic. He and other neighborhood kids teamed up to attempt special effects and act out different scenes. Due to technological limitations, James and his companions shot the remake in sequence because the film had to be edited in camera. The Utah resident reflected on his early attempt at moviemaking:
“I really got excited about trying some things as a kid. I knew it wasn’t going to be professional, I just felt that I wanted to try some things and experiment.”
James’s inclination to pursue filmmaking continued in college and resulted in his first documentary. That movie, Cleanflix (2011), was selected for several film festivals and was awarded the prize for Best Documentary at the New York United Film Festival. After the release of Cleanflix, he watched the documentaries Last Train Home (2009) and Sweet Grass (2009), two films that influenced his storytelling in Street Fighting Men.
The director became inspired to begin the Detroit project after he read the Metro Times articleabout Jack Rabbit. Using the former cop as a starting point, James and his producers worked on a multigenerational framework to create a narrative.
“They really just blew my mind in terms of how you could approach non-fiction as an art form and how you could tell stories in that format and how you could really say a lot with a micro-story, but have sort of a macro way of interpreting it.”
This style serves Street Fighting Men well. The intimacy pushes the audience to reflect on the various issues surrounding each person. Because his subjects embody different generations in Detroit, they are an archetype of larger societal issues. James spoke on why this examination of America is an early recurring theme in his work.
“I am really interested in the American experience and what makes things uniquely American. I also like underdog stories and I also like stories about people who don’t have things handed to them in life. I really respect hard work and I really respect people who go out and try to create things for themselves. I think that’s a running theme through all my films. Even in Cleanflix, where the characters are still fighting the system in a way. That seems to be a running theme. The human experience. The struggles that make us human. Street Fighting Men is a culmination of all of that.
I also wanted to say something about our situation here in America. Not only for black men, [but] for working people in general. It is something I have really been passionate about for a long time.”
Producer Katie Tibaldi came up with the idea to use Young Detroit Builders in the film. They interacted with Rowland Watkins, Jr., the organization’s founder, before the community leader passed away during the course of filming. The team also found Deris Solomon. The young man agreed to be featured in the documentary as he was entering a pivotal phase of his life.
Luke Williams approached James as the director was shooting extra footage on the street. The man invited the filmmaker to the house he was working on and the pieces of his story fell into place. When asked why he thought the three men agreed to be profiled in Street Fighting Men, James speculated that it was exciting for them. He also struck up a kinship with the men over time.
“When I wasn’t shooting, we would talk and hang out. I would ride around in Jack Rabbit’s truck all the time and he would tell me about Detroit, tell me about the neighborhood and we became buddies. It was the same way with Luke and Deris. It was a chance to hang out and talk. Luke was real excited to show me his house. I think they just wanted someone to connect with. Same with Deris. He had been through a lot in his life and was really at a crossroads in his life.”
James moved to Detroit to make the film. It took about three years to shoot and six-to-seven years to complete work on the project. His time in Motown allowed him to capture a tragic time for one of the film’s subjects.
An arsonist set fire to Luke Williams’ house while he was away. The moment becomes even more gut-wrenching as we find that his homeowner’s insurance had not gone into effect yet, leaving the man with only a scorched hulk of the property, a car, and his dog. This leads to an emotional breaking point as Luke is in the sedan with his dog and realizes the totality of the loss. The sequence drove James to tears as he filmed a person who had nearly lost everything. This part of the movie has lived on beyond Street Fighting Men. After filming was complete, Luke continues to call the director on the anniversary of the tragedy to discuss the incident.
James has kept in touch with each of his film’s subjects. Jack Rabbit became more involved with local community leadership and Luke was deported to Jamaica. Its youngest participant, Deris, moved to Ohio and landed a job in a factory.
The release of Street Fighting Men unintentionally coincides with widespread calls for social change that have dominated much of the news cycle in 2020. The observational aspect of the film’s narrative plays into the ongoing debate of these issues. By allowing viewers to form their own opinions without overtly pointing the audience in a direction, the movie induces a unique empathy and understanding. James remarked that these issues have been building up for quite some time, particularly in an impoverished metropolis like Detroit.
“It is sort of a reminder of where we’ve been and where we’ve come from and things happen in cycles. These issues that we’ve been talking about that we’re talking about and talking about now have been relevant for decades. I think that’s why you are seeing so much anger in the streets and why people are really in this moment right now.”
In an age where minutia and media are constantly twisted by partisanship, the director also says that the stripped-downnature of Street Fighting Men has resulted in a unique audience reaction.
“What I am really proud about the film is that anyone can come to the film, regardless of their political persuasion, and connect with the characters, and learn something, and feel something. I have conservatives, and progressives, and anarchists, and socialists, and libertarians who all like the film.”
The essentially point of view approach has shown these diverse viewers how far individuals in different income brackets have to climb to make ends meet. Rather than supporting discussions in Street Fighting Men about true work opportunities with graphics on economics and asides on America’s waning industrial jobs, the film shows the everyday choices that someone has to make when faced with extraordinary circumstances. In the end, James says that his film reaches its objective.
“I did not want to create something that was divisive. I did not want to create something that was going to heavy-handedly project some kind of message about racism and the prison industrial complex. That’s been done. I think a lot of people know about that. I wanted to create something cinematic, something experiential where you are there with the subjects.”
STREET FIGHTING MEN – Official Trailer from Andrew James on Vimeo.
About the Author: John Saeger is a music and film writer from Philadelphia. He has written the pop-culture blog Long After Dark, a site dedicated to the arts in the City of Brotherly Love and beyond, since 2017. Twitter Facebook Instagram
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