Right on! is a time capsule, a snapshot of a band and a style of music at a very specific time in a very specific place. Due to the radical way in which it captures this snapshot, this documentary film is clearly an experiment. The viewer feels like a witness to important steps in the development of a new musical genre that would become the dominant musical style in pop culture a few decades later. In this respect, Danska has succeeded in creating a kind of laboratory situation that has resulted in this very focused film (Felipe Luciano calls it “the first spoken word film” in the US). The collective The Original Last Poets (later The Last Poets), whose live performance, adapted for the film from a 1969 performance at New York’s Paperback Theatre, takes place on a rooftop in New York’s East Village, are considered, along with The Gil Scott-Heron, to be the most important pioneers of hip-hop and rap music in the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s. Anger at social injustice against black people in the US is at the heart of the poetic lyrics of the group’s three performers, which are presented in powerful and choreographed performances together with their two drummers Carlos Cuebas and Gene Ballard.

Karl Wratschko

While the reproduction of film material in the film industry requires multiple generations of copies that distance us from what was originally captured by the camera, lighter, independent productions allow for a more artisanal approach. Thus, films shot in 16mm can benefit from reversal film technology, avoiding the negative/positive system. The print of Right on! is a testament to this possibility: shot on Ektachrome (the camera original is now lost), it was duplicated from the 16mm original using contact printing to produce positive prints (two of which survive, though badly degraded). One of these prints was later subtitled for French distribution, and used as a positive master for the distribution of prints in the non-commercial circuit. Fortunately, the duplication was done using the Gevacolor process, which is significantly more stable than Eastmancolor. As surprising as it may seem for a relatively recent film,
the print presented may be the best remaining projectable print, derived from the original camera footage. This is thanks to the technical specificities and the unique distribution model of the16mm gauge.

Benoît Carpentier