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“We were making history, and it wasn’t nice and clean”. So says the first interviewee in Stanley Nelson’s portrait of one of the most mythologised groups in North American history, the Black Panther Party. The film opens with an animated rendition of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the essential message of which is that an object can appear to be many different things depending on the viewer’s perspective. Staying true to this sentiment, the film never lingers on a single narrative but continuously highlights critical events that shaped the party’s messy evolution.

Utilising extensive interviews along with a wealth of carefully arranged archival material, Nelson offers a comprehensive portrait of the party’s birth, growth and decline. Particular attention is paid to key figures and the influence their personas had, both on the membership, and on the establishment’s psyche. Hoover’s FBI and the Nixon administration are roundly condemned for their role in the escalation of violence within the party, as they sought explicitly to hinder the establishment of a “black messiah”. Huey Nugent, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton are each presented as fulfilling this prophecy in various ways. With limited time in which to tell their stories, the film gives us rather elementary sketches of their histories, just enough to leave us itching for more detail.

Though the testimonies of former party members are illuminating at times, the “talking heads” get too much screen-time, and the film drags a little in its less insightful moments. Mostly, however, Nelson’s sensitive direction propels the story along at an interesting pace. Nelson gestures towards the complicated nature of living and re-living history and politics by including nods to the various intersections that the BPP and the wider Black Power movement had with social causes of the time. A cracking soundtrack adds poignancy to a story which is still frightfully relevant; as the credits roll, Gil Scott Heron’s Winter In America plays over a reading of the party’s central aims: peace, justice, and an end to police brutality and the murder of black people.

Blank Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution is currently showing in the IFI.