In the late sixties the Black Panthers were reviled by the majority of white Americans but were the darlings of a "radical chic" social set. It was the perfect irony to spark the interest of William Klein, who, with an uncanny sense of timing and politics, filmed an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, living in Algeria. Klein garnished Cleaver's self-portrait with documentary footage (and Brecht/Godardian intertitles like "Culture Is a Gun"); the result is a singular portrait of black activism, very much linked to its time and its roots (Klein met Cleaver at the Panafrican Cultural Festival in 1969; Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther was made soon after at the request of Cleaver and the Algerian government). But if Cleaver is the film's hero, he is also very much, and very consciously, its antihero. As Irwin Silber wrote in The Guardian, "Cleaver, on film as in life, is a complex mixture of profound political insight, socially crystallized ghetto cultural patterns and a multifaceted human personality...(It) is clear that Cleaver himself is aware of the fact that he is not the new man but a spawn of a very sick, very rotten social order and that his own claim on humanity rests on his willingness to serve as an instrument for that social order's destruction."