A SOUTH AFRICAN CRESCENDO.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'AMANDLA! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' shows the struggle against apartheid in the way many involved with this documentary would like us to think it was fought: musically.

That's a beguiling idea and it certainly makes for a wonderful film, even if first-time feature director Lee Hirsch pushes the point well past its sales threshold. On the other hand, there is no denying that music played a vital role in both individuals' and black South Africans as a group's decades-long fight against the hateful, racist system, and Hirsch's cameras record eloquent eye- and ear-witness accounts to the fact.

The movie also delivers an informative, if unavoidably thumbnail, account of the major historical points of the apartheid years, which roughly ran from 1950 until the early 1990s. But this has all been chronicled before. ``Amandla!'s'' most enduring achievement is its collection of so many of the freedom songs sung by the oppressed - true, tradition-influenced folk responses to oppression that spread as if by osmosis, and many of which have never been recorded - in one stirring document.

The film's title is the Xhosa word for power, and we hear it chanted often as Hirsch - an American who spent the better part of a decade in South Africa making the film - recounts the development of these tuneful but angry protest songs with a who's who of the nation's musical talents, their progeny and cultural historians.

Often the only form of mass communication in the squalid townships the white authorities forced the country's majority to live in, the freedom songs grew from initial cries of outrage against extreme segregation laws to subversive satires, syncopated threats, poignant cries of personal anguish, military fight songs and, of course, unifying and emboldening anthems.

Well-known international artists - Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim - talk of their long exiles from their beloved country. Others, who weren't lucky enough to get out, recount much worse trials. Thandi Modise, now a member of parliament, tells an astonishing tale of giving birth in a prison cell when all she wanted to do was die after unspeakable torture. Instead, she sang, and mother and daughter survived.

Others did not. Some weren't as passive. And others reveled in scaring whites by any means necessary (the mass toyi-toyi dances, in which hundreds of marchers kind of hip-hopped toward police barricades in unison, were mighty effective ways to do this). But South Africa's revolution proved far less bloody than many, and some of the reason why may be understood through the beauty of the music and dance it inspired ... and inspired back.

No fool, Hirsch makes sure to end with the celebrations of Nelson Mandela's release from prison and subsequent presidential election. Needless to say, it was some party.

AMANDLA! A REVOLUTION IN FOUR-PART HARMONY - Three stars

(PG-13: language, violence)

Starring: Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim.

Director: Lee Hirsch.

Running time: 1 hr. 43 min.

Playing: Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: Intriguing and very tuneful documentary on the music black South Africans used in their struggle against apartheid.

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Photo:

Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim appears in ``Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony,'' Lee Hirsch's documentary on the music of South Africa's 50-year struggle against apartheid.