By Claire
Oberon Garcia
Haitian
filmmaker Raoul Peck’s award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro opened
in Paris this month to a sold-out and diverse audience at L’Arlequin Cinema on
the city’s Left Bank.
The powerful
film takes an innovative approach to presenting James Baldwin’s life and ideas,
avoiding “talking heads” and using only words from his own writing along with
archival film footage and clips from the Hollywood movies that Baldwin
discussed as exemplifying certain enduring pathologies of American culture.
The filmmaker
was in attendance, along with James Baldwin’s nephew and members of the film
crew, and the silence of the packed hall was remarkable, almost as if everyone
were all in a collective trance.
As Baldwin
would pause, for example, in an interview with Dick Cavett to search for just
the right entrance point into a response to a question, the audience
collectively held its breath.
Save for a
few moments of quiet, bitter laughter at points later in the film, the audience
was quietly absorbed by Baldwin’s words and the powerful and often violent
visual images. Samuel L. Jackson’s voice - almost unrecognizable - respectfully
brought Baldwin’s characteristic very personal but formal rhetoric to life.
Images from
the present constantly infiltrated Baldwin’s words and archival visuals:
footage of
 |
| Writer James Baldwin, in the film. |
Despite the
film’s emphasis on broader social forces and problems, it also conveyed a sense
of Baldwin’s individuality and vision: his development from a bright, curious
Harlem boy with bad teeth to a celebrated intellectual who nevertheless always
felt himself to be an outsider, a self-described witness to social change
rather than a participant in it, who seemed startled to receive a standing
ovation by hundreds of Cambridge undergraduates after winning a debate against
the aristocratic American right-wing critic William F. Buckley.
The audience
gave the film a standing ovation that lasted until the end of the credits,
after which Peck spent nearly an hour answering questions from the audience.
Interest in
Baldwin’s work has only recently been revived. Peck described the impact that
reading Baldwin at age 17 or 18 had on him, and declared that the motivation
for making this film was to help make sure that Baldwin’s ideas were not lost
to future generations.
When asked by a young woman in the audience
whether or not the film had any message for France, Peck declared that
Baldwin’s critique isn’t just of the United States, but addresses any society
that does not respect various aspects of human difference, including
immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation.
 |
| Raoul Peck |
The film made clear
that Baldwin’s incisive analysis of the pathology of U.S. racism is still
relevant today, and that today’s increasingly polarized West is badly in need
of his brand of intelligent, righteous humanism.
Claire Oberon Garcia is an author and a professor of literature, race and migration studies at Colorado College in the United States. She is co-editor of the book From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help.
