“I Am Not Your Negro” (2017), by Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck, sets the words of James Baldwin to images and videos of that “glittering republic”, the US, in the 1960s and the 2010s.
It is an excellent introduction to James Baldwin if you have never read him. And even if you have, there is probably stuff you have never seen or heard.
Medgar, Malcolm and Martin: It is based in part on a book that Baldwin could not finish: about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They were his friends and one after another they were gunned down before the age of 40: 1963, 1965, 1968. The linchpins of the film.
Lorraine Hansberry, another friend, also appears – and then is taken from us too soon. Also dead before 40.
The film cannot match the power or depth of his essays, but it hits the main points through joining quote, image and video.
For example:
Cue: video of the Ferguson protests in 2014.
Baldwin voice-over (played by Samuel L. Jackson): I sometimes feel it to be an absolute miracle that the entire black population of the United States of America has not long ago succumbed to raging paranoia. People finally say to you, in an attempt to dismiss the social reality, “But you’re so bitter!”
Cue: video of Rodney King being beat up by police in 1991 as a violin plays.
Baldwin: Well, I may or may not be bitter. But if I were I would have good reasons for it, chief among them that American blindness or cowardice which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.
Cue: the violin player himself, from “Love in the Afternoon” (1957). A White man and woman slow dance, presumably Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper.
Baldwin: In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day –
Cue: Doris Day dancing in “Lullaby of Broadway” (1951).
Baldwin: – two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and face of Ray Charles.
Cue: Ray Charles singing “What’d I Say” (1959):
Ooh mama don’t you treat me wrong
Come and love your daddy all night long
All right, whoa, it’s all right
I know it’s all right now,
hey, hey, heyWhen you see me in misery
Come on, baby, see about me
Baldwin: And there has never been any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.
Cue: Doris Day in “Lover Come Back” (1961) singing “Should I Surrender?”:
Should I be bad
Or nice?
Should I surrender?
His pleading words so tenderly
Entreat me
Is this the night that love
Finally defeats me?
Cue: still images of lynchings while Doris Day still sings.
Baldwin: You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.
Also Baldwin:
“We are our history.”
– Abagond, 2018.
Thanks to Mary Burrell for recommending this film.
See also:
- PBS: I Am Not Your Negro – see it free until January 30th 2018
- James Baldwin
- Medgar Evers
- Malcolm X
- Martin Luther King, Jr
- Lorraine Hansberry
- The Baldwin-Kennedy meeting – mentioned in the film
- lynching
- Rodney King
- Ferguson
555
Reblogged this on bjornhenry.
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The PBS link is blocked outside the USA.
It was screened here last year at the International Film Festival, but I could not make that time slot.
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I think it is still on Netflix.
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I watched this last Summer it was strange wasn’t quite sure what Raoul Peck was trying to say with this film. In my opinion it was just a jumbled mess. Maybe I will rewatch it.
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“The PBS link is blocked outside the USA.” – jefe
Well, of course it is. What good is an autocratic Amerika without a shoot from the hip tool of censorship, always and immediately at their disposal?
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Lorraine Hansberry and Medgar Evers and MLK died very young they all were under 40.
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@ Mary
It is kind of rambly.
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@Abagond: I thought it was kind of all over the place and the Doris Day video. I kind of think i understood that after watching a second time. But I wanted you to see it and I wanted to know your thoughts on the film.
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Mary,
This film is one of my recent favorites. I have watched it multiple times. It seems like the overall narrative was to follow the process of Baldwin as if he was still working on writing the proposed book. It seems the images, videos and songs were supposed to compliment each phase in the process.
I suppose it was anchored in Baldwin’s words of being a witness. A witness to MLK, Medgar, Malcolm and their life and death during the era; (juxtaposed with him being a literal witness from Paris and then returning; as we are witnesses to his process throughout the film.
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@PF Thought: I like your astute summation of the film. However I did pay attention to how young Malcolm X and MLK and Lorraine Hansberry were at the times of their deaths. And the scene with Baldwin as a guest on the Dick Cavett show and Baldwin unpacking the race issue in America was good. I also enjoyed how he debated William F. Buckley. In my opinion Baldwin was one of the critical thinkers and voices on the issue of race during the Civil Rights era, just as Ta-Nehis Coates is today in this age of the orange despot 45.
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Those parts you mentioned were sone of the highlights of the film for sure. I would include the final scene about the N-word and Euro-American accountability/ responsibility for it.
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He definitely was and his words are still precise, relevant, revealing and moving.
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Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film…it shuttered the IMDB forums and discussion threads for good.
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