James Baldwin 'unfiltered' in Oscar-nominated documentary
Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" presents the raw, "unfiltered" voice of US civil rights stalwart James Baldwin through his own words, the Haitian filmmaker says. "He invented a language of incredible force," Peck told AFP at his Paris office, calling the novelist, essayist and poet the literary "father of everyone" who influenced authors from Beat Generation idol Allen Ginsberg to Nobel literature laureate Toni Morrison. "The title is obviously a provocation," said Peck, president of La Femis, France's most prestigious film school.
He summed up the thinking of Baldwin, who was black and gay, by saying: "You can't park me in the ghettos and lynch me without becoming monsters."
Baldwin escaped American racism and homophobia in 1948, taking refuge in Paris for more than a decade before returning home to lead a nationwide campaign against segregation. It was in Paris that the Harlem-born Baldwin wrote his semiautobiographical coming-of-age story "Go Tell It on the Mountain". Three years later he authored the frank, homoerotic "Giovanni's Room", one of the first acclaimed literary works to explore the gay experience.
Back in the United States, Baldwin became friends with African American civil rights icons Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers-all three assassinated before they reached their 40th birthday, as Peck notes. In 1963, Baldwin's deeply personal exploration of racial injustice in "The Fire Next Time" fanned the flames of the American civil rights movement as it was exploding in the segregated South. Peck could not bear the idea of Baldwin falling into oblivion, that history would inherit his ideas "without quoting him". The filmmaker combed through Baldwin's novels and correspondence on the way to creating what he called a "confrontation" between the man and today's world. Black and white footage from scenes of more recent racial strife such as Ferguson, Missouri-which saw a wave of protests after the police shooting of an unarmed AfricanAmerican man-remind viewers of the subject's continuing relevance. The work, which Peck said is "highstakes artistically and politically", aims to challenge the racism of "(US President Donald) Trump and all those like him". But he said Baldwin's discourse is too politically incorrect for American television, predicting that his documentary would never reach the small screen. Actor Samuel L Jackson, whose breakthrough role was as a crack addict in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" (1991), voices Baldwin in the US version. French rapper JoeyStarr does the French voiceover for the documentary, soon to be released on the German-French cultural channel Arte. "They act from within" Baldwin's black skin, said Peck, who is in his early 60s and whose own family fled Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship.