Baldwin’s fiery words speak to new generation
A remarkable portrait of the American writer James Baldwin from documentary filmmaker and former Haitian Minister of Culture Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro” is a thoughtprovoking and entirely relevant resurrection of the novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, social activist and critic, who deserves to be cherished and remembered.
A homosexual, a leftist and an outspoken African-American at a time when all of those things were liable to land you in jail or get you dead, Baldwin lived a perilously and publicly defiant life and was as in your face as the film’s evocatively retro title suggests.
Based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript “Remember This House” and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the film uses as its context Baldwin’s uncompleted recollections of three assassinated civil rights leaders, who were in life friends of Baldwin’s: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. A spellbinding remembrance of an artist who dared to raise his voice and risk political and personal repercussions, the film is all the more astounding insofar as it was made by someone from another country.
Among Baldwin’s most striking traits, outside of his activism and eloquence, were his face and voice. Slight and not conventionally attractive, he had a kindly looking, childlike visage. His speaking voice, on the other hand, seemed completely self-invented, a prissy and impeccably proper form of mid-Atlantic English. In one of his more factually alternative comments, the closeted, racist FBI head J. Edgar Hoover ominously describes the known-to-be-homosexual Baldwin as “dangerous.”
Haitian-born Peck, who spent a year as a New York City cab driver, was raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and educated in France and Germany. He uses existing footage from such sources as (repeatedly) a vintage episode of “The Dick Cavett Show,” film clips, interviews and still photos to weave his historic tapestry. In a powerful scene, Baldwin addresses students at Britain’s Cambridge University.
An award winner at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, “I Am Not Your Negro” should be seen by all Americans, especially those who weren’t there to see these events and figures for themselves. These days, “I Am Not Your Negro” and Baldwin’s works speak more urgently than ever.
(“I Am Not Your Negro” contains profanity, violence and brief nudity.)