Oscar must-sees headed for Memphis
“The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”
Those words, written by James Baldwin and read aloud by Samuel L. Jackson, are heard in “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary that opened Friday at the Malco Paradiso and Studio on the Square.
Nominated for this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, “I Am Not Your Negro” could hardly be more passionate, provocative, sorrowful, angry or timely — unless it were “13th,” another Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, which screens Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
These two must-sees — which unpack and examine America’s history of racism and racial policy while helping to illuminate the future history that is being made at a breakneck pace by the current occupants of the White House — are among several high-profile Oscar-nominated films and screenings set for Memphis over the next two weeks. (The Oscars will presented Sunday, Feb. 26.)
Epic in length but intimate in its almost too-close-for-comfort depiction of an unconventional practical joker father (Peter Simonischek) and his careerist business-professional daughter (Sandra Hüller), director Maren Ade’s German production “Toni Erdmann” is a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film that opens Friday at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill. Odd in the best sense of that word, this comedy-drama is one of a kind, but that won’t stop Hollywood from trying to copycat it: A remake already is in the works, with Jack Nicholson and Kristin Wiig in the lead roles. See it now, with its unsettling surprises, unspoken but deeply felt emotions, frank comic nudity and false teeth and fright wigs intact.
Screening at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, at the Memphis Jewish Community Center, as part of the annual Morris and Mollye Fogelman International Jewish Film Festival, is another Best Documentary Feature nominee, “Life, Animated.” Directed by Roger Ross Williams from a memoir by Ron Suskind, the film (which played for a week in August at the Studio on the Square) is a tender and unsentimental portrait of Owen Suskind, Ron’s 23year-old son, whose obsessive lifelong passion for Disney animated films enabled him to overcome a “pervasive developmental disorder” and become “a proud autistic man.” More the movie version of a magazine feature story than a think piece, the movie doesn’t dig deep into the neuroscience of autism or into the implications of the Disney brand’s ubiquity for society in general; nevertheless, it engages the mind as well as the heart as it traces Owen’s history, his parents’ heartbreak and the surprise epiphany that occurred when the Suskinds realized Owen was using “Peter Pan,” “The Jungle Book” and other Disney cartoons “to make sense of the world.” As Owen’s mother, Cornelia Suskind, comments: “Who decides what a meaningful life is?”
Also screening next week — at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art — is a program titled “The Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Documentary.” The Holocaust, an Oakland intensive care unit, Syria and ISIS are among the subjects covered in the five nominees, which — unlike most fiction films — are the products of activist filmmakers eager to expose injustice, encourage the hopeless, champion the selfless and effect change.
As worthy as all these films are, it is “I Am Not Your Negro” and “13th” — the latter also is available on Netflix — that feel essential, as journalism, art and acts of resistance.
Directed by Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your Negro” conducts an autopsy of race relations in America from the jumping-off point of writer James Baldwin’s never-completed manuscript about “my dead friends,” Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. An elegant, almost elfin intellectual, with a raconteur’s sense of style, a realist’s grim suspicion of authority and a movie lover’s joy of performance (the documentary is filled with film clips), Baldwin is seen and heard in vintage footage, while some of his writings are read as a form of narration by Jackson, whose offscreen performance as Baldwin is superior to most of the work he’s done on camera in recent years. The author’s insights have lost none of their sting. Referring to the 1963 church bombing that killed four little girls, Baldwin comments: “White people were astounded by Birmingham, black people were not” — an echo of an observation about the last presidential election that has been made by many black commentators.
Remembering a youthful epiphany in which he realized for the first time that he was “black,” Baldwin states: “It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.” He condemns the “moral apathy” of the representatives of a “vast heedless unthinking cruel white majority,” who care only about “their safety and their profits ... . Above all,” he says, as if responding to the recent wave of Black Lives Matter and post-election protests, “they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for this way of life and so they cannot afford to know why their victims are revolting.”
Baldwin, who apparently never wielded a weapon more dangerous than the lit cigarette that was his constant companion during appearances on “The Dick Cavett Show,” was classified by the FBI as a man who “could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety.” The paranoid presence of J. Edgar Hoover is just one of many ways in which “I Am Not Your Negro” intersects with “13th,” directed by Ava DuVernay (”Selma”), a 2015 winner of the Freedom Award from Memphis’ National Civil Rights Museum. (A 2016 Freedom Award-winner, social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, is interviewed frequently in “13th,” which made its Memphis debut in December.)
Named for the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for a crime,” the movie decries the “prison industrial complex” that — enabled by race-baiting “law and order” politicians and a vast complex of profiteering “corrections” corporations and their associated vendors — has made the U.S. the world leader in incarceration. According to the film, America’s prison population has leaped from 300,000 to 2.3 million in the past four decades, thanks to mandatory sentencing requirements, “three-strikes-and-you’reout” legislation and penalties that target the poor and minority defendants who are most likely to accept a jail-time plea bargain (almost 40 percent of prisoners are black men, way above the group’s percentage of the U.S. population).
The movie’s shameful evidence of government overreach speaks almost prophetically to current events. When Hoover calls the Black Panthers “the greatest internal threat to this nation,” one can’t help but think of the type of rhetoric used against refugees and Muslim immigrants. The Clintons are not exempt from criticism (especially Bill Clinton, who as president endorsed passage of a 1994 crime bill that exacerbated the breakup of black communities), but more to the point, considering the outcome of the presidential election, is the presence of Donald Trump, who in 1989 took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News demanding that “the death penalty” be used against the juveniles convicted of assault and rape in the case of the “Central Park Five”; 11 years later, all five were exonerated, due to DNA and other evidence.
More devastating to the president and extraordinarily powerful, chilling and heartbreaking is a montage of footage of white people punching, pushing and heckling black people (from children to the elderly), both in the blackand-white civil-rights past and at various Trump rallies during the past year. The footage is scored with sound bites from the candidate praising “the good old days” when “they used to treat them very, very rough.” Says Trump, in a sound bite from a Las Vegas rally that accompanies footage of a distinguished-looking black man being assaulted on a city sidewalk: “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”