Documentary will make you rethink race history
I Am Not Your Negro (E, 93 mins), Directed by Raoul Peck, ★★★★★
James Baldwin was a friend or associate of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X.
Those three men, all towering figures in the American civil rights movement, were murdered within a few years of each other during one of the bloodiest and most notorious eras of recent North American history.
In the early 1970s, Baldwin proposed and then began to write a book about the lives of the three men. Of how they intertwined, of their legacies and of what the world lost via their assassin’s bullets. (Evers and King were both murdered by men aligned with the white supremacist movement. X was killed in 1965 by members of The Nation of Islam, the organisation he had turned his back on the year before.)
Baldwin’s book – to be titled Remember This House – was never completed. But from the copious notes, journals and interviews Baldwin left behind, film-maker Raoul Peck has assembled a kind of oral and visual recreation of Baldwin’s writings, his vision for
I Am Not Your Negro emerges as a ferociously wellargued and utterly watchable piece of work.
the book and his tireless, fearless advocacy for human rights for all of America’s citizens.
I Am Not Your Negro emerges as a ferociously well-argued, blazingly intelligent, wondrously layered and utterly watchable piece of work. Working within a startlingly brief running time, Peck lays out a history of race relations in North America, the civil rights movement, the lives of the three martyred men and a very personal biopic of Baldwin himself.
The unsung heroes of this film are surely editor Alexandra Strauss and the funders/producers who allowed Strauss and Peck the time they needed to work wizardry in the edit suite.
Compressing hundreds of hours of archival footage and contemporary comment into a brisk, cohesive whole that still perfectly tells its tales is a hugely skilled and time-consuming process.
It’s an old truism of filmmaking that the faster-paced you want your film to be, the longer it’s going to take you to make it.
I Am Not Your Negro has been blessed – made possible, really – by an edit that doesn’t waste a moment in telling a story that many film-makers would struggle to fit into twice the running time.
This film is just about as good as documentary gets.
Peck and Strauss weave their material together perfectly, drawing sturdy and not always obvious connections between narrative strands that then reach out and embrace us now, in 2017 – a time when so much of what Baldwin and his peers might have imagined would be settled is still so immediate and raw.
I Am Not Your Negro is impassioned, urgent and admirable on pretty much every level it aims for and occupies. It is a rare film that challenged and reframed what I knew and what I thought I knew. Just go.
– Graeme Tuckett