Powerful new film aims to fight the ‘rise of stupidity, ignorance, and racism’
civil rights movement to the present of #Black Lives Matter”.
One line of Baldwin’s, uttered in a television interview, remains genuinely revelatory. There were days, he questioned, “how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here”. He was “terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human … And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters”.
“He has a lot of those lines,” says Peck. “That’s why I tell people you don’t just read Baldwin, you study Baldwin. Because each of these lines, each word of the line, is a whole philosophy, and sends you looking for more, trying to understand all the metaphors as well that he has included. And, yes, this line about the ‘vast, heedless, cruel white majority’ – I mean, he is making it up as he is speaking. That’s an incredible capacity, to be able to do that.
“I remember, going back, taking my old Baldwin books when I was preparing for my research, I would find those books totally underlined from the first page to the last page. That’s rare that you can underline almost every line of every paragraph — because it’s like pure philosophy, pure human knowledge, experience, and also poetry, and love.”
Peck, who was born in Haiti and moved with his family to the Democratic Republic of Congo at the age of eight, first encountered Baldwin’s works as a teenager. Baldwin has remained with him ever since. “Baldwin was the first person who I thought was speaking to me and also speaking about the current world I was living in. He was bringing a very critical analysis and a very progressive one. Automatically, I became drawn to that, and he stayed a compass for me all my life.”
HE says he has been taken aback by the way people have reacted to the film in the States. “I know that Baldwin can get that kind of reaction, but what I discovered through all these screenings is that people go through a very personal, intimate experience watching the film.
“It’s not a film that you can just watch from the outside with a very cynical mind. He causes you to be serious with yourself, to take yourself seriously and to take your life seriously.
“It’s almost like – I don’t know if you’re religious, but you’re sitting in front of your pastor, or a priest, and it’s a confessional relationship, very intimate.
“You don’t feel threatened: you just have to swallow it, and think. He is forcing you to think, and not just in an intellectual way, but in a very personal, intimate way.”
Among the contemporary footage in the documentary are scenes from such places as Ferguson, Missouri, where the police shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in August 2014 helped give rise to the powerful Black Lives Matter movement. It is not hard to see why many see the film as a powerful exploration of what it means to be black in America today, or why Baldwin’s words have continued to resonate.
Little wonder, then, that Peck believes Baldwin is once again necessary. Speaking on Channel 4 News earlier this week, he said: “I felt the rise of stupidity, the rise of ignorance, and there was the need for that voice, that basically changed my life.”
Asked what Baldwin, who died in 1987, would have made of Donald Trump’s America, he said: “I think he would stop sleeping. It’s a very tough situation today, but again, it’s not just the United States. We have seen all over Europe as well. We forget that we had Berlusconi in Italy. This is what democracy has become.
“It’s a matter of celebrity. There is a lot of ignorance, and people want easy answer when we are living in a very complex world, and that’s the time for populists.”