James Baldwin's racially charged writings still hold true today, says I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck

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      James Baldwin, one of the few black writers allowed into the pantheon of America’s public intellectuality—a notion now as quaint as an unfettered press and upward mobility—defied expectations wherever he went.

      Following a poverty-stricken childhood in Harlem, and a period as a boy preacher, he emigrated to Europe after the Second World War and there wrote a string of groundbreaking novels, essays, memoirs, and plays.

      His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, counted as a gay declaration in the closeted 1950s. And 1963’s The Fire Next Time—one of many works to rely on biblical themes to capture the ongoing cataclysm of race relations in the U.S.—was found in virtually every college dorm room at the time. Its success followed his return to the States and reflected his involvement with the civil-rights movement and close friendships with activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

      After their assassinations, this experience became the subject of Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript that eventually formed the basis of I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary, which opens this Friday (February 24).

      Born in Haiti 63 years ago, Peck grew up in Africa, Europe, and the U.S. He returned to Haiti in the mid-’90s and was that country’s culture minister before resuming his film career—most notably for the 2000 biodoc Lumumba, for HBO. He currently heads France’s national film school, La Fémis.

      “When I was growing up,” Peck says, calling from Montreuil, a suburb east of Paris, “I didn’t read Baldwin—I studied Baldwin, the way you would study the Bible.

      “You can’t imagine how many people, young and old, I meet in audience exchanges around the world who say ‘This man changed my life,’ ” he relates in excellent, if heavily accented, English. “He had a way to crack right through you. He always told you straight, but he never made himself the enemy of anyone; he was a profound humanist, an incredible anthropologist, philosopher, political mirror, and also a poet!”

      Indeed, it may have been Baldwin’s contagious love of language and ability to speak eloquently, without notes, on almost any subject that won him the admiration of even people who opposed his scabrous analysis of American complacency and self-delusion. His words were often fierce, but his demeanour was as musical as Nina Simone, whose voice he often recalls.

      “He was like a father to Nina Simone,” Peck declares. “He basically raised her intellectually. She travelled with him extensively, to Africa as well as Paris. He was the mentor of so many young artists, and they loved him so much. He was friends with Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan, and they would argue constantly about theatre and acting.

      “But people would take criticism from Baldwin that they would not accept from anyone else. When things turned more radical, some of the militants thought he was too soft, and there was some homophobia there. But he managed to keep good relationships with them even so.”

      Baldwin’s influence on subsequent writers like Toni Morrison (who spoke at his 1987 funeral) and Ta-Nehisi Coates is incalculable. Given its parameters, the movie doesn’t delve into this realm, but it does include its subject’s thoughts about the role of American cinema and television in promoting a whitewashed view of history. Even success stories like those of close friends Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte were tainted by a Jim Crow agenda that kept their worlds apart from the Caucasian chalk circle of Gary Cooper and Doris Day.

      “I remember the first time I saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” Peck recalls, ruefully. “I was so proud to be seeing a man who looked like me, who I could really admire. It took me a while to realize that I was being given a model of social behaviour, and that this was all I could be, to be accepted.”

      The new film’s academy nod for best documentary feature—one of almost 40 nominations and awards—puts it up against the eight-hour O.J.: Made in America, present on numerous 2016 top-10 lists for its detailed study of racial touchstones in modern America. In the fiction category, the box-office ascendance of a nichy art film like Moonlight puts it alongside a glossy crowd pleaser like Hidden Figures.

      “I know many of the filmmakers behind these films, and I really like and respect them all. In a way, a movie like Hidden Figures presents maybe too friendly a world to be believed. But the problem is not with Hidden Figures; the problem is that there are not enough movies to tell these stories. Right now we feel we must applaud them all.”

      Peck himself is pleased by the new openness to African-American stories that hit few familiar tropes, flying in the scarlet face of xenophobia blighting the landscape. But he feels that arguments raised by Baldwin six or more decades ago still can address unresolved divisions in society. The ambitious writer-director’s next film goes back even further: it’s mostly in German and takes on the early life of Karl Marx. Peck truly takes the long view of history.

      “The western world is in a big change,” he concludes, “and this may take another 60, 70 years. Look, I had 90 minutes to tell this story, and there were certain constraints—as it should be. My job was not to tell the whole story of James Baldwin. And yet I wanted to somehow capture his essence. He was an incredible witness of and actor upon his time.

      “I hoped to push people to read him and that has already happened. Baldwin books are selling like crazy, and I just learned that the book from my film is now a bestseller. The return of James Baldwin to the front row—that has been my greatest desire. And I think he is there.”

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