In an age when ‘Black Lives Matter’ remains a controversial statement and huge brands co-opt protest imagery for profit, the film I Am Not Your Negro is more than timely – it’s an education.
Nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, director Raoul Peck’s documentary is based on the unfinished pages of a James Baldwin manuscript. Baldwin – an African-American, gay, New York-born writer who is mostly known for his novels, essays and social commentary – died in 1987. At the time, he had only written 30 pages of Remember This House, a memoir detailing his friendships and experiences with three murdered giants of the Civil Rights movement: Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and NAACP activist Medgar Evers.
Over the hour and a half of Samuel L. Jackson reading Baldwin’s words, I Am Not Your Negro presents us with a range of interviews and digs into the murky, racist history of Western popular culture. The film is not subtle: sections are bookended with stark, black and white title cards, Doris Day’s smiling face morphs into a lynched body hanging from a tree, the end credits burst on screen to the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s 'The Blacker the Berry'. But the film’s power comes from its punch, and the punch is a strong one.
Baldwin’s words resonate now as much as they did half a century ago, and there’s a lot of pain in their relevance. Protest comes up often, but so too does youth; perhaps the thing that stuck with me most after seeing the film was the reminder that the assassinated trio of Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar all died before they reached 40 years old. I spoke with filmmaker, activist and* I Am Not Your Negro* director Raoul Peck about where we come from, young people, revolution, and Karl Marx.
Well, firstly, I loved the film. Perhaps the thing I loved the most is I was expecting a film ‘just’ about Baldwin, not about TV and film and pop culture. I’m assuming that was something you had in mind from the very beginning?
You forget that Baldwin was cool. For me, the project was always ‘how do I bring Baldwin’s words to the generation of today?’ Baldwin changed my life when I was young, and I’ve seen that happen again and again to people. A lot of people of different ages came to me saying the same thing about the film: ‘Baldwin, he’s our hero, he changed our lives’. So my motivation always how do I bring these words as pure as possible, and without an intermediary, to an audience?
Did you always have a younger audience in mind?
Yes – bringing it to the audience of today, for today. For me, filmmaking is about being engaged. I hate doing anything in the past, and when I use the past, it’s [more about how] I can make the content of the past significant today. I feel like Baldwin as well, [him] saying if you don’t know your history, how can you fight? If you don’t know your enemy, if you don’t know how you got to that point, you are bound to do the same mistakes again and again.
You learn through the sacrifice of others before you because they were not dumber, I’m pretty sure they were sometimes more intelligent even. They made mistakes too, and some of them were killed. Many gave their lives for that – for whatever we have today – so the least we can do is to learn about that, and to learn where we come from. If you don’t learn what real life is you’re going to just be just food for the machine. You’re going to just be a consumer. That’s what the capitalist society wants you to be, a consumer that has no questions and can be satisfied. And they will make sure that they discover more needs for you to be satisfied. Like your iPhone; my iPhone, I use hardly 15% of its capacity. If I want to use 80% that means I’m going to spend hours [using it] – and that time, I’m not reading Baldwin. That’s the choice we must make.
Speaking of capitalism, I saw that your next film is about the life of Karl Marx. I’m assuming The Young Karl Marx explores his thoughts about the British working class, but ironically it hasn’t got a British distributor yet.
Yes, it’s done. It’s finished. I don’t know if or when it’s going out come out in Britain, but it did come out in Germany, it’s going to come out in France.
Do you think a film about Marx is a natural successor to Baldwin?
It’s a moment of the life of the young Karl Marx, when he meets Friedrich Engels in Paris, and they basically develop their theories. The idea is to show how that happened. [Revolution] is not just being angry – it’s about studying, it’s about thinking, it’s about discussing. Things just don’t blow up.
[The films both] say something about us, as well. How do we make out anger and make it productive? Anger alone is not sufficient. They want you to be angry, because it pins you down in that anger, and that’s something Baldwin refuses. He said, if you keep me in that anger then that means I can’t do anything else, and I am much more than that. I am a human being and I can do anything I want. The stupidity of racism? That’s something you invented. Why do I have to deal with it? It’s an incredible piece of knowledge as a young man, when you realise that ‘oh my god! I’m not the problem here!’ I’m sorry, this is your problem. Why don’t you deal with it, while I’m going around the world and making something out of myself. That’s the attitude I learnt from [Baldwin]. It’s not theoretical, it’s practical. It’s how I decided to live.
The other thing I found interesting after watching the film is the fact you’re not African-African, you’re Haitian, and I found the way it showed the struggle is not as simple as Americans, and America, really refreshing. There’s a wider black diaspora, and we all have this connection through struggle. Especially considering how Baldwin spoke about it a lot, and how he lived in Europe for large parts of his life. But I was wondering: do you think it affected your work here? Not being American?
No. No, that’s the same thing I was saying before: I don’t let anybody define me. I mean, what am I? I’ve spent more time outside of Haiti than in Haiti, does it mean I’m not Haitian, or that I’m French? I don’t have a Haitian passport, I have a French passport. I speak German perfectly, I write in German if I want. So what does that make me? Two people have influenced me, my whole life. Baldwin and Marx. So, what am I? I choose to be whatever I want to be. I don’t let anything define me.
[With regards to] the film, the only thing I wanted to make sure of was that the film would clearly be included and accepted by an American public. I wanted that stamp on it, of course. But also, I didn’t want them to be able to say ‘oh, that’s a film from a Haitian guy’, or ‘that’s a film from a French guy’. No, it’s an American film. By the way, I also have lived in America. I’m a resident there. My half-brother went to Vietnam. So I’m legitimate in talking about certain things. I don’t let anybody take that from me. It was part of the strategy, of course. Because similarly, now that the film is coming out in Europe, French people could say ‘oh this is America’. No guys. This is about you. This is exactly about you, too. And Britain, as well.
I see that. As someone British, the film felt very much ‘of here’ too. I’ve actually seen it in two different places – first in San Francisco at a tiny cinema, then in Soho at a press screening. Let’s just say the audiences, and their racial demographics, were very different. But people cried, both times.
A white woman told me on Twitter that ‘the first time of my life, I cried the whole way from the cinema to my home, and that’s never happened to me before’. I’ve heard that from people. I’ve received letters about it. I’ve seen it. Yes. People are reacting. We don’t see that kind of sincerity, that directness anymore. That credibility. We live in a world where Donald Trump is the President of America. So there’s our credibility, just gone, like that.
Trump only appears for a few seconds in the film, but I felt his presence a lot at times. Like a weight hanging over everything, especially when I watched it in the States.
[There is something similar] for every piece of that film, depending on where you watch it. I’ve watched it in Germany, and of course, the illusions to Nazism hit very hard there. It’s about the universal Western world. That’s what the film is. It’s saying ‘you don’t have the moral superiority anymore, and if you thought you once had it, you never had it’. As a Western civilization you need to ask yourself, how did you get here, and you better do your homework.
Baldwin was working on “Remember This House” for over a decade, but only managed to write 30 pages – I’m assuming because of all the trauma in the writing. Did you ever feel limited by the text?
No, on the contrary. Don’t forget, I had access to everything. I could use anything of Baldwin’s that I wanted, which has never happened. In my industry, you can hardly buy the rights for one book, or one essay. But I had the rights to everything – published, unpublished, private, etc. The text I found was just the entry point for me; I wanted to find something organic to be able to do the whole film. The difficult thing about that was to keep coherence, and the coherence came from these 30 pages of notes that he had written. I could use that as the real storyline about those three friends, but then find windows to speak about cinema, to speak about images, the world of Hollywood, the construction of that image, and the context of imperialism, etc. It was really like wanting to construct a puzzle, but the pieces are in so many different places; sometimes in a private letter, sometimes in a book that was published, sometimes in an essay, or in the corrected version of an essay. It was about finding the right pieces so I could tell the story. And now it’s been told.
*I Am Not Your Negro is released in the UK on 7 April. *
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.