Notes on "I Am Not Your Negro (2016)"
21 June 2018 (nearly two)
I had remembered James Baldwin first from the poster of the first edition cover that hung in my local Barnes&Noble of Go Tell It on the Mountain, an inscrutable cover to me for many years of several people standing on a streetcorner illuminated shades of brown by a setting sun. For whatever reason, the summer after my first year of college, I purchased that book, and within months I had read the first eight of his books, enraptured with his work and moved profoundly by his vision of America. I see something of myself in Baldwin, in his anger, his awkwardness, his self-consciousness and the odd contrast between his violence and the way he looks like he could never hurt a fly. This is something reinforced by I Am Not Your Negro which spends much of its time contextualizing Baldwin––or, showing us Baldwin contextualizing himself––with his peers. Hansberry, Evers, Malcolm and MLK, among other white peers (who, smartly, director Raoul Peck keeps silent). Poitier and Belafonte too. Baldwin's vision of the 1960s is that of a decade of loss. It's difficult to conceive how the decade could be understood in any other way, and Baldwin and Peck even ignore the murders of JFK and RFK––which is appropriate in the way the film constructs the experiences. To what purpose did they die? Not towards the benefit of black Americans, regardless of how we may remember them. LBJ likewise is ignored and downplayed, appropriately so. I am aware that Peck has another film about Marx, and this is no surprise to anyone who watches this film, which spends so much of its time implicitly and explicitly tying together the connections between commerce and violence, slavery, lack of progress. The 21st century appears in the film largely through reality TV (much of which is game shows), NYC Times Square, and Ferguson, with money and violence being the common denominators for much of the footage. There's a brutality to the juxtaposition of history with the present, at times so chilling that you wish all of history could be erased. The image of white Americans toting Nazi signs proclaiming White Supremacy should not be shocking to anyone living in 2018 but somehow one hoped that siding with Hitler was less fashionable in the 60s. The feelings of weariness and vulnerability produced by the film are appropriate for its very own portrait of weariness and vulnerability, which, along with its brutality, define Baldwin's work. How do you live through the 1960s, one loss of revolutionary life after another. There's a non-sense to it all and any figure lesser than Baldwin at the film's core would be unable to encourage us forward.
I had remembered James Baldwin first from the poster of the first edition cover that hung in my local Barnes&Noble of Go Tell It on the Mountain, an inscrutable cover to me for many years of several people standing on a streetcorner illuminated shades of brown by a setting sun. For whatever reason, the summer after my first year of college, I purchased that book, and within months I had read the first eight of his books, enraptured with his work and moved profoundly by his vision of America. I see something of myself in Baldwin, in his anger, his awkwardness, his self-consciousness and the odd contrast between his violence and the way he looks like he could never hurt a fly. This is something reinforced by I Am Not Your Negro which spends much of its time contextualizing Baldwin––or, showing us Baldwin contextualizing himself––with his peers. Hansberry, Evers, Malcolm and MLK, among other white peers (who, smartly, director Raoul Peck keeps silent). Poitier and Belafonte too. Baldwin's vision of the 1960s is that of a decade of loss. It's difficult to conceive how the decade could be understood in any other way, and Baldwin and Peck even ignore the murders of JFK and RFK––which is appropriate in the way the film constructs the experiences. To what purpose did they die? Not towards the benefit of black Americans, regardless of how we may remember them. LBJ likewise is ignored and downplayed, appropriately so. I am aware that Peck has another film about Marx, and this is no surprise to anyone who watches this film, which spends so much of its time implicitly and explicitly tying together the connections between commerce and violence, slavery, lack of progress. The 21st century appears in the film largely through reality TV (much of which is game shows), NYC Times Square, and Ferguson, with money and violence being the common denominators for much of the footage. There's a brutality to the juxtaposition of history with the present, at times so chilling that you wish all of history could be erased. The image of white Americans toting Nazi signs proclaiming White Supremacy should not be shocking to anyone living in 2018 but somehow one hoped that siding with Hitler was less fashionable in the 60s. The feelings of weariness and vulnerability produced by the film are appropriate for its very own portrait of weariness and vulnerability, which, along with its brutality, define Baldwin's work. How do you live through the 1960s, one loss of revolutionary life after another. There's a non-sense to it all and any figure lesser than Baldwin at the film's core would be unable to encourage us forward.
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