In his 14th full-length film, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born director Raoul Peck achieved perfection with a masterful blending of a screenplay by writer and activist James Baldwin, footage old and new, and an eclectic soundtrack that underscores his film’s ideas and contentions. As a cinematic essay, it is an intellectual and emotional argument so persuasive, it just might alter your frame of reference for U.S. history.
I Am Not Your Negro is based upon an unfinished memoir by Baldwin (1924-1987). Eight years before his death, he set out to chronicle his relationships with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Unfortunately for us, he put his manuscript aside after only 30 pages.
In his memoir and now in this film, Baldwin states, “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”
Few people were better qualified to tell this story than Baldwin. Born and raised in the Harlem ghetto, his paternal grandmother was a former slave. As an adult, his friends and acquaintances included Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, and the three aforementioned civil rights leaders.
Like Baldwin’s finest completed essays – such as Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time – I Am Not Your Negro is a dense, meandering combination of autobiography, American history, and prophetic exhortation. In bringing Baldwin’s word to life – voiced by an uncharacteristically subdued Samuel L. Jackson – director Raoul Peck emulates his subject in using movies as a window into American culture and history. Digging deeply into cinematic vaults, Peck deploys clips from a 1927 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and several “cowboy and Indian” flicks to expose our nation’s foundation of enslavement and genocide. More subtly, Baldwin speaks of the wide-eyed stuttering cowards and Stepin Fetchits who deprived him of any onscreen African-Americans with whom he could identify. Baldwin contends that if there had ever been a black character resembling a vengeful, gun-toting John Wayne, such a figure would’ve been seen as a dangerous maniac.
I Am Not Your Negro benefits from the superb editing of Alexandra Strauss, interweaving movies, interviews, and 20th Century footage of the Civil Rights Movement and Baldwin’s Harlem. Just as importantly, Peck and Strauss elevate I Am Not Your Negro to a pinnacle of power and timeliness, mixing in present-day images of violence in Ferguson with photos of children slain by police in the past decade.
At my first viewing of Peck’s film, these images and Baldwin’s words left me speechless and in tears by the time Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry”played over the end credits. Baldwin preaches truth about an America where simplicity and immaturity (read: willful ignorance and historical denial) are esteemed as virtues. The inevitable outcome is an “emotional poverty so bottomless” and existences “so empty, so tame, so ugly.” Peck pulls no punches in showing us how far we have yet to go, to achieve MLK’s dream.
– Andrew Spitznas, chief writer/editor at Secular Cinephile
- Directed by: Raoul Peck
- Produced by:
- Written by: James Baldwin Raoul Peck
- Music by: Alexei Aigui
- Cinematography by: Henry Adebonojo Bill Ross IV Turner Ross
- Editing by: Alexandra Strauss
- Release Date: 2016
- Running Time: 93 min
- Language: English
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