I Am Not Your Negro.
The title alone should give you a good idea about the mood of this extremely important and timely film. In other words, this is not Empire. This is not Scandal, or Star, or anything written by Tyler Perry.
This is about black life for real. Black life in America. Black life as written/experienced/interpreted by one of the most insightful and gifted writers of the 20th century, James Baldwin (1924-1987). Those who know need no further clarification, justification, or explanation. Those who don’t know need to pay attention because, as the saying goes, past is prologue.
Last week my wife and I went to an advance screening of the film, and it was one of the most satisfying theater experiences either one of us have had for quite some time. In an age when so much film entertainment is designed to make you go to sleep and forget – and for good reason – it’s almost too easy to forget how much a well-made film such as this can actually wake you up and shake you up at the same time.
I Am Not Your Negro is not only about what it means to be black in America but what blackness means to America. It is about how blackness – and the white sociocultural reaction to that blackness – continues to define the country in which we all live. It is about that perversely winding road that inexplicably meanders somehow from Kennedy and LBJ to Trump, through the fear and hatred (and repressed envy) of blackness and all that it represents, steering clear of the mirror that blackness holds in front of America’s cringing face.
It is race and racism that continues to shape the American landscape to a disproportionate degree. This is what Baldwin recognized more than a half century ago, that America was unwilling and/or unable to confront the truth of its obsessive self-hatred. And if Baldwin were alive today it’s hard to imagine how much he might be pained to witness the dreadful similiarities between now and then.
Then again, he might not be surprised at all. Past as prologue.
I Am Not Your Negro is already the recipient of a number of awards, including Winner Best Documentary from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; Winner Best Writing from the IDA Creative Recognition Award; Four Festival Audience Awards from Toronto, the Hamptons, Phildelphia, and Chicago; Two IDA Documentary Awards nominations, including best feature; Five Cinema Eye Honors Award Nominations, including Best Feature, and more.
From the synopsis:
“In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.
“Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.”
And from the film’s director, Raoul Peck:
“Medgar Evers died on June 12, 1963.
Malcolm X died on February 21, 1965.
And Martin Luther King Jr. died on April 4, 1968.
“In the course of five years, these three men were assassinated.
“These three men were black, but it is not the color of their skin that connected them. They fought on quite different battlefields. And quite differently. But in the end, all three were deemed dangerous. They were unveiling the haze of racial confusion.
“James Baldwin also saw through the system. And he loved these men. These assassinations broke him down.
“He was determined to expose the complex links and similarities among these three individuals. He was going to write about them. He was going to write his ultimate book, Remember This House, about them.
“I came upon these three men and their assassination much later. These three facts, these elements of history, from the starting point, the “evidence” you might say, form a deep and intimate personal reflection on my own political and cultural mythology, my own experiences of racism and intellectual violence.
“This is exactly the point where I really needed James Baldwin. Baldwin knew how to deconstruct stories. He helped me in connecting the story of a liberated slave in its own nation, Haiti, and the story of modern United States of America and its own painful and bloody legacy of slavery. I could connect the dots.”
“Today James Baldwin’s words still catch us unprepared and with the same violent truth. There will hardly ever be anything as precise, as just, as subtle, as more percussive, than the writing of this man. He understood all: politics, history, and most of all, the human factor.
“Baldwin survived the magicians, the gurus and the smooth talkers of his time, black or whites. His thoughts are as effective today as when they were first expressed. His analysis, his judgment, his verdicts are even more percussive today than when originally written.
“There has been an evolution, but within today’s context of extreme violence in America, especially against blacks, I Am Not Your Negro attempts to analyze and understand the deeper structural explanation. Peck again: “Despite progress, Martin seems quite lonely on the mountain top.”
“The cycles of violence and confusion condemned by Baldwin continue, trivialized and distorted by the influence of the press, television, Hollywood, and angry partisan politics.
“How do we break these cycles when we never touch the real issues themselves? How do we address the fundamental problems of America? Never before has Baldwin’s voice been so needed, so powerful, so radical, so visionary.”
I Am Not Your Negro will be opening in Detroit-area theaters beginning Feb. 10.
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