Originally published April 7, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
I Am Not Your Negro, 2016.
Directed by Raoul Peck.
Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.
SYNOPSIS:
Director Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished – a radical narration about race in America, using the writer’s original words. He draws upon James Baldwin’s notes on the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to explore and bring a fresh and radical perspective to the current racial narrative in America.
Black America and the plights of what it is to be black in modern America was a little more than a mere dot, an afterthought-at least for me-as part of historical education whilst at school in the UK. Only Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and on the rare occasion, Malcolm X were we made aware of. With this, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s remarkable, vital study of writer James Baldwin’s musings in his unfinished novel “Remember This House” resembles something of immense urgency. Along with Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, it exists as a tool for education and one can only hope it is to be implemented as part of curriculum.
Baldwin’s writing, still tragic and of such righteous anger 50 years on maintains its vitality and director Peck pairs grandiose passages with montages of those murdered in cold blood by police in the supposed land of the free. Cutting from Rodney King’s beating to Michael Brown, to Trayvon Martin, to Freddie Gray, to Kimani Gray, to Alton Sterling, to Philado Castle, to Eric Garner, to Oscar Grant, the list goes on and on and Peck places emphasis on the baffling normality of these occurrences to a point when it’s almost unremarkable as to the frequency of these events.
Peck avoids the cliché of documentary filmmaking placating talking heads for archival clips of Baldwin on the televised debate “Has The American Dream Been Achieved At The Expense of the American Negro,” whilst leaning heavily on his appearances on radio shows and talk shows as a “token negro.”
And that word is repeated over and over, each use acting as a punch to the gut. Baldwin’s realisation as a child that when looking in the mirror, people like him resembled less the white heroes of the Western but those being booed, those the audience hoped to lose is truly tragic.
Samuel L. Jackson’s narration is more than simply a narration. His titular wit, that rolling smoothness so often associated with him is entirely absent. His reading of Baldwin’s writing are of such warmth and underlying sadness, it’s not simply Jackson giving a reading, it’s Jackson giving a mature, moving performance.
Over time, one would hope that times would change, that the plight of the black man would be something archaic, an ugly, gross stain on American history. It hasn’t and with the current trajectory it’s on, it may take another 50 years. Which makes Baldwin’s writing all the more immense in it’s importance. I Am Not Your Negro is a powerhouse documentary that bulldozes preconceived conceptions of American culture and exists as maybe the finest retelling of the American civil rights movement in recent memory.
There is a certain essay like manner to Peck’s study and it may lack the beating anger of The 13th, but it is never short of riveting.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Thomas Harris
