The film, inspired by an unfinished book, is now becoming a BOOK!
I cannot say enough how immensely proud I am to have been and be again working with such a great filmmaker, with such profound inspirations.
About the English edition:
I Am Not Your Negro
A COMPANION EDITION TO THE DOCUMENTARY FILM DIRECTED BY RAOUL PECK
By JAMES BALDWIN and RAOUL PECK
Part of Vintage International
Category: 20th Century U.S. History | Biography & Memoir
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ABOUT I AM NOT YOUR
NEGRO
National Bestseller
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary
To compose his stunning
documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul
Peck mined James Baldwin’s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages
from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as
incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts
together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his
final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated
friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal
notes for the project have never been published before. Peck’s film uses them
to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s private words with his public
statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America.
This edition contains more
than 40 black-and-white images from the film.
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About the French version:
| I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO | ||
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| James BALDWIN Raoul PECK Traduit par Pierre FURLAN | ||
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| « Ce que les Blancs doivent faire, c'est essayer de trouver au fond d'eux-mêmes pourquoi, tout d'abord, il leur a été nécessaire d'avoir un "nègre", parce que je ne suis pas un "nègre". Je ne suis pas un nègre, je suis un homme. Mais si vous pensez que je suis un nègre, ça veut dire qu'il vous en faut un. » James Baldwin. Dans ses dernières années, le grand écrivain américain James Baldwin a commencé la rédaction d'un livre sur l'Amérique à partir des portraits de ses trois amis assassinés, figures de la lutte pour les droits civiques : Medgar Evers, Malcolm X et Martin Luther King Jr. Partant de ce livre inachevé, Raoul Peck a reconstitué la pensée de Baldwin en s'aidant des notes prises par l'écrivain, ses discours et ses lettres. Il en a fait un documentaire – salué dans le monde entier et sélectionné aux Oscars – aujourd'hui devenu un livre, formidable introduction à l'oeuvre de James Baldwin. Un voyage kaléidoscopique qui révèle sa vision tragique, profonde et pleine d'humanité de l'histoire des Noirs aux États-Unis et de l'aveuglement de l'Occident. « Attention, chef-d'oeuvre ! »La Croix (au sujet du film documentaire I Am Not Your Negro) | ||
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Film presentations in The
Guardian:
I Am Not Your Negro
review – James Baldwin's words weave film of immense power
5/5stars
Raoul Peck’s stunning
look at the civil rights era ends up as the writer’s presumptive autobiography,
but it gets there via an unexpected route
Raoul
Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro has a “written by James Baldwin” credit
in its opening sequence. At first this seems like a polite tip of the hat to
the author, essayist and public intellectual who died nearly 30 years ago. Soon
we realize this is an accurate statement of fact. Each line of the narration
that permeates the film is taken directly from one of Baldwin’s texts or
letters. His words dominate the archival clips as well.
It in no
way diminishes Peck’s work as a film-maker to suggest that Baldwin’s ideas and
personality are the author of this movie. It is a striking work of
storytelling. By assembling the scattered images and historical clips suggested
by Baldwin’s writing, I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic séance, and one of the
best movies about the civil rights era ever made.
Eschewing
talking head interviews, Peck’s documentary ends up as Baldwin’s presumptive
autobiography, but it gets there via an unexpected route. During the final
years of his life, Baldwin was researching a book he planned to call Remember
This House. It would profile three assassinated civil rights leaders: Medgar
Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He intended it to be a personal work,
as he knew each of these men, and telling their stories would likely be a
springboard to tell his own story at a more advanced age.
Beginning
with Baldwin’s pitch to his agent, we link to touch points with the slain men,
hopping through time, juxtaposing Baldwin’s personal essays with his public
statements. (As with last year’s wonderful Best of Enemies,
I Am Not Your Negro excerpts from the Dick Cavett show. I can only imagine a
documentary about him is headed our way soon.) The entirety of Baldwin’s
written and on-camera oeuvre eventually mixes down to a roux, and while Peck
uses the occasional chapter break, the effect is more of a Chris Marker-like
cine-essay than typical Frontline-like reporter’s documentary. (Though they
both focus on the topic of race in America, I Am Not Your Negro is quite the
opposite of ESPN’s justly celebrated OJ: Made In
America.)
Peck
occasionally takes advantage of some of Baldwin’s more prophetic passages to
flash-forward through time. Images from Ferguson, the Obama inauguration and
the dross of daytime TV aren’t there so much to say “see, he was right?” as to
make us realize the timelessness of his greater arguments. Baldwin did much of
his best writing about America while living as an expatriate, and this
outsider’s perspective (shared by Peck, who is from Haiti) brings with it a
tremendous amount of clarity. I Am Not Your Negro’s specifics are only
intermittent, like reporting on different reactions between white and black
audiences during Sidney Poitier films. By and large this film concerns itself
with the greater philosophy of why groups in power behave the way they do. This
might be the only movie about race relations I’ve ever seen that adequately
explains – with sympathy – the root causes of a complacent
white American mindset. And it took a black writer and director to do it.
The
narration is done by Samuel L Jackson, and it’s one of the best things he’s
done in years. No offense to the many boldfaced names who swoop into a
recording booth to lend their voice and celebrity to a well meaning
issue-oriented documentary, but what Jackson does here is give a performance.
He doesn’t exactly mimic Baldwin, who we see in many of the archival clips, but
he does much more than read words on the page. (I didn’t even realize it was
him until the closing credits.) We live at a time when almost every notable
person from the 20th century has a documentary about them streaming somewhere.
That’s all well and good if they are about someone whose work you fancy. I Am
Not Your Negro isn’t a special interest title, it is a film.
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I Am Not Your Negro
review – astonishing portrait of James Baldwin's civil rights fight
4/5stars
Raoul Peck dramatises the
author’s memoir of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers, in this
vivid and vital documentary
Raoul
Peck’s outstanding, Oscar-nominated
documentary is about the African American activist and author
James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next
Time. Peck dramatises Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This
House, his personal memoir of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and civil rights
activist Medgar Evers, murdered by a
segregationist in 1963. Baldwin re-emerges as a devastatingly
eloquent speaker and public intellectual; a figure who deserves his place
alongside Edward Said, Frantz Fanon or Gore Vidal.
Peck puts
Samuel L Jackson’s steely narration of Baldwin’s words up against a punchy
montage of footage from the Jim Crow to the Ferguson eras, and a fierce
soundtrack. (It’s incidentally a great use of Buddy Guy’s Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues, which never
sounded so angry or political.) There is a marvellous clip of Baldwin speaking
at the Cambridge Union Society, and another on the Dick Cavett Show – the host
looking sick with nerves, perhaps because he was about to bring on a
conservative intellectual for balance, whom Baldwin would politely trounce.
Baldwin has
a compelling analysis of a traumatised “mirror stage” of culture that black
people went through in 20th-century America. As kids, they would cheer and
identify with the white heroes and heroines of Hollywood culture; then they
would see themselves in the mirror and realise they were different from the
white stars, and in fact more resembled the baddies and “Indians” they’d been
booing.
The film
shows Baldwin refusing to be drawn into the violence/non-violence difference of
opinion between King and Malcolm X that mainstream commentators leaped on, and
steadily maintaining his own critique – although I feel that Peck’s
juxtaposition of Doris Day’s mooning and crooning with a lynch victim is a
flourish that approximates Baldwin’s anger but not his elegance. There is a
compelling section on Baldwin’s discussion of dramatist Lorraine Hansberry,
author of A Raisin in the Sun. It is vivid, nutritious film-making.
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