Journey to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’
During a discussion Raoul Peck had with Richard Plepler, president of HBO at the time, the filmmaker elaborated what his next project would be.
“I told him I needed peace, time and maybe resources to pay researchers, but I wasn’t sure what the next step was,” Peck said during a discussion with Tabitha Jackson at Sundance Film Festival online this week. “He basically told me that I could have all three.”
That’s how Peck started his new project, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a four-part miniseries.
For more than a year, Peck explored different ideas surrounding the beginning of slavery in the United States to find the right narrative of what he wanted to say.
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I was the only and main researcher when the project started in the summer 2017, with Peck's film production company Velvet Film, in Paris.
Raoul wanted to work around the book by Sven Lindqvist, 'Exterminate All The Brutes', on the roots that led to the worst genocides in Europe.
I researched all the sources mentioned in the book, which basically compares the Nazzi's expansion plans to Britain and France's colonial expansion in Africa and Asia.
After six months collecting, books, reading nots, visual references and interviews with historians, I came across the work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in America, about the history of Indigenous people on the continent and the first massive genocides that happened in the Caribbean and in North America, from the 1500s to the early 1920s.
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“I knew in terms of scope, I needed to tell the bigger story and start earlier, and tell it from the original white-supremist position,” Peck explained. “We tend to see our current situation as the domination of one people over others. But when did the concept of white supremacy begin?”
The concept started in Europe, and Europeans invaded America, Peck said. “That’s what we call ‘settler colonisation’ in scholarly terms,” he said. “It’s not about a country that was basically empty and there were a few ‘savages,’ but that’s how the European story is being told.”
The story, Peck said, is being blurred by the notion that violence was committed equally by the colonised and the coloniser. “But people do not hand over their land, their resources, their children and their futures without a fight,” he said. “And that fight is always met with violence.”
The story is also about land, and who oversaw and cultivated it, Peck said. “It’s about who fished its waters, maintained its wildlife and who invaded and stole it,” he said. “It’s about how the land became a commodity, real estate, and broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.”
In the same way Baldwin’s narrative served as a libretto for “I Am Not Your Negro,” the writings of three authors served as the basis for the new project:
-The first was as I previously mentioned Sven Lindqvist’s book, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” which also provided the title of Peck’s miniseries.
A friend, who is a publisher, gave Peck the book. “The whole story I was trying to tell all these years was right there,” Peck said. The book examines slavery in Europe, Africa and the United States, and also looks at Germany and the Holocaust, he said.
-The second book was “Silencing of the Past: Power and the Production of History” by Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
“It’s the perfect link,” Peck said at Sundance. “It gives the principal and theoretical construct that links all three, and the role that Haiti laid, not only in the wealth of Europe and France, in particular, but also in the creation of the U.S. Suddenly I have the bigger picture that made sense to me.”
Adding Trouillot’s book also brought Peck back to his own story of Haiti, where he was born and served as the ministry of culture.
- The third element came from the writings of Native American activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
“I knew I had to be sure of what I was going to say, and I had to find a Native American scholar who knew exactly what they were talking about,” he said. “Roxanne, who is, herself, of mixed Native American origin and Irish-Scottish on the other side, had written something that was the equivalent to Howard Zinn's history of America. Her books opened another big chunk of the story.”
With these books in hand, Peck was faced with the task of creating a comprehensive story.
“I had to make sure to go through and take everything I could that felt vibrant, and make sure they are in sync with what they are telling me,” he said. “I put chunks of stories and sentences on the wall, not in a random way. I tried to follow the chronology of the books and some sort of dramatic chronology. And the most difficult thing was not to panic.”
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Raoul Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” is on HBO in the spring.
Trailer:
For information and further reading, visit HBO's website here:
https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes
For more details see also this video:
The Big Conversation: The Past in the Present
On January 29, 2021, at The Big Conversation: The Past Is Present, activist and filmmaker Raoul Peck joined Festival director Tabitha Jackson for a discussion about white supremacy, history, creative expression, and his personal journey from the Academy Award–nominated I Am Not Your Negro to his upcoming work Exterminate All the Brutes. The 2021 Sundance Film Festival continues through Wednesday, February 3.
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