James Baldwin filmed in Paris

 

What an incredible example of challenging the 'white gaze'!! 

"I think you think I'm an exotic surviver..." James Baldwin told this filmmaker completely misunderstanding him. 

Incredible to see him in Barbès as well, talking to Algerian men in cafés I used to haunt when living in the neighbourhood up until 3 years ago,  where my father might have been hanging out with these men a decade before he married my mother, who left Algiers for Paris to live with him...

'Meeting The Man' - James Baldwin filmed in Paris (1970)

Directed by Terence Dixon United Kingdom, France, 1970

A documentary portrait of James Baldwin, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American literature, Black culture and political thought, filmed in Paris. The iconic writer is captured in many symbolic locations in the city, where he was living at the time, including the Place de la Bastille.

Mubi wrote: "Tense, combative, discursive: A meeting with James Baldwin doesn’t quite go according to plan for a group of presumptuous white filmmakers in this rarely seen, Paris-set short film. An illuminating snapshot of Baldwin’s intellectual worldview that bristles with friction and ideas."