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Interview with filmmaker Raoul Peck:
Oscar contender I Am Not Your Negro
finds little has changed for black America
Filmmaker Raoul Peck puts writer and social critic James Baldwin back into the frame.
Stephanie Bunbury
![Filmmaker Raoul Peck loved films as a child, but ''suddenly, in that world you thought you were part of, [you realise] ...](https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/y/7/q/t/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gy7qzu.png/1504586502584.jpg)
Four out of the five contenders for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars were made by black directors. That was fortuitous, given the controversy raging about lack of diversity in Hollywood, but it wasn't planned.
"It was just pure chance," says Raoul Peck, whose astonishing film I Am Not Your Negro was among the five. "The Oscars are about films that have been made already, when the big problem is who decides which films are made, who gets green lit. Four out of five: that is just bizarre. But it's not substantial. It's not structural. Nobody has done anything to make that happen." Nothing, in other words, has really changed.
The question of whether anything much has changed runs like fuel through I Am Not Your Negro, which is both inspired by and pays tribute to the writer, political activist and public intellectual James Baldwin. Baldwin's novels Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and The Fire Next Time (1963) were two of the great literary companions to the civil rights movement of the '60s; an intervening novel Giovanni's Room (1956) is a classic of gay literature. Baldwin, who died in 1987, was witty, incisive, angry, articulate and cool; to see him demolish a conservative opponent on Dick Cavett's chat show is to be reminded of a time when people talked seriously about things that mattered on prime-time entertainment shows. In that respect, things probably have changed.
What remains very much the same is the police violence against African-Americans castigated by Baldwin in his chat-show answers, his galvanising speeches to student bodies and in his writings. In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck alternates Baldwin's own with the voice of actor Samuel L. Jackson performing his words to underscore footage of recent Ferguson and #blacklivesmatter demonstrations, making inescapable the parallels between then and now.
"That is the crazy part of it," says Peck. "He wrote those things 50 years ago and they're even stronger today. Because you know what he says? 'You cannot hide the truth any more'."
Raoul Peck was born in Haiti in 1953. After his father had been imprisoned by the Duvalier dictatorship, his family moved to the Congo. He has strong memories of military roadblocks both in Port-au-Prince – "I remember being in my pyjamas in the back of the car, and my mother driving through the city trying to find where my father was" – and in Congo, where there were frequent rebellions followed by army crackdowns.
"It was always about how does the conversation go?" he told National Public Radio in the US last year. "You need to give the right answers to the questions, and depending on the answer you gave, you know, you could be arrested as well."
His early travels, he believes, gave him his perspective on the world. "I would not believe the propaganda they were feeding me in one country because I knew the reality in another. I'd see an American politician talking about democracy when in my country they were supporting the worst dictatorship ever. So you start to ask questions."
He now lives in France; his previous films include a documentary about his home country's 2010 earthquake, Fatal Assistance, and two features, Lumumba and Sometimes in April, about the Rwandan genocide. Along with the Baldwin film, which has been an ongoing project over 10 years, he recently finished The Young Karl Marx, a dramatic interpretation of Marx's life and thinking.
"I was always privileged because I came to cinema though politics, through my civil engagements," he says. "I never do any movie because I have some extraordinary idea. Cinema was always something that had to do with my life. Marx and Baldwin: they are both people who shaped me, so to engage in projects related to their work is like giving back to a younger generation something essential that changed my life. I never saw myself as a film-maker who wants to tell stories."
The young Raoul Peck was a big reader and avid film fan, but he was always aware that the stories he was imbibing were not about him. "When you are not coming from, let's say, the very Eurocentric way of seeing the world," he says, "you look to film, books or sometimes music and suddenly, in that world you thought you were part of, [you realise] you are just a footnote. It's not your story."
And if he wasn't the footnote, he was the enemy. "Like Baldwin says in the film, he was rooting for Gary Cooper until he realised that Gary Cooper was killing the Indians and the Indians were him. And that is what most people in the Third World grew up with. We always had to deconstruct what they were showing us."
Reading Baldwin, he felt he was at last seeing his own world and being seen in it. He still has his teenage collection of Baldwin books; they are, he told Toronto's Globe and Mail, underlined almost from beginning to end. Everything spoke to him.
For I Am Not Your Negro, he had access to a vast amount of material in Baldwin's estate, including unpublished manuscripts. Among them he found Remember this House, a recollection of his political comrades Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Assassinated within five years of each other, they all died before they were 40. Baldwin had told his literary agent in 1979 that he planned to write a book about them in which their lives "would bang against and reveal each other as they did in life", but he had only written 30 pages of it when he died.
"Having this document in my hands, for me as a filmmaker, it was like having an incredible mystery book," Peck told Globe and Mail. "This book needed to be not finished, but found. So my theory was that he wrote it already, and my job was to find it through his body of work." I Am Not Your Negro is so forceful not least because there are no qualifying interviews with friends, family members or observers about its subject; we just hear Baldwin speaking to us directly, either through his writings or from the archives.
Once a literary celebrity, Baldwin's star had waned by the time he died. Sidelined politically by the rise of Black Power militants such as Eldridge Cleaver (for whom Baldwin's frank homosexuality was an issue), he was no longer a go-to television commentator. Gradually, his novels disappeared from bookstores and academic syllabuses. For Raoul Peck, however, he was a constant presence, his mentor when times were tough.
"There is a reason why we are pushing him out," says Peck. "My obligation was to put him back, because I was seeing people even quoting him now without saying it's him." Giving a voice to black narratives, he says, is as urgent as ever. "And he did it not only from the point of view of a black man or a black gay man, but from a very humanistic point of view.
"Because what he writes is not just for black people. It is even more important for white people, because he teaches them this is your history, you need to own this history. You can't pretend to live in a world like this and say you are innocent. Walls were made in your name, discrimination was made in your name. The price of comfort and security is very heavy."
I Am Not Your Negro opens on September 14 and screens at ACMI until November 1.
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