Not P but Baldwin

[David Morris]

Yes!  Watch it!
On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 7:26 PM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It's been a long wait but the film ("I am Not Your Negro")  about James
> Baldwin's unfinished final book has gone to DVD and streaming. You can
> stream it at both iTunes and Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime, you can
> stream it for free! Here
> <https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro/dp/B01N6Q00JM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498347244&sr=8-1&keywords=i+am+not+your+negro>
>
> I've watched about a third of it (will watch the rest this evening) and
> have to admit that, yes, it is a life changing film. It also has reminded
> me how careless I have been to not think of James Baldwin for all these
> decades.
>
> -Allan in Shepherdstown, WV where we are so progressive we've given Blacks
> two sides of town
>
> *I Am Not Your Negro” is a thrilling introduction to his work, a remedial
>> course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial politics — a
>> concise, roughly 90-minute movie with the scope and impact of a 10-hour
>> mini-series or a literary doorstop. It is not an easy or a consoling movie,
>> but it is the opposite of bitter or despairing. “I can’t be a pessimist
>> because I’m alive,” Baldwin said. “I’m forced to be an optimist.” AO Scott*
>
>
> AO Scott's Review is at http://bit.ly/legacyNword (or below)
>
>  A few weeks ago, in reaction to something we had written about blackness
> and whiteness in recent movies, my colleague Manohla Dargis and I received
> a note from a reader. “Since when is everything about race?” he wanted to
> know. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
>
> A flippant — though by no means inaccurate — answer would have been 1619.
> But a more constructive response might have been to recommend Raoul Peck’s
> life-altering new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” Let me do so now, for
> that reader (if he’s still interested) and for everybody else, too.
> Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called
> “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer
> English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your
> mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist
> James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be
> hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater
> clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark
> lessons from the shadows of history.
>
> To call “I Am Not Your Negro” a movie about James Baldwin would be to
> understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration,
> an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous
> work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the
> Congolese anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject. The
> voice-over narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from
> Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the
> mid-1970s, when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book,
> never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm
> X and Martin Luther King Jr.
>
> Reflections on those men (all of whom Baldwin knew well) and their
> legacies are interspersed with passages from other books and essays,
> notably “The Devil Finds Work,” Baldwin’s 1976 meditation on race,
> Hollywood and the mythology of white innocence. His published and
> unpublished words — some of the most powerful and penetrating ever
> assembled on the tortured subject of American identity — accompany images
> from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own
> decidedly non-post-racial present.
>
>
> Baldwin could not have known about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, about
> the presidency of Barack Obama and the recrudescence of white nationalism
> in its wake, but in a sense he explained it all in advance. He understood
> the deep, contradictory patterns of our history, and articulated, with a
> passion and clarity that few others have matched, the psychological
> dimensions of racial conflict: the suppression of black humanity under
> slavery and Jim Crow and the insistence on it in African-American politics
> and art; the dialectic of guilt and rage, forgiveness and denial that
> distorts relations between black and white citizens in the North as well as
> the South; the lengths that white people will go to wash themselves clean
> of their complicity in oppression.
>
> Baldwin is a double character in Mr. Peck’s film. The elegance and gravity
> of his formal prose, and the gravelly authority of Mr. Jackson’s voice,
> stand in contrast to his quicksilver on-camera presence as a lecturer and
> television guest. In his skinny tie and narrow suit, an omnipresent
> cigarette between his fingers, he imports a touch of midcentury
> intellectual cool into our overheated, anti-intellectual media moment.
>
> A former child preacher, he remained a natural, if somewhat reluctant,
> performer — a master of the heavy sigh, the raised eyebrow and the
> rhetorical flourish. At one point, on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Baldwin
> tangles with Paul Weiss, a Yale philosophy professor who scolds him for
> dwelling so much on racial issues. The initial spectacle of mediocrity
> condescending to genius is painful, but the subsequent triumph of
> self-taught brilliance over credentialed ignorance is thrilling to witness.
>
> In that exchange, as in a speech for an audience of British university
> students, you are aware of Baldwin’s profound weariness. He must explain
> himself — and also his country — again and again, with what must have been
> sorely tested patience. When the students erupt in a standing ovation at
> the end of his remarks, Baldwin looks surprised, even flustered. You
> glimpse an aspect of his personality that was often evident in his writing:
> the vulnerable, bright, ambitious man thrust into a public role that was
> not always comfortable.
>
> “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” he wrote early in his
> career, in the introductory note to his first collection of essays, “Notes
> of a Native Son.” The disarming, intimate candor of that statement
> characterized much of what would follow, as would a reckoning with the
> difficulties of living up to such apparently straightforward aspirations.
> Without sliding into confessional bathos, his voice was always personal and
> frank, creating in the reader a feeling of complicity, of shared knowledge
> and knowing humor.
>
> “I Am Not Your Negro” reproduces and redoubles this effect. It doesn’t
> just make you aware of Baldwin, or hold him up as a figure to be admired
> from a distance. You feel entirely in his presence, hanging on his every
> word, following the implications of his ideas as they travel from his
> experience to yours. At the end of the movie, you are convinced that you
> know him. And, more important, that he knows you. To read Baldwin is to be
> read by him, to feel the glow of his affection, the sting of his scorn, the
> weight of his disappointment, the gift of his trust.
>
> Recounting his visits to the South, where he reported on the civil rights
> movement and the murderous white response to it, Baldwin modestly described
> himself as a witness, a watchful presence on the sidelines of tragedy and
> heroism, an outsider by virtue of his Northern origins, his sexuality and
> his alienation from the Christianity of his childhood. But he was also a
> prophet, able to see the truths revealed by the contingent, complicated
> actions of ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. This is not to
> say that he transcended the struggle or detached himself from it. On the
> contrary, he demonstrated that writing well and thinking clearly are
> manifestations of commitment, and that irony, skepticism and a ruthless
> critical spirit are necessary tools for effective moral and political
> action.
>
> “I Am Not Your Negro” is a thrilling introduction to his work, a remedial
> course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial politics — a
> concise, roughly 90-minute movie with the scope and impact of a 10-hour
> mini-series or a literary doorstop. It is not an easy or a consoling movie,
> but it is the opposite of bitter or despairing. “I can’t be a pessimist
> because I’m alive,” Baldwin said. “I’m forced to be an optimist.”
>
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