Not P but Baldwin

[Allan Balliett]

Not as far as I know.

It was on my list of 'things-to-see' when I last went to NYC but,
unfortunately, it closed a long run the night before I got there.

-Allan in WV who also wants to see that movie about Alice Waters' lover

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 2:09 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Was it not shown in the movie theaters in West Virginia?
>
> The movie is great when Baldwin is on the screen. When you hear him speak
> it's even better. That man was a born rhetor, and his surprise when he gets
> a standing ovation in Cambridge is hard to believe. (Buckley, the poor sod,
> looks lost. (And he is, has, of course.))
>
> If you don't know his The Devil Finds Work go and read it. (What he says
> about his teacher is heartbreaking; I think it's quoted in the movie.) The
> man had an uncanny way with antinomy, dichotomy, antithesis – no wonder.
>
> That said, I think OJ – Made in America is a far better film, not only
> regarding racism at the basis of your society.
>
> 2017-06-25 3:14 GMT+02:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>
>> 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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