Not P but Baldwin

[rich]

I guess it didn't help Baldwin like Bayard Rustin being queer. Homophobia
being a well known quantity in southern black churches as well as elements
in the civil rights movement.
These voices were muted. I had never heard of Rustin until recently. Yes
Baldwin lived in exile but its unfortunate these other voices (including
many women) were pushed to the side for so long

rich

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 6:54 AM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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