I Am Not Your Negro

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I took in an early matinee showing of I Am Not Your Negro this morning, filmmaker Raoul Peck's presentation of the thought of James Baldwin. 

Content aside, it's a masterpiece the intensity of which drew me in, as a viewer, in a way which I don't remember experiencing since the much and well-deservedly praised Whiplash. For me, however, the nearest point of cinematic comparison is 2003's American Splendor. Neither film can be neatly categorized, and both, while not entirely new in style, present a model which we can only hope other filmmakers will imitate. American Splendor used actors and the real people they portrayed, along with elements of cartooning, to present something (entirely moving) between a biography and an autobiography of Harvey Pekar. I Am Not Your Negro is only nominally a documentary; in fact, it's an essay in film form.

That it comes off as a unified and incisive essay on race relations in these United States is Raoul Peck's personal triumph, since he edited it together from a number of Baldwin's published works, notes towards a never-completed book, and footage of James Baldwin in debate, lectures, and even an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. That last, in particular, made me wonder how anyone could not fall in love with Baldwin's mind. Completely off the cuff, in rejoinder to a white academic, he improvises a speech marked by symmetry and repetition of key phrases, and which crescendoes to a shattering climax. It's a feat of rhetorical jazz which I've rarely had the privilege to encounter.

James Baldwin wanted to use Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to tell the story of the Negro in America (and I wish I could figure out a way to mention his brilliant analysis of the role of Sidney Poitier in 1960s American cinema), but his true central thesis emerges most clearly in the film's final moments. To Baldwin, the Negro is a concept constructed by whites who sought to deny the reality that America is not composed of black and white people, but of one people with a literally shared and commingled blood. He posited that the challenge for whites, and implicitly for blacks as well, is to recognize that truth, that we are not other to one another, but rather are one. As Baldwin says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced."