“He Gave Me the Words”: an Interview with Raoul Peck
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INTERVIEW “He Gave Me the Words”: An Interview with Raoul Peck Leah Mirakhor Yale University Abstract I Am Not Your Negro (2016) takes its direction from the notes for a book enti- tled “Remember this House” that James Baldwin left unfinished, a book about his three friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.— their murders, and their intertwining legacies. The film examines the prophetic shadow Baldwin’s work casts on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American politics and culture. Peck compiles archival material from Baldwin’s interviews on The Dick Cavett Show, his 1965 Cambridge lecture, and a series of banal images indexing the American dream. Juxtaposed against this mythology is footage of Dorothy Counts walking to school, the assassination of black leaders and activists, KKK rallies, and the different formations of the contemporary carceral state. Our conversation examines Peck’s role as a filmmaker and his relationship with the Baldwin estate. Additionally, we discussed a series of aesthetic choices he fought to include in the film’s final cut, directing Samuel L. Jackson as the voice for the film, the similarities and shifts he wanted to document in American culture since the 1960s, and some of the criticism he has received for not emphasizing more Baldwin’s sexuality. Keywords: James Baldwin, Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, race, film, America, The Devil Finds Work, “Remember this House,” violence, sexuality, Patrice Lumumba, film I Am Not Your Negro (2016) is a work that has been a lifetime in the making for Raoul Peck. Before he met James Baldwin’s younger sister, Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, a decade ago at her home in Washington D.C. and expressed his desire to make a film about him, Peck had what he describes as an intimate rela- tionship with Baldwin. As a teenager transplanted to Brooklyn during the 1960s, Peck began reading Baldwin as a way to understand the world he occupied—his peripatetic life between Haiti, Congo, France, and Germany, growing up during James Baldwin Review, Volume 3, 2017 © The Authors. Published by Manchester University Press and The University of Manchester Library http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/JBR.3.13 This is an Open Access article published under the conditions of theDownloaded Creative Commons from manchesterhive.com Attribution- at 09/29/2021 09:05:14AM NonCommercial-NoDerivitives licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 via free access 204 James Baldwin Review 3 the Civil Rights movement, and as a Haitian immigrant well-versed in the history of slavery, colonialism, and occupation. Baldwin provided Peck with a theoretical, moral, and aesthetic underpinning to the world around him. He “gave me,” Peck has said “a voice, gave me the words, gave me the rhetoric … all I knew or had learned through instinct or through experience, Baldwin gave a name to and a shape.”1 Subsequently, his work as a filmmaker has been shaped by a responsibility to tell stories that intervene into dominant narratives that elide the histories of Third World resistances. His previous films, such as Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990), Lumumba (2000), Sometimes in April (2005), and Fatal Assistance (2013), engage directly with political conflicts, economic strife, racial terror, and postco- lonial shifts in contexts such as the Rwandan genocide, the 1960s Congo crisis, and the devastation wrought by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Peck served as Minister of Culture from 1996 to 1997 in the Haitian government during the one-year term of Prime Minister Rosny Smarth. In addition to his personal and political journey as a filmmaker, and his debt to Baldwin’s work in his thinking, I Am Not Your Negro is also a testament to Peck’s close relationship with Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart. Peck credits Karefa-Smart’s generosity and support as the most significant part of the decade-long process of turning the words of James Baldwin into an Oscar-nominated film. After their initial encounter, Peck received unprecedented access to the estate and has devel- oped a deep bond with and loyalty to Karefa-Smart, whom he identifies as “a soul mate, a friend, and above all an ally with whom the conversation quickly became real, direct, sincere.”2 About halfway through the process, Karefa-Smart gave Peck a packet contain- ing Baldwin’s unfinished book project titled “Remember this House,” centering on the intertwined lives of his three friends, murdered within a five-year span of one another: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. This unfin- ished book provided the narrative direction for the film which spans the work and life of James Baldwin, drawing most notably from The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). Although Peck had access to all of Baldwin’s archives, he eschewed drawing heavily from Baldwin’s private letters, respecting the family’s wish to keep Baldwin’s private life private. Although Peck did not draw much from personal correspondence, he noted in our conversation that the letters were important in shaping what he understood about Baldwin’s writing process, his life, and how he negotiated his status as a writer and man. Peck compiles archival material from Baldwin’s interviews on The Dick Cavett Show, his 1965 Cambridge lecture, as well as a series of banal happy images indexing the American dream. Juxtaposed against this mythology is footage of Dorothy Counts walking to school, the assassination of black leaders and activ- ists, KKK rallies, and the different formations of the contemporary carceral state. Alongside Baldwin’s own voice from recorded interviews and lectures, Samuel L. Jackson narrates Baldwin’s letters and excerpts from his work, creating a subdued Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 09:05:14AM via free access “He Gave Me the Words” 205 but emotive and unsettling tone throughout the film. Baldwin’s words reverber- ate prophetically against the present moment of militarized state violence, racial capital, and the limits of the American dream. Our two-hour-long conversation took place in Los Angeles on 10 December 2016 while Peck was there to promote a series of advance screenings of I Am Not Your Negro. I had the opportunity to see the film on two occasions with enrap- tured audiences: once at the International Documentary Screening Series, and again at the Film Independent Screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he appeared with Samuel L. Jackson. We continued our conversation via email over the following months. Peck has appeared internationally for screen- ings, and as a recent recipient of a Ford Foundation grant is garnering support to build curricula and outreach programs around Baldwin’s work in under-served communities. Peck’s confidence about the film’s uncompromising look at Baldwin’s words against the backdrop of America in the last fifty years is built around a journey he has defined as “respecting at all times and preserving scrupulously the spirit, the philosophy, the pugnacity, the insight, the humor, the poetry, and the soul of the long-gone author.”3 It is undeniable that a lifetime with Baldwin’s work has guided Peck’s own experience and created a lasting intimacy to which he has wanted to remain true. “I hope,” Peck recounts movingly, “I have not betrayed a man who has accompanied me from very early on, every day of my life, as a brother, father, mentor, accomplice, consoler, comrade-in-arms—an eternal witness of my own wanderings.”4 Interview with Raoul Peck, 10 December 2016 LM: How did your previous films prepare you for making I Am Not Your Negro? RP: My films are mainly based on complex political/historical material, not often covered by others. Because they are complex and rare, I make sure that they will survive the test of time. For example, Lumumba: La mort du prophète (1990), which I made nearly three decades ago, is still distributed, viewed and used by a general public, and scholars use it as well for their teaching, because there aren’t many films that take on these issues, and with that kind of approach. The film industry is permanently asking “simplicity” from us filmmakers. I try to deliver on my terms, without compromising substance and form. I never enhance a subject for dramatic purpose or convenience. I always choose not to invent any fictional plot or any fictional character to make the story conform to Hollywood dramatic standards. I will always prefer to find real historical characters or real events to build my story with, because I want them to be historically and politically accurate. I basi- cally have to wear three hats simultaneously: one as a “normal” filmmaker and artist confronted with the world at large, another as a “politically engaged” film- maker, with a specific combative agenda, and the third as a researcher of my own Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 09:05:14AM via free access 206 James Baldwin Review 3 national narrative and creator of an appropriate form for that narrative, for we were not part of the previous 100 years of world cinema. In the case of a film like Lumumba, for example, while having to make a film “sellable” to my Western financiers, I had to make sure that Congolese, Africans, and the diaspora at large would feel that this film is totally theirs, and make it unique, “immortal,” and real. And I wanted to “record for posterity” as much reality as possible on the screen. That’s why I always prefer to shoot where the actual story happened.