I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro Remixes James Baldwin With America’s Tradition Of On-screen Racism

... job to extract all those things from that photo.”. What about sound? Thanks to the connections of composer Alexei Aigui, who previously scored his 2009 drama Moloch Tropical, Peck was able to get a full orchestra at an affordable rate to match Baldwin’s dignified air with a proud, insistent classical score recorded at Russia’s Mosfilm Studio. He also needed to replace the narration that had been recorded to get the film off the ground to make it fly. Through the entertainment lawyer Nina L. Shaw (who had also connected him with the Baldwin estate initially), Peck was able to get the film to Samuel L. Jackson, who quickly agreed to lend his voice. Rather than ask Jackson to fulfill the traditional role of a narrator as a voice of authority, Peck asked the actor instead to approach the vocal work as he would any other dramatic ...

I Am Not Your Negro Gives The Race Problem Back To White American Film Critics

... have failed in art and literature,” said Benjamin Disraeli hundreds of years ago, and while many have since proven him false, there remains the belief that those who cannot create great works of art themselves are often destined to merely respond to and explain how greatness happens. One could argue that there remains, for example, a lack of interactive creativity between filmmaker and film writer, and similarly, a lack of interactive activism between the documentarian and his critic. Something about I Am Not Your Negro offers up a chance for critics to do more. But so far as I can see, they have failed to embrace this opportunity. White critics in particular have all managed to ignore the most pressing message of the film. They have refused to acknowledge, let alone answer, the question given back to white audiences. Who is the nigger in ...

I Am Not Your Negro' Gives James Baldwin's Words New Relevance

... each other, as in truth they did, and used their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they love so much who betrayed them, and for whom they gave their lives. YU: When filmmaker Raoul Peck first read Baldwin's letter, he knew he had the basis of his film. RAOUL PECK: Which was, how do I make sure that people today come back to Baldwin and the important words that he have written and this well-needed confrontation with reality today with words he wrote, you know, 40, 50 years ago. YU: The Haitian-born filmmaker has been a fan of Baldwin's work since he was a teenager. PECK: He helped me understand the world I was in. He helped me understand America. He helped me understand the place that I was given in this country. YU: And Peck wanted to do the same with "I Am Not Your Negro." In the documentary, he weaves together archival images and footage to illustrate the impact Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had, the ways in which they were different and more importantly the ways they were alike. But it is not just a history of the civil rights movement or its key players. The film also examines, as James ...

5 Movies, Including ‘i Am Not Your Negro’ And ‘the Space Between Us,’ Open The Week Of Feb. 3

... In this insightful and quietly unnerving first feature by Northwest filmmaker Ryan Graves, shot in Portland with local actors, an outwardly harmonious couple disintegrates when the husband reveals he hasn’t been honest with himself or his wife. It’s a penetrating look at a disintegrating marriage and the forces behind it. Full review. — Tom Keogh. ★½ “The Comedian” (R): Every scene in this film, which stars Robert De Niro as the washed-up title character, is dragged out — kicking and screaming — far longer than it needs to be. It’s fascinating, in a perverse way, to see this play out: Many of the scenes kick off with a funny, promising little spark (this movie does feature a talented and interesting cast), and then you watch as that spark sputters and dies, even though the dialogue keeps going, and the camera keeps rolling, and you start pondering what to have for dinner. Full review. — Moira Macdonald. ★ “The Space ...

I Am Not Your Negro’ Doc Gives Baldwin’s Voice New Life

... — James Baldwin. The film holds a mirror to the great myths Americans tell themselves to sanitize the country’s bloody history and is a haunting reminder of the lack of progress in the 30 years since Baldwin’s passing. Images of protest and segregation that were taken decades ago are presented along modern day images and the similarities are disturbing. Notorious footage of police beating, hosing, and sic’ing dogs on peaceful protestors is not a far stretch from the military gear and tanks of Ferguson. The photo of police standing on a Black woman’s neck reminds the viewer of Eric Garner pleading for breath. When a White woman told a reporter that God forgives murder and adultery, but is “angry” at integration, that statement rings with loud irony, considering the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching, or the current discourse on whether or not Islam is a “religion of hate”. The film provides context for the anger and concern some have towards a President-elect who has been more direct in criticism on a civil rights leaders like John Lewis than he’s been on the Klu Klux Klan or Russia. Like Baldwin, I Am Not Your ...

Director Raoul Peck Discusses His Oscar-nominated James Baldwin Documentary 'i Am Not Your Negro

... That's the power and the strength of Hollywood—it went all over the world. No matter where I was, I watched American movies. They were the dominant form of cinema. So, I could dip into my own mythology, into my own book of memories and understand exactly, frame by frame, what Baldwin said and thought about the impact of those images on our narrative, on our understanding of who we are. James Baldwin interviewed by Kenneth Clark in 1963. Reading Baldwin was not so much a discovery about what I already knew. But I learned that it was not only me thinking that. It was not only me feeling that, "Wow, John Wayne killing Indians, there is something wrong in that picture." Baldwin put it in a form that was philosophically and politically bold, but the feeling itself was already in me. I don't think I ...

Watch James Baldwin In A New Clip From 'i Am Not Your Negro

... after tweet after tweet punctuated with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. It has been almost 30 years since the writer and social critic died, and though his words have never lost their potency, they have, of late, increasingly found their way into the airwaves (and twitter-waves) of mainstream popular culture. As a new generation discovers his work and older generations seek to revisit it, the timing couldn't be more auspicious for director Raoul Peck’s new documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which uses Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript about the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. as a launchpad for a conversation about race in contemporary America. The documentary, which hits theaters Feb. 3, had a qualifying run in 2016 that made it eligible for an Academy Award nomination , which it received on Jan. 24. The category this year is rich with films that explore racism from different angles: Ava Du Vernay’s 13 th draws a straight line from slavery to mass incarceration and Ezra Edelman’s O. J.: Made in America uses the life of O. J. Simpson as a lens through which to explore race, celebrity and sport. In I Am Not Your ...

I Am Not Your Negro' Director Raoul Peck On James Baldwin's Legacy

... Negro" opens in theaters on February 3, we offer three quotes from Peck that show how Baldwin's legacy still resonates in today's racial justice battles. On media and entertainment's brainwashing. When I started making films, I already had Baldwin in my mind. I knew what you can do with images and what they can do to you. I knew about propaganda and brainwashing. By the time I became a filmmaker, I was using Baldwin left and right. "Lumumba" was me, for the first time as a Black filmmaker, telling a story from my point of view in an industry that didn't care. I had to fight to get the proper money, write a story they couldn't refuse, etc. You can't just make a film about someone killed by the CIA. So ["I Am Not Your Negro"] is the result of my own anger about the ignorance that exists today, how we ignore how important Baldwin is. Baldwin talks about television and the ...

I Am Not Your Negro' Will Introduce James Baldwin To A New Generation

... Promise". Clark: What do you see? Are you essentially optimistic or pessimistic, and I really don't want to put words in your mouth, because what I really want to find out is what you really believe. Baldwin: I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives - it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face, and deal with, and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long. What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, ...

James Baldwin Speaks To Now In I Am Not Your Negro

... bringing Baldwin’s words to life, and while his voice is instantly recognizable, Jackson uses none of his usual vocal swagger. What he does instead isn’t so much an imitation of Baldwin as an embodiment of his essence. Jackson nails the cadences in Baldwin’s speech, punctuating his words with humor, anger, exasperation and hope — sometimes in the same sentence. At times, there’s an almost feminine quality to Jackson’s delivery, a softness that carries surprising power. He avoids the trap of sounding reverent, opting instead for a casual bluntness that’s true to the man he’s portraying. This isn’t just narration — it’s a full-blooded, lived-in performance, one of Jackson’s best. In addition to Jackson, there is Baldwin himself, appearing in archival footage from university speeches and appearances on The Dick Cavett Show. That he and Jackson peacefully coexist in the film is a testament to how cleverly Peck and his editor, Alexandra Strauss, have pieced together the material. Granted complete access by Baldwin’s estate, Peck excels at the daunting task of selecting a small fraction of the author’s vast output to service his 95-minute feature. It took him ...

The Best Takedown Of Hollywood Comes From James Baldwin In ‘i Am Not Your Negro

... “ Stagecoach ” and scenes of cowboys killing Indians that, given historical context, had us “watching a genocide,” Peck says. “Somehow it was to us entertainment.”. We see a film adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” showing Tom forgiving those who killed him. Baldwin greatly influenced public perception of the 19 th-century novel with a 1949 critical takedown. In Peck’s documentary, he explains that he didn’t see Tom as a hero because he refused “to take vengeance into his own hands.”. James Baldwin (Dan Budnik/Magnolia Pictures). “Heroes, as far as I could see, were white — and not merely because of the movies, but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection,” Baldwin says. “I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vengeance into their own hands. They thought vengeance was theirs to take, and yes, I understood that. My countrymen were my ...

The Powerful Trailer For 'i Am Not Your Negro' Shows Why It's The Movie We All Need To See

... his film. Along with never-before seen archival material from Baldwin, the film takes a look at the lives of Malcolm X, King, and Evers as well as a look at various movements and cultural moments from Ferguson and Black Live Matter to the civil rights movement and the original Birth of a Nation film. “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America,” says Samuel L. Jackson, who narrates the film, in the trailer. “It’s not a pretty story.”. In the trailer, you can hear Baldwin’s discernible voice and prophetic words (narrated by Jackson) and images from the 1960 s to the present day. “If any white man in the world in the world says ‘give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds,” says Baldwin in the trailer. “When a black man says exactly the same thing he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.”. Last year, in an interview with Complex, Peck said ...