Part of Milestones of the Last Quarter Century
To be fair, docs are way out-numbered in this assemblage of films, which isn’t fair. Year to year, docs represent about 12% of our offerings. To the extent that moviegoers democratize their choices through the purchase of a movie ticket, we do find ourselves in a lull. But back in 2017-2018 — aka the “Movie Pass” years — y’all were banging down the doors and for good reason. Those were peak-doc times. While innovation in form and interest in the genre do have their respective peaks and valleys, at certain points these phases come together. In adding a third wave of societal reckoning, a documentary like I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO might become part of its soundtrack.
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project — a personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — a project uncompleted, leaving only 30 pages. Working from this text, filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America and a journey into Black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter. It is a film that questions Black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
Beyond its relevance as a great documentary in a time of change, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO unwittingly marked a crucial entry point into in a golden era of documentaries that really turned folks out — as much and even more than narrative features at the time. Consider what followed — Turkish cat doc KEDI, LOVING VINCENT, RBG and WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR, climbing doc FREE SOLO, and THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS. All of those films played for weeks and even months on end — something we’ve not seen here since before the pandemic.
“By the end of I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Baldwin’s words have transcended the boundaries of their era and become timeless, functioning as both a celebration of cultural survival and a warning that the battle for its survival won’t stop anytime soon.” —Eric Kohn, IndieWire (Feb 2, 2017) “A kaleidoscopic and transporting 90 minutes living inside James Baldwin’s mind, coming thrillingly close to his existential perception of the hidden meaning of race in America.” —Owen Gleiberman, Variety (Oct 3, 2016) “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…and his subject…. 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.” — A.O. Scott, NYT Critic’s Pick, New York Times (Feb 2, 2017)
