I Am Not Your Negro (2018)

As I said when I reviewed Giovanni’s Room, I haven’t read enough James Baldwin, and that’s still something I have to work on. But this documentary is an excellent companion to his work as an author and a crucial voice in the African American community. I Am Not Your Negro is a really beautiful film that visualizes and contextualizes Baldwin’s words in arresting ways.

Constructed from the notes for Baldwin’s unfinished novel Remember This House, I Am Not Your Negro takes Baldwin’s words and weds it to evocative visuals, news footage, photographs, and old media appearances from Baldwin himself to paint an expansive picture of Baldwin’s views on race in America.

I’m really impressed with the work of director Raoul Peck here. While I’ve seen some excellent documentaries in my day, I’ve seen very few films like this. More than anything, it’s driven by Baldwin’s words. In the pages from the unfinished book, he intersperses his own observations on/experiences with race in America with details on the lives and assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, all of whom Baldwin knew in their lifetimes. Peck lets Baldwin’s words shape the flow of the film and he crafts the visuals and accompanying contextual materials around that. Throughout, Samuel L. Jackson’s quiet, measured narration work gives voice to Baldwin’s thoughts.

Even though the subject matter, theme, and overall style is very different, the documentary that I’m most reminded of here is Inside the Mind of Leonardo. Again, even though the two documentaries are wildly different, both set out not just to inform or tell a story about a history but evoke the feeling of the figure at their center. The clips and images that are paired with Jackson’s narration don’t just lend context to Baldwin’s words, they feel like Baldwin’s words. This is video prose, a treatise in images, and it’s really effective.

There are so many strongly-resonating moments here. I really like Baldwin’s observations about being a child watching John Wayne movies, rooting for the cowboy to win the day, only to get a little older and realize that his country would never allow him the role of the hero, that in America he was always one of the nameless disposable Indians to be shot by the stalwart Wayne. His recollections of hearing about Ruby Bridges’s first day of integrated school is also very affecting, especially the account of the meeting between civil rights leaders and Bobby Kennedy, in which Kennedy offered Bridges the physical support of troops to protect her from hateful white people but couldn’t see the point of the spiritual support of him or JFK walking into the school alongside the little girl. Another strong point of the documentary is the way that it seamlessly blends the past and present, shifting easily between footage/photos of civil rights marchers in the ‘60s and Black Lives Matter protests today, showing how Baldwin’s words ring just as true today as they did then.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including racism,) images of violence (including hate crimes,) and language (including racial slurs.)