I Am Not Your Negro

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
Director: Raoul Peck

Synopsis: Black American intellectual, James Baldwin, and his unfinished manuscript ‘Remember this House’ become the pivot around which a kaleidoscopic panorama of American race relations is interrogated.

Review: Following hot on the heels of last year’s exemplary documentary on US race relations, Ava DuVernay’s 13th, comes another stellar dissection of the ‘Negro’ question in American socio-historical discourse, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. And, like with 13th, I Am Not Your Negro cannot simply be explained away by the value and moral weight of its subject matter alone; it’s a highly skilled, cerebral example of sophisticated documentary storytelling too.

Selecting the film’s locus as erudite black intellectual, James Baldwin, proved a particularly sage means of probing the legacy of American race relations over the last hundred years or so. Not only because Baldwin was a historic witness to much of that history (he was associated with many of the famous figures of black political protest – Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr), but because his position as a marginally more detached, discursive voice seemed exactly the right proxy for this film’s balance between history lesson and impressionistic treatise on the African-American experience.

Baldwin is recaptured both through lots of documentary footage of his many interviews and TV appearances, as well as his unfinished manuscript ‘Remember this House‘ being narrated over some of the footage by a muted Samuel L. Jackson. Although Baldwin symbolises the film’s somewhat distanced, intellectual perspective on the subject matter, as with the politics of the film itself, don’t mistake Baldwin’s reserve for neutrality. Baldwin articulates acutely how the issue of the “African-American” hints at the malignancy of the whole failed ‘American’ experience. He highlights how the underbelly of violence and unhappiness at the centre of many American communities life is linked thematically to the fact that white America still hasn’t come to terms with its creation of the “negro” (the negro being a construct more than a specific racial epithet here).

Incidentally, away from politics, I Am Not Your Negro offers a lot for cinephiles to gorge on too. Baldwin filters a lot of the accounts of his growing awareness of the representation of the African-American through cinema. Alongside more obvious referents (Sidney Poitier), he even conjures a recollection of the lesser known screen version of Imitation of Life (1934) – a story which stands as emblem for the tragedy at the heart of American race relations that Peck explores so cleverly in this ingenious documentary. (December 2017)