Three short documentaries that will be shown during 'James Baldwin Abroad,' a retrospective of the author's life in exile. Film critic Sean Burns says each film shows sides of Baldwin that are eloquent, cantankerous and endearing.
Sometimes to understand a place, you need to get away from it. In 1948, a 24-year-old James Baldwin left his hometown of Harlem and moved to France with 40 dollars to his name. With books like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Notes of a Native Son,” the author would go on to become one of the foremost chroniclers of the Black experience in America, but first, he had to see it from afar.
Each film presents the expatriate author in a different light – by turns eloquent, cantankerous and endearing. His perceptions are precise and do not coddle the audience. Thirty-six years after his death, Baldwin’s insights remain depressingly evergreen, astutely observed through the double-outsider lens of being Black and gay in America at a time when either one could get you killed.
Baldwin has had quite the big screen resurgence in recent years. Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” brilliantly reconfigured his unfinished manuscript “Remember This House,” with the author’s galvanizing prose read by Samuel L. Jackson. It’s some of the actor’s finest work, toning down his naturally theatrical cadences for a moodier, more pensive approach. He doesn’t really sound like James Baldwin, but he sure doesn’t sound like Sam Jackson, either.
The most well-known of the three films is Terence Dixon’s 1971 “Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris.” It’s a wonderfully contentious piece of work, as Baldwin repeatedly clashes with the filmmaker. Dixon had clearly intended to do a glossy, travelogue-type short, and the writer is having none of it. Baldwin arrives at the Bastille with some American students who were there avoiding the draft, and he explodes every attempt to pigeonhole his perspective.
In fact, the funniest moment in the whole program is when an undoubtedly well-meaning student asks Baldwin and Gregory if there’s a place for white liberals in the Black Power movement. Some people just can’t resist making everything about themselves.
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