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Tag: hilton als

Fade to Black

Hilton Als on James Baldwin, movies, and Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, for The New Yorker:

One has the sense, in the sections of “I Am Not Your Negro” that are devoted to Baldwin’s relationship to film, that Peck is stepping in to make the film that Baldwin couldn’t make. From the beginning of his career, Baldwin longed to make movies. In the introduction to his 1955 landmark collection, “Notes of a Native Son,” he wrote, “About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.” To my knowledge, Baldwin never satisfied that desire (morbid, perhaps, because he knew of the herculean effort that goes into getting any movie made), but he never stopped yearning to be a filmmaker. Like a number of other significant twentieth-century authors—James Agee, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, and his friend Norman Mailer—he knew that the page was not enough in the modern world; cinema was a powerful medium with many more “readers.” What would his life as an artist have been like, and what would American cinema be like now, had it opened itself up to him?

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