(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The man behind sold-out performances at both the Berlinale and CPH: DOX in Copenhagen, is from the old school: He received his directing education in Berlin in the 1980s, with teachers such as Alexander Kluge, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Jean-Luc Godard. When I meet him in Berlin, he worries that the next generation of filmmakers is in the midst of our time of confusion. Haitian Raoul Peck is a warm person, it's not just his handshake that indicates that. The times I have met him, also at the Film fra Sør festival in Oslo a few years ago, he has always had a burning political commitment. That's why I filmed his Masterclass in Berlin (see the film after the article).
I Am Not Your Negro (see review on the left) is about James Baldwin and hans role models: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King jr. and Malcolm X. They all fought for the rights of blacks, but were killed for it. However, Baldwin, whom Peck says has shaped him (framed him), did not give him an existence: Peck spent 10 years making the film about Baldwin as a political activist, as a human rights advocate, as an intellectual. Because of the rise was I Am Not Your Negro almost impossible to see in Berlin. It is currently running at 250 cinemas in the US, and will soon be in Oslo.
Pecks has long been concerned about Marx, and also the film There young Karl Marx it took ten years to complete. Both of the films mentioned are thus about intellectual political work. As Peck made both a documentary (1992) and a feature film (2000) about the murder of Congo's liberation hero and First Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, he alternates here again between genres. But for the Haitian director is coming content always in the first place – the form follows. The story of Marx and Engels in the English working class environment in the early 1800s also addresses the political content of the struggle until the release of The Communist Manifesto. The narrative here is built around the two political thinkers and their political women – and films are visually engaging. The black-and-white documentary on Baldwin has a completely different expression – but this time too we follow Peck's examples, as Baldwin followed in his book on Evers, King and Malcolm X.
We all have role models, and Raoul Peck is one of mine. In the mentioned film about the director – which you can see on Ny Tid's website – you hear him talk about the political student community he was part of when they became involved in the ANC, Nicaragua and the communist movement in Iran. He also talks about today's bombardment of pseudo-news, and argues that I Am Not Your Negro is a film about the future. And he asks: Where can we find room, how can we confused concentrate – without ending up as perfect consumers?
