![]() ![]() Whites’ terror toward blacks “has made them criminals and monsters,” said Baldwin.Īnd just as DuVernay unpacks the powerful images in D.W. We see clips of Baldwin giving talks, and appearing on the Dick Cavett Show describing the mythology of the negro criminal. Jackson voices Baldwin as the film’s articulate narrator, describing meetings with all three men and their oversized impact on the culture before they were tragically brought down. “I Am Not Your Negro” (Magnolia, December 9) from 62-year-old documentarian Raoul Peck, works from an unfinished manuscript (“Remember This House”) by the late writer James Baldwin (“Another Country”) about a generation of black leaders slain in their prime: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. “It was very clear decade by decade, it was the organizing principle we embraced.”Īnother doc in the New York Film Festival addresses race relations in America. “We wanted to show the building blocks, show the progression of oppression,” DuVernay said. READ MORE: ‘Triple 9’ Director John Hillcoat Talks Great Actors, #OscarsSoWhite and the Black Lives Matter Movement Chilling footage from the likes of Lee Atwater and John Ehrlichman reveal the lengths taken by the Nixon and Reagan administrations to keep African-American communities at bay via law-and-order policies and the war on drugs. UCLA History grad DuVernay chose to lay out her argument in chronological order, from 1865 through the Jim Crow era into the Civil Rights movement and the growth of the prison-industrial complex (a phrase coined by Angela Davis, one of 38 people DuVernay interviews at length on camera).ĭuVernay began by examining prisons, but her inquiries led her down many more rabbit holes as she looked at some 1,500 hours of archival footage and tried to explain why our prisons treat so many black men like slaves. It would be a disservice to the tragedy that is happening not to paint a full picture.” (That said, while there was a four-hour cut, DuVernay was set on delivering a two-hour movie.) Later on the phone, DuVernay told me she wanted to “go back and do a history lesson, to help people make associations, and grasp the system more fully, not just taken in snapshot. ![]() READ MORE: How Black Lives Matter Created The Accidental Documentarians How much of what we think is manufactured and given to us?” ![]() At a New York Film Festival press conference, the Compton-raised director said that she wanted her Netflix doc to give a wide swath of people “an understanding of what we’re seeing and why we think the way we do. Netflix VP Lisa Nishimura reached out to DuVernay after “Selma,” knowing that she’d begun her filmmaking career in documentaries. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |