The former expatriate describes how he was not a member of black civil rights groups like the Black Panther Party, the NAACP, or the church. When describing a trip he took with Medgar Evers, Baldwin writes that he “was to discover that the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed.” Baldwin says he was troubled by the passivity required of witnesses. This section also provides a clear example of the self-interrogation the Montaignian essay aspires to. The gentleness in that “caress” gestures at an interiority often missing from depictions of heroes of the 1960s, particularly a firebrand like Malcolm X. “Malcolm was sitting in the first row of the hall, bending forward at such an angle that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles of his long legs, staring up at me,” he writes of the first time he met Malcolm X. In Witness, Baldwin’s beautiful prose paints an intimate portrait of the larger-than-life figures who are his subjects. The film is loosely organized into thematic chapters: Paying My Dues, Heroes, Witness, Purity, Selling the Negro, and I Am Not a Nigger. What follows, instead, is Baldwin’s strong, personal point of view on the question at hand, told in a voice that now seems prophetic. Peck is not concerned with presenting the biographical details of Baldwin’s life. He has filled in this skeletal framework with excerpts from Baldwin’s other essays, clips of his spirited debates and roundtable appearances, and archival footage from Baldwin’s time. But the film’s troublesome, inquisitive nature is in keeping with what Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, meant his “Essais” to be-attempts, trials, experiments. It is the problematic stepchild in a world insistent on categorization. Similar to its literary counterpart, the essay-film escapes clear definition. And like any good essay, it begins with one question, and, over the course of its 90 minutes, asks a set of new ones. Like the famed works that are its inspiration, it is an essay. The film is not just a factual report about a particular event or person. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, which opens on Friday in select theaters around the country, revisits Baldwin’s interrogation of what it means to be American. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.” “The very word ‘America,’” Baldwin wrote in his 1959 essay “The Discovery of What It Means to be An American,” “remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. It was in Paris that he found his voice and also came to understand the complexity of his American identity. Years later, Baldwin would write a series of essays reflecting on his Paris years. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” It was because of this desire to escape the dire situation of being a black male in America that Baldwin found himself alone in France with only $40 in his pockets. In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, he said: “My luck was running out. After his friend Eugene Worth jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death, Baldwin was afraid that he would suffer a similar fate. In 1948, James Baldwin left Harlem for Paris to save himself.
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