With this still being Black History month, I wanted to share this wonderful documentary film I recently saw entitled, “I Am Not Your Negro”. It is based on the unfinished book,Remember This House, by American novelist, playwright, poet, and social critic, James Baldwin. With only 30 completed pages, it was intended to examine racism through the lives of three of his famous civil rights’ activist friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When my mother asked me to go see it with her, I wasn’t really all that excited. The title alone gave it away as to what it would be about. And with enough racial drama unfolding in our country right now, I would have preferred to escape to my local movie theater to see a more light-hearted romantic comedy, rather than endure the gut-wrenching storytelling of a difficult past that now seems all too presently familiar. But of course I went. You can’t really say no to your mother, right? Well, you can, and I do sometimes, but… ok anyway, lol!!! “This”, was not “that.” Going into the theater I thought, how in the world did they manage to make an entire movie off a manuscript with just 30 pages?
This docu-film, was one of the most excellent films I’ve seen of its kind. Filled with incredibly important American history, amazing cinematography and editing in the intertwining of past and present clips, the exceptionally unusual choice of music for some of the scenes, the obscure interviews and recollections, all interlaced beautifully. While it offered some of Mr. Baldwin’s personal history in part, it was not autobiographical at all. This film was very enlightening and actually refreshing. Refreshing in the sense of bearing witness to the correlation of some of the historical viewpoints shared on the screen so eloquently, matching those that are currently being shared on similar platforms of those in decades past. From the first screenshot to the very last, this movie came across detailed and extremely thorough in the compilation of its content, and the flow of it through its entirety. So immersed and engaged was I in the detail of how well the movie moved from one piece to the next, that I didn’t realize it was narrated by Samuel L. Jackson until the credits rolled.
