The film draws its inspiration from Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, intended to be a personal recollection of his friends, the civil-rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.-all of whom were assassinated within five years of each other. Now add to this list the director Raoul Peck’s powerful but imperfect documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which received critical acclaim and a Best Documentary Oscar nomination before it opened nationwide on February 3. Hollywood Doesn’t Make Movies Like The Fugitive Anymore Soraya Roberts This past September, at the dedication ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, President Barack Obama began his remarks by quoting from Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” A group of arts and educational institutions in New York City declared 2014 “The Year of James Baldwin.” And, over the past decade, he has received an unprecedented level of scholarly attention, including the founding of an annual journal committed to reappraising and preserving his legacy. While Baldwin fell out of critical favor in the last decade of his life, and in the years that followed his death in 1987, his work always remained a source of deep and demanding insight and beauty-which is why it’s so heartening to witness the national revival he is currently enjoying. Baldwin lent his words and energies also to the civil-rights movement and would write one of the defining books of that era, The Fire Next Time, his 1963 classic. His signature style was his prose-startling in its intricate design and depth of perception, and fierce in its determination to dismantle the racial assumptions of the American republic and the English language. The complexity of its images deepen the power of its message, enriching rather than confusing.A novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, James Baldwin was a writer with an arsenal of artistic talent and moral imagination. Yet director John Greyson pushes the boundaries even further, placing his work in dialogue with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The film has a broad, international scope from the very beginning. Zackie Achmat works with the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, Tim McCaskell with AIDS Action Now! in Canada. Fig Trees (2009)įig Trees is an experimental, musical portrait of the work of two AIDS activists. They feature the earliest days of the Gay Liberation movement in the United States, the fight to respond to the AIDS epidemic, and the international scope of the pursuit LGBT civil rights around the world today.
Therefore, we’ll call them history films, built from a century-long struggle against discrimination.
It might be a misnomer to call all of them “activist” documentaries, and the “issue film” moniker seems reductive. Yet the following 10 films are more consciously political, narratives of the struggle for freedom and equality over the course of history. Obviously when dealing with something like LGBT civil rights, culture and politics are often very closely connected. Today’s list is entitled “The Best Documentaries About LGBT History.” What’s the difference? Once again, Happy Pride Month! Last week we featured a list of the 10 Best Documentary Portraits of LGBT Culture, films that celebrate the lives and loves of their diverse subjects.