Tag Archives: James Baldwin

MR. SOUL! — LA FILM FESTIVAL

Ellis Haizlip—black, gay, and deeply invested in the African-American liberation and equality movements of the 1960s and ’70s—was the producer and host of the short-lived but seminal public television show Soul!, which aired from 1968 to 1973. Sui generis in its approach and impact, Haizlip’s Soul! gave black voices an unprecedented platform at a crucial time.

Directors Melissa Haizlip and Sam Pollard have brought the life and work of this catalyst to a new generation with the documentary MR. SOUL!, screening this week at the LA Film Festival in its local premiere.

Included in the film are rare interviews and performances by James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Harry Belafonte, Al Green, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Odetta, Stokely Carmichael, Merry Clayton, Betty Shabazz, George Faison, Toni Morrison, Patti LaBelle, The Last Poets, and many more.

MR. SOUL!

Wednesday, September 26, at 7:30 pm.

Writers Guild Theater, 135 South Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills.

Above: Ellis Haizlip interviews Melvin Van Peebles in 1971. Soul! director Stan Lathan looks over a camera operator’s head.

Below: Haizlip, Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers, and a Soul! sound engineer.

Photographs © Chester Higgins Jr.

BEALE STREET AT THE APOLLO

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As part of the 56th New York Film Festival, and its debut presentation at the venue, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (2018)—Barry Jenkins’ first film since Moonlight—will have its U.S. premiere at the Apollo Theater, in Harlem, the setting of the James Baldwin novel on which the film is based.

Tickets are on sale now, and two encore screenings at Lincoln Center will follow.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK U.S. premiere

Tuesday, October 9, at 7:30 pm.

Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street, New York City.

Encore screenings:

Thursday, October 11 at 8:30pm.

Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway (at 65th Street), New York City.

Sunday, October 14, at 5pm.

Walter Reade Theater , 165 West 65th Street, New York City.

See: KiKi Layne

Above: KiKi Layne and Barry Jenkins at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on July 6, 2018. Photograph by Craig Barritt.

Below: Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk. Image credit: Annapurna Pictures.

HARMONY HOLIDAY ON BALDWIN

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“[Being] an attentive and heroic witness can mean that you yourself, as that witness, are never entirely seen. And a father is a kind of god in the human psyche, one who sees you and whose vision you must both realize and overcome, overthrow, ruin.

“Maybe James Baldwin was the only star-witness America could trust on any given day because at an early age he had to perform the ritual (or rite of passage) of becoming his own father, seeing himself, which allowed him to see others so clearly.

“But when it came time for the next ritual in the sequence, overcoming that self-imposed vision, betrayal of any limiting concept of the self—maybe it was because the vision was his own, because he was his own master, that suicide so seduced him, as his own father, his own master, he was in his own way.”

Harmony Holiday, “Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note,” Poetry Foundation, August 9, 2018:

poetryfoundation.org/preface-to-james-baldwins-unwritten-suicide-note

loa.org/james-baldwin

Above image credit: Library of America.

Below: James Baldwin in France, 1970.

HOURIA BOUTELDJA

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“Why am I writing this book? Because I share Gramsci’s anxiety: ‘The old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ The fascist monster, born in the entrails of Western modernity.

“Of course, the West is not what it used to be. Hence my question: what can we offer white people in exchange for their decline and for the wars that will ensue? There is only one answer: peace. There is only one way: revolutionary love.” — Houria Bouteldja, from WHITES, JEWS, AND US

“With her new book, the French-Algerian political activist launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon’s political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism.

“Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, Bouteldja issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love. Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation.

“She challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe—that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab–Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn’t in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a problem; that humanism can be against racism when its very function is to support the political-ideological apparatus that Bouteldja names the ‘white immune system.’ ”*

Bouteldja serves as spokesperson for the Parti des Indigènes de la République.

HOURIA BOUTELDJA

WHITES, JEWS, AND US – TOWARD A POLITICS OF REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

Forward by Cornel West

Translated by Rachel Valinsky (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018)

* mitpress.mit.edu/whites-jews-and-us

Originally published in France in 2016 by La Fabrique Éditions.

See “We, Indigenous Women,” an excerpt from the book: e-flux.com/we-indigenous-women

Frantz Fanon (top), Houria Bouteldja. Image credit below: Semiotext(e).

YOUNG MARX AND ENGELS

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In an early scene in THE YOUNG KARL MARX—a biopic of exuberant intelligence—Karl and Jenny Marx (August Diehl and Vicky Krieps), followers and supporters of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Olivier Gourmet), engage the father of French anarchy in a debate over image versus substance. Jenny admires the poetry of Proudhon’s pronouncements—”La propriété, c’est le vol” (“property is theft”), for example—but tells him, “It’s just an image. An image, as you say in French, chasing its own tail.”

The collective spirit of the enterprise—the rigorous activism of Jenny and Karl and the industrialist’s son Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) in the years leading up to the composition of the Communist Manifesto—is a joy to behold.

THE YOUNG KARL MARX was directed and co-written by Raoul Peck, who’s previous film was the brilliant James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro.

LE JEUNE KARL MARX / THE YOUNG KARL MARX, now playing.

ROYAL, Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

PLAYHOUSE, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

laemmle.com/films

See Raoul Peck’s Vulture interview: vulture.com/raoul-peck

Also: democracynow.org/an_hour_with_filmmaker_raoul_peck

Streaming on demand from March 6.

Top two: August Diehl and Stefan Konarske. Photograph by Kris Dewitte.

Bottom: Vicky Krieps, August Diehl, and Stefan Konarske. Photograph by Frederic Batier.

Image credit: The Orchard.

PARIS LA

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Tag Archives: James Baldwin

MR. SOUL! — LA FILM FESTIVAL

BEALE STREET AT THE APOLLO

HARMONY HOLIDAY ON BALDWIN

HOURIA BOUTELDJA

YOUNG MARX AND ENGELS