Raoul Peck | PARIS LA

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.

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?), but they love the idea of being superior….Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not American—who had any real desire to be free….We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know.” — James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” from The Fire Next Time

In the late 1970s, James Baldwin began work on a book about three of his friends who had been murdered: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Passages from this unfinished, unpublished manuscript, titled Remember This House, form the basis for I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, Raoul Peck’s masterful, exhilarating documentary on Baldwin, American racism, and our threadbare construct of lies and amnesia implemented daily to forestall national self-immolation.

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

Now playing.

“Down at the Cross” was originally published as “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in the November 17, 1962 issue of The New Yorker, and is included in the Library of America edition James Baldwin—Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison.

Above image credit: Library of America.

Below: James Baldwin in France, 1970.

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Tag Archives: Raoul Peck

YOUNG MARX AND ENGELS

JAMES BALDWIN