Capturing James Baldwin’s Legacy Onscreen

The movie moves, and James Baldwin moves in it. Sometimes he looks like a graceful queen, as he sits, poised, his back erect with grand indulgence or tolerance or love. His expressive hands cut through the air during this or that interview, speaking a wordless language of their own, as the former boy preacher from Harlem, small, dark, and compact, talks and talks about race, sounding like no one else on earth. It’s Baldwin’s voice—his luminescent words describing and analyzing dark matters—that ties together Raoul Peck’s latest film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which is about many things, including the writer’s relationship to racial politics and the fantastic yet undermining power of the cinema’s racially defined images. One of the chief pleasures of the movie is watching Baldwin, who died in 1987, appear on talk shows and in public forums: he had an extraordinary physical presence, of a piece with his singular mind. We watch him because he saw us, wanted to see us.