»Dear Raoul,
I remember the first time I saw I am not your Negro in a movie theater here in Cologne. In the darkness of the cinema, there was breathless amazement, tension, enormous concentration. That's rare, especially for a documentary. But had I ever seen moving images like this before? I felt as if I had been to the cinema for the first time. I staggered out in disbelief. How was that possible?
I had read James Baldwin before, several times. I was familiar with his texts, especially THE DEVIL FINDS WORK“. And yet, when I came out of the cinema, everything was new. Those words! Wisdom and wit, anger and analytical power: how his intelligence flows! How the images resonate with his writings! This rhythm between poetry and theory, this intervention from yesterday into today! What a stunner.
After the film, I went to my bookshelf. I read Baldwin again, and I read him differently. It seemed to me that your cinematic art had changed his books: The writings had become different through cinema, they had been transformed.
Was that magic? No, the word is too sticky, too overused. Let's call it recadrage – in a purely cinematic sense, in the sense of redefining the image section from a larger spatial continuum. What you, Raoul, do in cinema is a kind of film-historical reframing. You change the image by changing the field of vision. You transform the relationship between off-space and on-space. What was previously out of frame and invisible to us now enters the picture. Bodies, voices, stories that were excluded move from the periphery to the center. Your films have changed not only the way we read books, but also the way we perceive images and try to make sense of the world.There is a deep conviction in your films: that of being involved. You are never a silent observer or a detached spectator. Whether fictional or non-fictional, you always shoot from a subjective perspective. “Neutrality is not an option”, you say in your documentary series Exterminate all the Brutes. You make your position clear, you put yourself in the picture. This can be seen very early on in your work, most clearly in Lumumba, Death of a Prophet. Your childhood memories, the Congolese struggle for freedom and independence, the country's collapse into violence, the way in which politicians and the Western media have distorted and manipulated Lumumba's image: you connect all of this with your personal history and with your impressive voiceover.
Your films chronicle the traumas of history: in the Congo, in Haiti, Rwanda, the U.S. and Europe. They tell of the horrors of colonialism, the brutality of racism, oppression and injustice. Your films don't make it easy for us – because cinema often makes it too easy for us. Your films challenge us – because cinema often does not challenge us enough. And as we sit in the movie theater and are amazed by the complexity and cleverness of your films, we realize that this is the greatest respect a filmmaker can show his audience: to trust them with something. Not to please, but to provoke. And because that's exactly what we feel when we watch your films – that we are taken seriously as a thinking and acting audience – we will never leave the cinema untouched. Neutrality is not an option.
There must have been setbacks. How many times has the film industry turned down your projects? How many times have they told you that it wouldn't work, that it was the wrong way, the wrong story? And how many times have you ignored all that and kept going? Because you know that pictures are never made unconditionally. Because you know that you have to fight for them, again and again.
Raoul Peck: We bow to you with deep gratitude. You are a unique role model in terms of intellectuality, poetry, passion, and artistic energy. You confront us with unresolved conflicts and historical entanglements. You uncover the overlooked. You draw our attention to frictions that cannot be brought to an easy end. You remind us that we are caught in the middle, each and every one of us, in the turmoil of our time. You show us that we bear responsibility for the way stories have been told and for the way they will be told in the future. Neutrality is not an option.«
