Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris

1970

★★★★

This was incredibly difficult to watch, but I am so glad that I did. The beauty of it is the way in which Baldwin wields language, as he does, to distill something so complex and profound into lines that almost seem like throw aways. Sentences that I had to write down and will think about for the rest of my life, and seem like he was looking forward to the current moment and commenting on it: : "Sooner or later all the wretched of the earth in one way or another will destroy the cobblestones on which London and Rome and Paris are built. The world will change because it has to change. The party is over." The difficult parts, which take up entirely too much of the half-hour, are really of the filmmakers clumsily stumbling around Baldwin's intellect, his work, his life, and his struggles. Their entitled demands for him to break it all down in language that they can understand and not be threatened by made me want to turn it off several times. To see him trying to defend against gaslighting, ignorance, entitlement, and appropriation while trying to exercise comion and love must have been exhausting and made me love him more than I already did.

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