Fading to Black: Embodied Spectatorship and Empowered Subjectivity in James Baldwin’s Cinematic Imagination

‘About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimetre camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.’¹ So notes James Baldwin, in an almost flippant aside towards the beginning of Notes of a Native Son (1955), the landmark essay collection that established him as the foremost African American public intellectual of his generation.² Across the course of a career that spanned over thirty years, Baldwin was something of a creative polymath, his oeuvre consisting of six novels, dozens of short stories, seven essay collections, two plays, a poetry collection, and even a novel-length picture book for children. Yet the single artistic endeavour that forever evaded Baldwin, despite its being characterised by Caryl Phillips as ‘one of the greatest ambitions of his life’, was to break into the world of film: seeing his novels and plays adapted for the screen, producing his own original screenplays, and shooting his own documentaries.³ Despite the fact that these aspirations remained largely unfulfilled, Baldwin’s overarching preoccupations as a writer and thinker can be illuminated by examining his self-confessed cinephilia, his position as a life-long devotee (and, more importantly, an uncompromising critic) of the American cinema. Film was, it seems, Baldwin’s first great love, an imaginative space of escape from the childhood constraints of home and church which, later in his life, would take on a strangely synecdochic position in his worldview, analogous to that of America herself; a steadfast belief in, even affection for, a form or an idea, coupled with a grim frustration with the sense of that idea’s expression somehow falling perilously short. ‘I love America more than any other country in the world’, he also tells us in Notes of a Native Son, ‘and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.’⁴ The French semiotician Christian Metz, writing almost contemporaneously, speaks in much the same vein about film, offering a playfully paradoxical adage which can fittingly be applied to Baldwin’s cinematic writings; ‘To be a theoretician of the cinema’, he claims, ‘one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it.’⁵

The space of the ‘movie-house’ is a quietly pervasive presence in the background of many of Baldwin’s writings – see, particularly, his novels Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962) – but forms the primary focus of The Devil Finds Work, a book-length essay first published in 1976. In this hybrid piece of memoir-cum-film-criticism, Baldwin reveals how it was within the realm of the cinema that he was first compelled to reckon with what might be figured as the defining question of both his literature and his life – what it means to live as a black man in America, where the struggle to maintain a sense of self is daily challenged by a dehumanising, white cultural hegemony. In his various writings about cinema, Baldwin grapples with complex questions surrounding the power dynamics of spectatorship and identification, the multifaceted relationship between gazing and being gazed at, and the ambiguous interplay between myth and history, and image and reality, on the American screen. If he ultimately had little faith in either the practical ability or, indeed, the ideological willingness of ‘Hollywood’ to truthfully represent the lived experiences of African Americans, his engagements with cinema (both critically and creatively) foreground the pre-eminence of a radical black interiority. It is precisely in this championing of a fully realised and embodied subjectivity, both on and off the screen, that Baldwin envisions a potential means for the African American to free himself from the constraints of the exterior image of the ‘Negro’ to which he has been historically condemned in the cultural imagination of ‘white’ America.

W. E. B Du Bois’s notion of ‘double consciousness’, the ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ which he argues to be ineluctable to the lived experiences of the ‘American Negro’, has long been figured as a paradigmatic lens through which to examine conceptions of black subjectivity and selfhood. According to Du Bois, the ‘Negro’ exists in ‘a world which yields him no true self-consciousness’; instead he is condemned to a state of ‘twoness’, his subjectivity forever split between his own innate sense of himself and the corresponding image of that self imposed upon him by the racially prejudiced society within which he is forced to move.⁶ There is something of a ‘double consciousness’ to the way in which Baldwin characterises his particular relationship with the American cinema; the verbal disjunction of that ‘morbid desire’ he talks of in Notes of a Native Son neatly encapsulates a life-long tension between a natural affection for, even fascination with, the medium of film, and an increasing discomfort with its altogether more pernicious ideological expression when it came to acknowledging African Americans, both as subjects of representation and as spectators.⁷ ‘In a sense I was born in the nightmare of the white man’s mind’, Baldwin says; ‘All of my growing up and all my early youth was first that discovery and then the bloody struggle to get out of that mind, to destroy that frame of reference for myself and for those coming after me.’⁸ Du Bois’s claim that the ‘history of the American Negro’ centres around a ‘longing to attain self-conscious manhood’ and escape one’s own ‘double consciousness’ is echoed in Baldwin’s account of the development of his own subjectivity in The Devil Finds Work, as much a Bildungsroman as it is a piece of film criticism – a cultural critique that, in Baldwin’s words, also positions itself as an ‘entrance into the cinema of my mind’.⁹ Indeed, this notion of ‘double consciousness’ as a mediated view of the world is strangely literalised in the space of the cinema, the dichotomy between ‘image’ and ‘reality’ becoming more than mere figuration and instead referring to something concrete and material about the embodied experience of film spectatorship itself.

One of the early moments of the essay that offers a key to understanding its larger project does not, however, explicitly involve discussion of film. Baldwin tells us of his fraught childhood relationship with his stepfather:

My father said, during all the years I lived with him that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him. But it was not my father’s hatred of my frog-eyes which hurt me, this hatred proving, in time, to be rather more resounding than real: I have my mother’s eyes. When my father called me ugly, he was not attacking me so much as he was attacking my mother.¹⁰

As the essay proceeds, this notion of seeing behind an appearance and, in doing so, deducing some kind of hidden, truer meaning emerges as the thrust of Baldwin’s experiences as a film spectator too – he confesses to being ‘fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen’, interested as much in the hypnotic power of the apparatus itself as in the images it presents, likening its motions to ‘the light which moves on, and especially beneath the water’ of the sea.¹¹ This ‘beneathness’, the suggested presence of something to be deciphered below that which appears on the surface, complicates Baldwin’s personal experiences of ‘double consciousness’. In the cinema, after all, the young Jimmy is not just faced with the inexorable dilemma of ‘looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ – rather, he gradually learns, with every film he watches, to see through that which the eyes of others dictate that he sees, to dare not mistake the merely ‘resounding’ for the patently ‘real’. In his own words:

You go to the movies and, like everyone else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realise all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression and will lead you into a kind of psychological warfare in which you will perish.¹²

For Baldwin, then, the relationship of the African American cinephile to the movie screen is a complex and multivalent one, contextually situated by both personal and national histories and stubbornly resistant to dualistic conceptions of both identification and habits of ideological interpretation. It may, indeed, be a state of ‘psychological warfare’, but in engaging both intellectually and affectively with his lived experiences as a black movie-goer, Baldwin appears determined not to let such a state be one in which he or his people must necessarily ‘perish’.

Baldwin’s idiosyncratic writings on the cinema appeared in a decade crucial for the development of academic film theory, a period particularly characterised by a burgeoning attention paid by the likes of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Laura Mulvey towards models of spectatorship, the ideological function of the cinema as specifically considered in the way it ‘has shaped and defined the fantasies of generations’ of consumers.¹³ The development of so-called ‘apparatus theory’, a psychoanalytically influenced approach to film studies which advocates attending as much to the inherent qualities of the medium itself as to the images it presents, might initially seem to chime with Baldwin’s vision of the cinema, his pointed interest in both the ‘movement on and of the screen’.¹⁴ Yet, as Judith Mayne points out, this ‘institutional model’ of spectatorship tends towards the ‘abstract’ and the ‘deterministic’, positing the existence of a ‘totally passive’ film spectator, helpless to look past the dominant ideological ‘reading’ of a film as imposed upon them by its creators.¹⁵ The same cannot be said for Baldwin’s view of spectatorship, where any notion of generalisation sits almost entirely at odds with the writer’s inescapable awareness of himself as a specifically black spectator. Baldwin’s cinematic imagination was necessarily tied both to his personal history living as a marginalised subject in the United States and his growing understanding of a national history of systemic oppression and injustice against African Americans, the underlying ideology of which he suggests ‘Hollywood’ cinema, as a powerful instrument of mass culture, both reflects and actively perpetuates. The act of spectating, then, is anything but passive for him, but rather an activity in which individual, subjective viewers can challenge the apparent semantic stability behind the images they see and, in doing so, go some way towards resisting or, at the very least, uncovering the wider cultural imaginaries which underpin them.

‘The language of the camera is the language of our dreams’, Baldwin writes. If it might be tempting to read this concluding aphorism from the first section of The Devil Finds Work in the spirit of the abstracted psychoanalytic thinking which dominated the vanguard of 1970s film theory, this would be to overlook the sentences which precede it: ‘It is said that the camera cannot lie’, Baldwin tells us, ‘but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.’¹⁶ The shifting play of pronouns here is subtle, yet crucial, moving between an intangible ‘you’, akin, perhaps, to those faceless forces of cultural hegemony acting upon a supposedly idealised spectator, and an altogether more concrete ‘we’, suggesting a collective investment in the illusions (and, as Baldwin will come to show us, the elusions) of the American film image. This is a state of ‘dreaming’ in which the individual spectator, whether willingly or otherwise, is liable to be complacent, ‘in danger of surrendering’ himself ‘to the corroboration of [his] fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen’.¹⁷

The Devil Finds Work’s status as memoir allows Baldwin to situate the phenomenon of spectatorship within the specificities of his personal experience, documenting his own gradual awakening from this so-called ‘state of dreaming’, and thus countering the apparatus theorists’ claims to a lack of subjective agency in the spectator. There is a marked sense of polyvocality to the first section of the essay, which is ostensibly figured from the perspective of the adolescent Baldwin, whilst also being mediated and tonally shaded by the voice of an older, wiser man, looking back upon and frequently reconfiguring his formative experiences. Our attention is drawn towards both the practical limitations and vagaries of recollecting film scenarios (‘She is looking for someone, or she is trying to escape from someone. She is eventually intercepted, I think, by Clark Gable’) and a drily ironic awareness of the hermeneutic naiveties of the adolescent cinema-goer.¹⁸ ‘I knew that I was poor, and knew that I was black’, Baldwin tells us, ‘but did not yet know what being black really meant, what it meant, that is, in the history of my country and in my own history.’¹⁹ Indeed, as the young Jimmy wonders what will happen next to Fay Wilson (Bette Davis) at the end of the 1932 prison drama 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, supposing that she ‘would probably never get over it’ because ‘people pay for what they do’, it is difficult not to hear the overlaid voice of a knowing, elder Baldwin.²⁰ For Baldwin has learnt, after all, that the United States is not only a country where people decidedly do not always pay for what they do, but one where some are made to pay a profoundly heavy price for having done nothing at all – the adolescent Jimmy’s earlier claim that the on-screen Davis ‘moved just like a nigger’ thus takes on a peculiarly palpable resonance.²¹

Mayne notes that ‘attempts to define spectatorship in racial terms’, or, indeed, under the rubric of any collective identity, have historically been ‘limited by literalist assumptions’ – the notion, for instance, ‘that black audiences can only “identify” with black characters, female audiences with female ones’, and so on.²² However keenly aware of the implications of race upon his experiences, Baldwin’s understanding of spectatorship evades such facile categorical constraints, perhaps explaining why some scholars have rather blithely characterised his film theory as one that ‘resolutely rejects identification’.²³ Yet it isn’t so much that Baldwin disdains the idea of spectatorial identification in and of itself; rather, he complicates its parameters, conspicuously identifying with the likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (white female movie stars), as opposed to those on-screen figures, few and far between in any case, who supposedly ‘look like’ him.²⁴ ‘No one resembling … my father has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene’, he claims, offering short shrift to the archetypal African Americans of the early classical cinema, the likes of ‘Stepin Fetchit … Willie Best and Manton [sic] Moreland’ who ‘lied about the world I knew, and debased it … I did not know anybody like them’.²⁵ For Baldwin, these men, known for their portrayals of stereotypically lazy, illiterate, and buffoonish characters, refused to provide African American spectators with any sense of interiority or true personhood with which they could conceivably identify. The degrading minstrel shows of America’s early history had simply been transmuted into celluloid form, revealing everything about the way in which white America continued to imagine African Americans, but nothing about their own lived, subjective experience.²⁶ Throughout his essays, it is telling just how often Baldwin likens America itself to an ‘illusion’, speaking in terms which strike at the heart of the ontology of film too – both tease an ‘illusion’ of movement and progression in that which is, in fact, merely static.²⁷ Indeed, if we are to believe Baldwin’s famous claim that ‘the story of the Negro in America is the story of America’, then the history of the nation as a whole becomes figured as one of profound stasis, where to ‘change’ has not been to progress, but only to regressively recycle and refigure the same old tropes.²⁸ In a 1986 lecture entitled ‘The World I Never Made’, Baldwin encapsulates this idea in typically pithy form:

We can see if we examine our legends that very shortly after I was discovered in Africa, where I was sometimes noble savage, in the twinkling of an eye, after the Middle Passage, I am found on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backlot, singing and dancing, the noble savage now transformed into the happy darky. No one quite knows how this happened. We are living with these myths until today. And it corrupts the view from here.²⁹

For Baldwin, then, the cinema is simply the latest in a long line of American institutions committed to bolstering pre-established cultural myths and master-narratives, at the expense of honestly reckoning with the nation’s uncomfortable racial histories.³⁰ His description of his childhood church, in which he likens being ‘bull-whipped through the Psalms of David and The Book of Job’ to a ‘forced march, designed to prepare the mind for conciliation and safety’, also applies to his experiences of movie-going.³¹ ‘When I entered the church, I ceased going to the theatre’, Baldwin says; ‘It took me awhile to realise that I was working in one.’³² A shrewd equivalence, certainly, and one that crucially seems to work both ways; indeed, as Baldwin talks of having ‘left the church’ at the age of fourteen only to walk straight into a movie-house on 42nd Street that very same afternoon, one might question just quite how far from the pulpit he truly managed to stray.³³

If affirming an air of ‘conciliation and safety’ is purported by Baldwin to be the primary aim of America’s foundational public institutions – the Christian church and the alternative ‘church’ of the movie-house – he also observes that ‘such a forced march’ can ready the observing mind ‘for subversion and danger’.³⁴ For at the same time as Baldwin is disempowered by the representative content of the cinematic image, he is empowered by his subjective ability to witness and interpret it, to see through and beyond its deceptive trappings – in his words, to take his ‘infirmities’ and see them ‘forged into weapons’.³⁵ If such trappings are relatively easy for the young Jimmy to spot in the broad, parodic routines of Fetchit and Best, the elder Baldwin, who narrates the second section of The Devil Finds Work, is fully alive to the harsh realities of American society, and thus able to reveal their presence in altogether more shrouded forms.

To understand this more politically conscious mode of spectatorship, it is useful to look at Stuart Hall’s seminal ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication, first developed in 1973 (just three years before Baldwin published The Devil Finds Work). Hall, too, criticises simplistic understandings of the workings of media discourse, which he argues tend to conceptualise the ‘process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop’.³⁶ He instead argues that the various elements of this process (production, circulation, and, most importantly for our purposes, consumption) should be viewed as ‘determinate moments’ in their own right, insisting that the spectator can play an active role in ‘decoding’ the ideological content of the image, sometimes against the supposedly ‘dominant’ or ‘hegemonic’ position ‘encoded’ in it by its producers. The moment in which the spectator ‘detotalises the message’ written in this ‘preferred code’ in order to ‘retotalise’ it ‘within some alternative frame of reference … he/she is operating with what we must call an oppositional code’, reading ‘against the grain’ of the text at hand.³⁷

Almost two decades later, the feminist scholar bell hooks echoed and developed these ideas, coining the term ‘oppositional gaze’ to specifically characterise the phenomenon of black spectatorship. hooks talks of being ‘amazed the first time [she] read in history classes that white slave-owners [had] punished enslaved black people for looking’; her ‘oppositional gaze’, then, becomes indicative of a ‘rebellious desire’, an ‘overwhelming longing to look’ even against ‘attempts to repress’ such an impulse. ‘I knew that the slaves had looked’, hooks says; ‘By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: “Not only will I look. I want my look to change reality”.’³⁸ In everyday public life, she argues, the black gaze may be ‘subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other’ (hooks draws, for instance, on the tragic stories of black men such as Emmett Till, lynched for the apparent crime of looking at a white woman), but ‘the private realm of television screens or dark theatres’ is distinctly affordant to ‘[unleashing] the repressed gaze’.³⁹ hooks explicitly draws on Hall, particularly his notion that spectatorship, as both critical theory and empirical practice, should acknowledge that cultural identities are constituted ‘not outside but within representation’. Film is not a ‘second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists’, but rather a form ‘able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects and thereby enable us to discover who we are’.⁴⁰ This radical reworking or revelation of subjecthood occurs precisely in these empowered acts of oppositional looking and reading, argued by Annette Kuhn to offer the spectator ‘the pleasure of resistance, of saying “no”: not to “unsophisticated” enjoyment … of culturally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways’.⁴¹

There is certainly nothing ‘uncritical’ or ‘circumscribed’ to the way in which Baldwin responds to film texts – his oppositional readings in the second section of The Devil Finds Work mark a refining of his boyhood instincts, a firm realisation that the majority of the films he watches, even those which specifically purport to grapple with issues of race, ‘exist for the sole purpose of perpetuating the legend’, that ‘American-self-evasion, which is all that this country has as history’.⁴² Hall notes that many media texts ‘serve to reproduce hegemonic definitions specifically by not overtly biasing their operations in a dominant direction’, essentially working from ‘behind men’s backs’.⁴³ Indeed, if some of Baldwin’s targets are unequivocal – for instance, he considers The Birth of a Nation (1915) little more than ‘an elaborate justification for mass murder’ – he also observes dangerous ideological implications in cinematic texts which had been critically lauded for their supposedly progressive political outlooks, largely by the very same white, liberal clientele that had helped make Baldwin himself a household name.⁴⁴  The Defiant Ones (1958) and In the Heat of the Night (1967), both star vehicles for mid-century Hollywood’s foremost African American screen presence, Sidney Poitier, face the brunt of his criticism. The latter film’s naivety is apparent to Baldwin in the very minutiae of its opening narrative set-up. ‘We are asked to believe’, he comments in a tone even he admits to be ‘helplessly sardonic’, ‘that a grown black man, who knows the South … would elect to change trains in a Southern backwater at that hour of the early morning and sit alone in the waiting room’.⁴⁵ Baldwin argues that the film moves with ‘vertiginous’ speed ‘from one preposterous proposition’ such as this ‘to another’ right up to the point of its conclusion, which depicts a solemn farewell between Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger’s (apparently now formerly) racist white sheriff.⁴⁶ This scene is akin to that ‘obligatory, fade-out kiss’ of the classical American cinema, a trope that, for Baldwin, ‘does not really speak of love, and still less, of sex’, but rather more broadly ‘of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possible’ – in this particular case, it seems, the prospect of a miraculous cure for America’s longstanding racial divisions.⁴⁷ Yet in reducing its politics to the distinctly microcosmic, a mutual understanding between two individuals, Baldwin argues that the film’s conclusion amounts to little more than a gutless exercise in wish-fulfilment. He returns to his earlier figurative idiom, though with something of a greater sense of urgency; ‘nothing … has been made possible by this … preposterous adventure, except that white Americans have been encouraged to continue dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up’.⁴⁸

Part of this ‘waking up’ seems possible, however, in the space of the cinema itself, through that ‘oppositional gaze’ which refuses to take texts, however ‘genuinely well-meaning’ they may be, at face value.⁴⁹ With The Defiant Ones, a story of two escaped prisoners, one white and one black, who spend much of the film forcibly shackled together, it is once again the reconciliatory ending which proves to be of most interest to Baldwin. If ‘liberal white audiences’ supposedly applauded Poitier’s character jumping off a train ‘in order not to abandon his white buddy’, then Baldwin perceives this reaction as being precisely the reason the scene plays this way in the first place; ‘to reassure white people, to make them know that they are not hated’.⁵⁰ What is all the more telling, however, is that here, in a rare move for his film writings, Baldwin reaches beyond his own personal reading and notes the collective response of a black audience in Harlem who, far from applauding ‘Sidney’s’ ‘noble’ act, were ‘outraged’, going as far as to vocalise their disdain during the screening itself (‘Get back on the train, you fool!’).⁵¹ This reclamation of subjective autonomy in reading oppositionally is, then, an act at once profoundly individual and primed with a kind of communal trenchancy – a power which Baldwin suggests can also bridge the gap between the worlds on and off the screen, even working from within the film itself. It is, after all, not only the black spectator who often cannot escape an awareness of the illusions and delusions of the American screen, but the black actor too – in Poitier’s performances, Baldwin claims to observe an ‘unmistakable truth … being placed at the mercy of a lie’, ‘hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the tale to fragments’.⁵² Poitier, the quintessential ‘civil rights subject’, so often lauded by white audiences as a ‘paragon of respectability’, may not have had quite that level of subversive force – but if we see in him one mid-century African American icon both constrained and afforded an unusual power by their own iconicity, then it is hard to ignore that another went by the name of James Baldwin.⁵³

Meeting the Man: Baldwin On and Behind the Screen

In his 1972 essay ‘To Be Baptised’, Baldwin recalls being recognised by a young white woman sitting next to him in (where else?) a cinema. ‘My famous face created a certain kind of hazard’, he says; ‘She stared and shook – I could not tell whether she was about to cry Rape! or ask for an autograph.’⁵⁴ If a kind of ‘double consciousness’ can be said to characterise Baldwin’s practices as a spectator, then it also came to permeate his experiences of being constantly spectated himself; indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s Baldwin could ‘claim to be one of the most photographed, and certainly one of the most recognisable men in the world’.⁵⁵ José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of a so-called ‘burden of liveness’ (also applied by Sharon Willis, perhaps not incidentally, to Sidney Poitier) elucidates Baldwin’s position as a well-established public intellectual, as much a fixture on the American small screen as he was a devotee of its big screen.⁵⁶ If the ‘majoritarian public sphere’ generally ‘denies subalterns access to larger channels of representation’, those few ‘minoritarian subjects’ who are afforded such a level of visibility are given their own particular cross to bear – the ‘burden’ of ‘performing his or her alterity as a consumable spectacle’.⁵⁷ ‘I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer’, Baldwin had confessed in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), a quandary to which he provides fuller form a decade later in No Name in the Street (1972), outlining an essential ‘conflict … between my life as a writer and my life as – not spokesman exactly, but as public witness to the situation of black people’.⁵⁸ Just as he perceives Poitier to be subject to the lot of ‘most American performers’, finding himself ‘trapped … in an “iron maiden” of mannerisms’ behind which he must strive to ‘smuggle in a reality’,⁵⁹ so Baldwin imagines his own ‘double’ life in strangely cinematic terms; ‘I began to feel unreal’, he says, ‘almost as though I were playing an unworthy part, in a cheap, unworthy drama.’⁶⁰

In the 1970 documentary Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, one of the earliest examples of Baldwin himself as a specifically cinematic subject, one witnesses the writer’s frustration at being confined to a particular public image, largely constructed, it seems, by white readers and spectators. The filmmakers, remaining mostly unseen behind the camera, admonish him for apparently attempting to ‘veer the film off [his] literary work’, instead turning towards his role as a political activist, to what he ‘feels’ rather than what he ‘writes’.⁶¹ But, of course, for Baldwin the two are entirely coterminous; in his view, ‘the private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject’, the ‘key … to his achievement’.⁶² Standing pointedly beneath the Colonne de Juillet in the Place de la Bastille, a monument to the kind of national revolution he appears to be demanding of his own country, Baldwin’s reply is both mildly bewildered and characteristically shrewd: ‘I’m not so much a writer as I am a citizen, and I’ve got to bear witness to something which I know … something which I represent, whether or not I like it’ (Figure 1). For Baldwin, the political is the personal – and the attempted reduction of his public image to merely a ‘writer of novels’ is to be in danger of eliminating both of those facets. There is a distinct irony to the fact that, later in the film, immediately following a searing, apparently impromptu speech delivered by Baldwin to a group of black students, the documentary voiceover (courtesy of director Terence Dixon) chimes in, telling us that the writer has ‘finally agreed to talk personally’. The interview that follows marks a sharp diversion from the cinéma vérité approach of the previous scene; here Baldwin is captured squarely head-on yet somehow distinctly less personally by the camera, subject once again to the leading questions of the filmmakers.

It is during this segment, too, that Baldwin is asked to respond to an accusation that was becoming increasingly levelled at him by this point in his career; the idea that he was ‘writing for white people’, succumbing to what Robert Reid-Pharr considers to be the greatest danger for the African American artist – being perceived to have ‘travelled too far from their roots’.⁶³ Indeed, according to Joseph Vogel, ‘as the political lines hardened in the mid-to-late 1960s’, Baldwin ‘found himself in a kind of no-man’s land: punished alternately for being too political and not political enough, resented and castigated by both black and white readers’.⁶⁴ Whilst his critiques of such well-respected figures of the liberal establishment as Norman Mailer disgruntled the latter audience,⁶⁵ Henry Louis Gates Jr notes that, amongst prominent African Americans, ‘Baldwin-bashing’ became ‘almost a rite of initiation’; he was accused by a leading member of the Black Panther party, Eldridge Cleaver, of exhibiting ‘the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in any black American writer of note in our time’ and dubbed by writer Amiri Baraka as the ‘Joan of Arc of the cocktail party’, his ‘spavined whine and plea … sickening beyond belief’.⁶⁶ Yet there is something altogether more nuanced to Baldwin’s performance of his public selfhood; his sparring with the filmmakers behind Meeting the Man, that apparently self-conscious impulse to divert ‘their’ film off its intended course, can be seen as exercising a kind of ‘oppositional code’ not in consumption (as Hall habitually locates it) but in production, as an on-screen witness. Regardless of how much Baldwin found his ‘notoriety hard to bear’, his doubly conscious public profile afforded him a practical power not so readily available to the likes of Cleaver and Baraka, in all their countercultural fervour.⁶⁷ He had the potential to succeed where even Poitier could not – to ‘shatter the tale to fragments’ from the inside, both in front of and, as we shall see, from behind the camera.⁶⁸

Whilst Baldwin’s attempts to break into filmmaking were various, spanning across almost the entirety of his career, his best-documented foray into the world of Hollywood is his brief involvement with the production of a biopic of the late Civil Rights leader Malcolm X in 1968.⁶⁹ The film would be an adaptation of Malcolm’s autobiography, co-written with Alex Haley, which had been published in 1965, just a few months after his assassination. Baldwin did not recall the experience with fondness, claiming that he ‘would rather be horse-whipped, or incarcerated in the forthright bedlam of Bellevue than repeat the adventure’.⁷⁰ If he admits to having had ‘grave doubts and fears’ from the outset about ‘the idea of Hollywood doing a truthful job on Malcolm’,⁷¹ such apprehensions proved to be prescient; after a series of impassioned disagreements over everything from casting (Baldwin’s choice to play Malcolm was Billy Dee Williams, whilst Warner Brothers preferred Poitier or ‘even, it was rumoured, Charlton Heston darkened up a bit’) to the screenplay itself (Baldwin’s manuscript was over 200 pages long, accused by producers of reading too much ‘like a novel’),⁷² Baldwin walked away from the project – ‘There was absolutely nothing left to discuss: I was not going to make their movie’.⁷³

Baldwin confessed to feeling an obligation to Malcolm’s memory that went beyond a deification (or, indeed, a ‘second assassination’) of his public image:

When George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan, he had the immense advantage of having never known her. He had never seen her walk, never heard her talk, could never have been haunted by any of those infinitesimal, inimitable tones, turns, tics, quirks, which are different in every human being, and which make love and death such inexorably private affairs.⁷⁴

To read Baldwin’s unrealised screenplay (published in 1972 under the title One Day, When I Was Lost) is to gain a palpable sense of the writer’s desire to prioritise those ‘private’ aspects of his subject’s life, to present a kind of radical interiority – in essence, to paint a portrait of Malcolm not as monument or martyr, but as the man he knew. Baldwin’s script specifies a number of moments where the camera is said to be ‘following Malcolm’s eye’ (and, by extension, his ‘I’), consciously grounding the spectator in his perspective. Much the same effect is achieved by the frequent use of voiceover, often literalising a Du Boisian ‘double consciousness’. For instance, Baldwin imagines a scene in which we see Malcolm working as a sandwich-seller on a train, performing public politeness to disdainful white patrons (‘Boy! Two ham and cheese! / Yes sir. A little mustard, sir?’) even as his internal voice, rendered external for the audience through voiceover, reveals a private resentment which lies beneath (‘Because you look like a real shit-eater to me’).⁷⁵ Baldwin’s cinematic imagination, articulated in a specifically filmic grammar, permits us, then, to look behind the servile smiles of the ‘happy darky’ stereotype he had encountered in his earliest visits to the cinema.

Yet the script is more than just a document of a private consciousness. True to Baldwin’s chiasmatic aphorism that ‘people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them’, Malcolm’s individual life becomes symptomatic of a wider American story – the story, in Baldwin’s words, ‘of any black cat in this curious place and time’.⁷⁶ Through montage and visual superimposition, Baldwin imagines the past, present, and future as literally bleeding into one another; such moments include the burning of Malcolm’s childhood abode at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, which becomes the burning of his own family home over three decades later, and the streetside murder of his father, which morphs, ultimately, into his own assassination. These oneiric sequences often revolve around a recurring visual motif, whereby our attention is drawn to the ‘side-view mirror’ of Malcolm’s car as he drives.⁷⁷ Surreal flashbacks and memories are interposed between shots of his reflection; looking back at the past becomes, it seems, both to look back at oneself and to look back at the other, as Malcolm’s gaze meets the lens of the camera and, in turn, the gaze of the imagined spectator. Through this interpellation, the viewer, looked at as well as looking, is called upon to ‘engage in a dialogical relationship’ with the text, spurred into subjective action and compelled to confront their own implication in this long, dark, and crucially continuous history.⁷⁸ ‘Don’t believe everything you see in the movies’, Malcolm says at one point, a line which surely wouldn’t be out of place in The Devil Finds Work.⁷⁹ Yet the fact that One Day, When I Was Lost remains an inherently half-formed artefact, confined to the page and only ever imagined for the screen, speaks less to the naiveties of audiences than it does to the delusions of Hollywood itself, its institutional reluctance to ‘bear too much reality’, let alone allow such a reality to ‘shatter the tale to fragments’.⁸⁰

Even those few cinematic projects of Baldwin’s that did end up making it to the screen (albeit with extremely limited distribution) were somewhat curtailed by this reticence; Dick Fontaine, director of the 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine, may have expressed an ambitious desire to create a ‘Baldwin essay on film’ but, as Hayley O’Malley notes, ‘only a fraction of Baldwin’s recorded interviews’ made it into the finished product, with ‘some of the most searing political critiques’ (including Baldwin’s firebrand characterisation of Richard Nixon as a 'kind of amateur Hitler’) being ‘left on the cutting-room floor’, much to the writer’s chagrin.⁸¹ ‘It did not seem likely … that I would ever be able to make of my past, on film, what [Ingmar] Bergman had made of his’, Baldwin confessed, after meeting the Swedish director himself in the early 1960s. Bergman was a filmmaker for whom, despite finding his work ‘rather cold … somewhat too deliberate’, Baldwin nonetheless possessed a strange admiration, considering him to be ‘one of the very few genuine artists now working in films’. Even so early in Baldwin’s career, the pursuit of truth, it seems, was paramount, trumping questions of taste. His gloomy prediction of a dream unfulfilled would prove, despite many efforts to the contrary, to ring true – Baldwin died in 1987, leaving unrealised a final manuscript, entitled Remember This House, and, with it, his longstanding cinematic ambitions.⁸²

The Children of Our Age: Baldwin’s Cinematic Legacies

‘An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born … This book is not finished – can never be finished, by me.’⁸³ These caustic words, from the epilogue of No Name in the Street, capture something of an overarching truth about Baldwin’s work; as much as the core of his worldview revolved around the necessity of ensuring that the past be rescued from oblivion in his present, his gaze is also forever directed towards an imagined future – one existing, crucially, far beyond the reach of his own lifetime. The promise of a truly changed world is the promise of a new generation; Baldwin’s grandfather may have been ‘defeated long before he died’ precisely because ‘he really believed what white people said about him’, but the writer’s words to his young nephew in The Fire Next Time contain a message of resilience and hope, a firm belief that he need not meet that same fate – ‘For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.’⁸⁴ As ever with Baldwin, the private intersects with the public, a personal injunction to his own kin having also served as a mantra for an entire subsequent generation of African Americans, many of them taking up the work he left unfinished, some even in the realm of his beloved cinema. If Baldwin’s awakening to his own subjectivity and place in the world came through reading, watching, and listening to those who came before him, for directors such as Raoul Peck (whose 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro is based upon Remember This House) and Barry Jenkins (director of a 2018 adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk), that awakening came from reading, watching, and listening to Baldwin himself. Peck recalls that, as an adolescent, ‘Baldwin was one of the few authors I could call “my own”’, and Jenkins has described the writer as a ‘cape or a shawl I wrapped myself in’ during times of personal struggle; ‘massive, humbling, nurturing’.⁸⁵ Yet if both men owe a profound debt, it is perhaps one they have also come some way towards repaying, succeeding in finally bringing Baldwin’s mind and words to the screen in a manner befitting his legacy. Though divergent in many ways, not least at the fundamental level of genre, both I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk speak in a distinctly Baldwinian vocabulary, relishing the power of the kind of fully articulated black interiority Baldwin found to be so lacking in the cinema of his day. In Peck’s film, that interiority is Baldwin’s own, as the writer’s narrated words are presented in concert with a kaleidoscopic collection of archival images, including those of recent Black Lives Matter protests in the United States. True to Baldwin’s diagnosis, the story may still be unfinished, but, in the continuing fight for recognition and justice, his words might speak even more powerfully to us today than they did during his own lifetime.

In Jenkins’s cinema (including, but not limited to his adaptation of Beale Street), we find an evocation of the altogether more private impulses of Baldwin’s vision of selfhood, the kind of intimate self that emerges in the darkness and quiet of an auditorium – a subjectivity that can resist, as the Baldwin of The Devil Finds Work does, in the inherent power of its presence, the piercing defiance of its gaze.⁸⁶ Indeed, if Baldwin’s and Jenkins’s filmic grammars share one key component, it is that interpellative gesture of the cinematic eye which looks directly back at the camera, appearing to bridge (or perhaps even to ‘shatter’) the gap between the worlds on and off the screen, between so-called ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. The ‘oppositional gaze’ of the black spectator meets its on-screen reflection in what Jenkins has affectionately termed ‘Baldwin’s Black ecstatic’, the ‘boundless expressiveness possible in alight faces’.⁸⁷ The rich inner lives of his cinematic subjects are suggested, above all else, by the flickering animism of their eyes, captured, more often than not, in lingering, intimate close-up. This is nowhere more striking than in Jenkins’s experimental film The Gaze, which accompanies his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s speculative historical novel The Underground Railroad. For fifty-two minutes, Jenkins presents a series of tableaux, portraits of the hundreds of African American background actors on his set – standing, in his words, ‘in the spaces where our ancestors stood’, allowing, finally, for the ‘feeling of seeing them, truly seeing thefm’.⁸⁸ But, of course, even as these people are objects of the gaze, they are also rendered its subjects; staring straight down the lens of the camera, they do what hooks tells us was never permitted of the African American in bondage: they defiantly look back. (Figure 2).

Jenkins’s ‘black gaze’ realises, then, a form of subjective agency of which Baldwin himself was, unsurprisingly, acutely conscious:

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.⁸⁹

Nowhere is this multivalent structure of gazing more apparent than in the space of the cinema which, as ever in Baldwin’s view, is never just that, but rather a microcosm of the nation at large, an America in miniature. Whether on a screen or in the mind, the ‘Negro’ amounts to little more than an idea, an image, metonymising a traumatic African American history of not only being forever looked at, but deprived of the subjective power of one’s own gaze in turn. Yet if this is the grim American reality which Baldwin tells us must be unflinchingly faced if it is to have any chance of being changed, then in the cinema, such rhetoric can become radically embodied, literalised in a reimagined politics of gazing, whereby the eyes of spectator and image (black or white) are made to meet – a mutual animation of subjectivity in both representation and reception. Just as the young Jimmy, maligned by his stepfather for his ‘frog-eyes’, first escaped the delusions of self-hatred in meeting the similar ‘pop eyes’ of a glamorous Bette Davis on the silver screen, so might persistent acts of looking, looking back, and, most important of all, refusing to look away, both within the cinema and without, hold the key to dispelling far greater delusions.⁹⁰ Such is the crux of James Baldwin’s radical cinematic imagination; if film does not passively reflect our reality but actively forms it, then surely it can be used to reform it too.

The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the best dissertation in the Cambridge University final examination in English. The article printed here is the Prize Essay for 2024.

Footnotes