IIt’s safe to say that James Baldwin was not a fan of The Exorcist. “That just doesn’t work,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir-criticism collection, The Devil Finds Work. “With the exception of Satan, he’s definitely the star.” William Friedkin’s 1973 horror may have wreaked havoc in theaters with its hit portrayal of a possessed high school girl, but it was a For a giant of American literature, it was a flashy failure that really missed the mark. “For I have seen the devil day and night, and I have seen it in you and in me,” he continued. “He doesn’t float around the bed or play with little girls. We do.”
Baldwin was not an opportunistic critic who slammed commercial blockbusters. He is an avid movie buff who became obsessed with movies when he was a child in Harlem, where a teacher named Orilla “Bill” Miller took him to see a movie. These early trips were the beginning of his lifelong love affair. He went to the movie theater as often as he could, seeing everything from The Maltese Falcon to his 1959 Lynchian drama I Spit on Your Grave. Baldwin scholar Caryl Phillips said that although literature was his greatest love, “Baldwin discovered movies before he discovered books, and he never forgot the influence early movies had on him.” .
New season begins at London’s Barbican By presenting a series of films that are thematically or more directly related to Baldwin’s work, the author’s well-known nonfiction works, such as the essay collections No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name, will be screened. and “The devil does his job” into the conversation. work. Barry Jenkins, who directed 2017’s “Beale Street Could Talk,” is on board. Meanwhile, Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” and Steve McQueen’s “The Hunger” were also screened, along with Ayo Akingbird, a young black British filmmaker who drew inspiration from Baldwin, and Leah. There will also be a talk by Mr. Storr.
In The Devil Finds a Job, Baldwin says: Approximately 60 movies He carefully weaves bits and pieces of his life and observations about race and America, which are his main interests. He recalled his father’s fascination with Bette Davis, a white movie star who was not his mother (“I realized that my father was sick, not lying”), and Margaret Farrand Thorpe’s The “escape from persona” theory states that Golden Age viewers saw themselves in the stars on screen. “No one blackens the character of running away.”
His most scathing criticism is reserved for the interracial romance “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” in which Sidney Poitier’s character, a doctor, tells his disapproving father: I consider myself a man. “It means that men exist only in the brutally limited vocabulary of people who consider themselves white,” Baldwin says.
Phillips said The Devil’s Work is Baldwin’s most “underrated work of nonfiction,” and in 2014 The Atlantic called it “The most powerful piece of film criticism ever written”. But even for many Baldwin fans, this work sits outside the established canon. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth, but some of his writings Reissued by Penguin ClassicsThe Devil Finds Work is not among them.
Barbican season curator Clive Chijoke Nwonka hopes audiences will see a new side of Baldwin. “Documents like ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ and ‘Meeting the Man in Paris: James Baldwin’ portray him as a polemicist, but there are so many layers to him. He was an extraordinary film critic and someone who truly understood the form of film criticism. “Only one of Baldwin’s novels was made into a film in his lifetime. In 1985, two years before his death from stomach cancer, a television version of the author’s first novel, “Let’s Talk”, was well received. It wasn’t until 1998, when Baldwin’s beloved work was brought to the big screen with the release of Where the Heart Is, which was inspired by Baldwin. In 2018, Barry Jenkins produced the sequel to Moonlight, A Tale of Beale Street.
Phillips doesn’t think it’s surprising that there is such a lack of adaptations. The literary world Baldwin creates is often very vast. “Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” and “Just Above My Head” are expansive novels that travel across vast stretches of time. It’s not easy to fit it into a 90 minute running time. With the exception of Giovanni’s Room, all of his books ripe for adaptation have been published. ”
Mr Nwonka has a different view. “All novels are shown on television, although they may not be suitable for film,” he says. “We live in an era where projects can span six or 12 episodes. Having that luxury allows showrunners to explore parts of Baldwin’s world. I didn’t know if “Railroad” could be made into a movie, but look at how Barry Jenkins handled it.”
Phillips said Baldwin “actively aspired” to the exposure and fame that only Hollywood could bring, and that if pushed, Baldwin “would covet an Oscar as much as a Pulitzer Prize.” He said he would have admitted that he had done so. He certainly wasn’t shy about pitching his ideas to directors.
When he was assigned to interview Ingmar Bergman for Esquire magazine in 1960, while they were discussing it in the director’s office in Stockholm, he described his idea for the film as follows: “The master is white as a ship’s sail, and the slave is black as the sea,” he wrote.
It was the story of an enslaved man who died in the center aisle protecting a woman who was giving birth to a child. The child then grows up to lead a slave revolt and is hanged, only to reappear in every generation as a Reconstruction-era politician who “left Congress and was murdered.” A World War I soldier who was “buried alive.” Crazy jazz musician. And finally, the modern incarnation of “Junkie.”
Like nearly all of Baldwin’s film aspirations, this project was destined to go unfulfilled. This is not due to a lack of effort on the part of the author. When Jenkins was working on Beale Street, Baldwin’s sister gave him a list of directors, including Gordon Parks and François Truffaut, who she wanted to direct the story, and how she wanted the story to be directed. I gave him a brown leather bound notebook with notes on what to make.
There were also concrete suggestions. Rainer Werner Fassbinder approached Baldwin about adapting Giovanni’s Room, as did black British filmmaker Horace Ove, who had filmed a documentary about Baldwin during his stay in London in the 1960s. Both believed they had secured the rights, but due to the author’s dislike of legal agreements and contracts, neither was able to secure the rights and the film was never produced. “Jimmy wasn’t the kind of guy who would dot the I-state and cross the Te-state,” Phillips says.
However, the trappings of Hollywood were appealing to Baldwin. At the height of his fame in the 1960s, he became close friends with Poitier, Harry his Belafonte, Richard his Burton, Yves his Montand and others. Baldwin hung out with Ava Gardner, and he claimed that he once tried to convince her that she was the perfect person to play Billie Holiday, even though she was white. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, Baldwin reportedly heard the news poolside at Billy Dee Williams’ home in Los Angeles. He was in town working on the script for Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm The script was ruined because he was reportedly considering doing so.
Perhaps the most tragic of his failed film projects was his last attempt to make Giovanni’s Room.British director Michael Raeburn and Baldwin worked on the script Late 1970s. After a decoy limousine meeting in Paris, Marlon Brando was cast as the bisexual protagonist Guillaume, with Robert De Niro reportedly also interested. However, as with previous efforts, interest faded, and the 211-page script languished in Raeburn’s London apartment for 40 years. “There’s no way that would ever be built,” Phillips says. “Even though it was very filmable, because of how homophobic the industry was.”
Despite that disappointment, a biopic of Baldwin is being produced starring Billy Porter, but Baldwin’s recent interview with the Guardian suggests that he has a slightly lower level of political awareness than the great writer. It has been shown. Even if the project is doomed to suffer the Baldwin curse, the Barbican’s new program will delve deeper into the thinker whose first love was always cinema.
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The Devil Found a Job: James Baldwin Through the Films runs from 2nd to 22nd May at the Barbican in London
