In this profound and cutting portrayal of James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016), Raoul Peck traced the haunted connection between two things: Baldwin’s extraordinary insight into being Black in America; and the depth of his sadness, self-doubt as well as relentless truth-telling. For Baldwin, it was always personal and political all at once — in ways that were uniquely bleak.
“Lost and Found,” Peck’s latest documentary, could be a companion to that earlier one in a sense. It isn’t as strong. But it is another deep-dish portrait of a Black artist the photographer Ernest Cole, born 1940 in Eersterust, South Africa, who took his camera to the streets beginning in the late ’50s to document apartheid’s wickedness’s and daily realities, who escaped to New York City in 1966, whose book of his South African photographs, “House of Bondage” (1967), woke up the world by showing people for the first time what apartheid looked like. What it was.
“I Am Not Your Negro” was held together by Samuel L. Jackson reading Baldwin’s writing with a voice of almost musical strength. In “Lost and Found,” LaKeith Stanfield reads Ernest Cole’s words letters etc., some of them quite moving but I don’t mean that we hear passages from letters or journals etc., which can have their own direct lyricism even if not written with the same kind of literary genius as Baldwin’s. What I’m getting at is something about these two movies’ relationship between writing and image-making: In “Lost and Found,” Cole’s photographs are the equivalent for him of whatever you want to call that quality in Baldwin which can make words sound like music (some people say he had a voice like an instrument); and, like I said, the photographs take up the whole film.
Cole saw a book of Henri Cartier Bresson’s images of Moscow and decided he wanted to do that. His black and white pictures have a Cartier-Bresson quality. They’re vérité dioramas of street scenes as well as psychological portraits of life within a caste system, they show us power dynamics between Black South Africans and white police officers (and sometimes Black ones too), for example, or white citizens’ blank indifference to poverty among the Black majority even when it’s right in front of them pulsating desperately. We see signs on entranceways or drinking fountains that say “Whites Only” our own diabolical system of segregation did not feature this particular variation on a theme and experience them as slaps.
Every day was life-threatening for Cole with his camera; but then again what else is new when you’re recording under totalitarianism? “I am collecting evidence,” he says. “And sometimes the monster looks back at me.” The lives of servants who got paid $15 a month were among those that he captured, as well as the misery in diamond/platinum/iron/gold mines (South Africa’s wealth base and regime-pillar) or neighborhoods being destroyed by “slum clearance” (whereby people were moved into tin-roof government ghettos) or every citizen having to carry a “passbook” containing record of his her life history because apartheid is violence both open secret rooted white-supremacist political culture baasskap etcetera also open e.g., Sharpville massacre March 21st 1960, 69 killed etcetera.
“House of Bondage” a book which took ten years to make had Cole known worldwide. However, these doors were only so wide and they could only take him so far because they limited what editors would hire him for; as a black photographer of social consciousness. He did receive funds from the Ford Foundation for a project he was working on. A portrait of the Deep South. But his pictures of Jim Crow life, while suggestive fell short in comparison with the brilliance, tenderness mingled with roughness exhibited by his South African works. He felt like an alien in an alien land and this is evident from those photographs.
And what about Cole besides work? This is where the film gets creepy and subtle at once. It seems like he didn’t have much after all (life). In New York City alone with his camera he documented freedom that didn’t resemble anything he ever experienced (we see portraits showing interracial couples, gay couples, women discovering themselves), but this wasn’t entirely true because it was not a freedom that embraced him completely or let him be partakers of its fullness. His isolation took many forms homesickness beyond comparison made him a stranger suffering from one place to another within himself depressed most times feeling out of place strange land syndrome always referring to “the story behind my slow descent into decline into hell” while at the same time being unable return back home country since the apartheid government would have arrested even just by setting foot there hence becoming invisible person etc.
But also in America especially New York where everybody else seemed happy except himself who always appeared as though he weren’t there at all since people would look through him like looking past thin air without noticing anything different about their environment whatsoever such kind of man being small (5’4″), ascetic monkish nature face reflecting certain sad puzzled expression, so much more therefore began hiding behind camera lens further away each day until eventually disappearing altogether from being seen by other individuals around him including those closest his own self such that no one seemed know anymore where he had gone to subsequently his book turned out be forgotten even homeless dying (of cancer) 1990 few weeks before Nelson Mandela got freed from jail thus becoming spirit.
However, “Lost and Found: Ernest Cole” is not just about a great photographer’s life story. In two thousand seventeen three safety deposit boxes were found in Stockholm filled with sixty thousand never before seen negatives of photographs taken by Cole. How they ended up there remains mystery to this day. The bank refuses comment on the matter which seems rather fishy if you ask me but anyways back onto the subject at hand – what happens next? Well as can be expected people start opening these boxes and once they do so organized film rolls come pouring out most shot within United States many shots having been featured throughout documentary itself when watching ‘Ernest Cole: Lost & Found’ you get hit with realization that although tragedy struck somewhere along way here still stands as an amazing accomplishment because even though photographer may have died young leaving behind only few years worth of work behind him each photo At the end of it all you just feel haunted by something more than his ghost.
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