Curating the Civil Rights Archive in I am Not Your Negro and Dreams are Colder than Death
In my last post, I examined Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While most of the critical backlash against March Through Time has centered around the project’s “tonal dissonance,”—the seeming incompatibility of civil rights imagery and Fortnite’s cartoon style—I am most interested in the project’s failure to put civil rights photography to active use. In my post, I asserted that within the game’s virtual re-creation of the National Mall, players are forced to assume a passive, distant relationship to the images. This failure on the part of the project’s curation renders the struggles of the civil rights era equally distant, limiting the extent to which players recognize the on-going nature of anti-blackness in the present[1].
Perhaps it’s silly to expect a multi-billion dollar platform such as Fortnite to be capable of doing truly progressive work around Black social movement. Even so, I’m drawn to the centrality of the archive in this attempt to educate players on civil rights. March Through Time recognizes that archival images play a significant role in informing our relationship to the past, even if the way in which Fortnite integrates those images into its project falls short. This is not to say that there are only “appropriate” or “inappropriate” ways to engage the civil rights archive. I’m not attempting to delineate what counts as “misuse.” I simply want to ask: if we wish to educate by way of archival images, how should our experience of those images be curated? What visual and sonic arrangements invite viewers to ask new questions about the civil rights movement rather than restricting or delimiting our understanding of that history? What uses of the civil rights archive can aid viewers in comprehending the struggle of civil rights as ongoing rather than distant?
I believe that Rauol Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2014)are two documentary film texts that imbue the civil rights archive with an urgency that is lost in Fortnite’s March Through Time. Both films accomplish this urgent and active relationship to history through careful aesthetic and sonic curation.
Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, is a documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House. The film’s essay style narration, performed by Samuel L. Jackson, recounts Baldwin’s relationship to assassinated Black movement leaders and friends, Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King[2]. One of the film’s biggest accomplishments is its vast collection of repurposed archival imagery. The footage and photographs included in the documentary not only originate from and depict events from the civil rights era, but this archive is also inclusive of Hollywood film footage, photographs of Black lives lost to police violence, Black Lives Matter protest footage, and dreamlike tracking shots through contemporary environments. In imagining what James Baldwin would write about his friends in this unfinished manuscript, the film very deliberately moves between past and present, drawing critical comparisons between the concerns of nearly 60 years ago and those of today.
In her own essay on the film, scholar and historian Ellen Scott writes that Peck “achieves a curatorial feat in his selection and pairing of images and Baldwin’s words.”[3]I think one of the best demonstrations of Peck’s curatorial capacities happens in a sequence that tackles the effects of white violence and white supremacy. In this section of the film, we view stunning technicolor footage from the late 1950s. We view white people, armed with picket signs and baseball bats, passionately protesting integration. The white protestors angrily chant “We want King!” and this footage is intercut with rare, up-close technicolor footage of Martin Luther King Jr. ducking through an unruly crowd. Given that so much of the visual archive of civil rights imagery is rendered in black-and-white, this vibrant color footage of King instantly troubles our assumed relationship to the past with shocking immediacy. Peck reinforces this unsettling temporal experience by juxtaposing these vibrant, full color images with black-and-white footage from the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. In this footage, state violence is on full display. Police officers move through the city streets in armored tanks, they carry military grade weapons, and assault unarmed protestors. The meaning of this curatorial choice is made known in the clip that follows from James Baldwin’s 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark. When Baldwin voices his terror of the “moral apathy” of the “vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority,” viewers must reconcile the similarities between the technicolor footage of white protestors and the black-and-white footage of the Ferguson police. Not only does “white cruelty” remain consistent in the present, but it is also thoroughly integrated into the systems that proclaim to protect all of its citizens.
Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death is an experimental essay film that has been described as a visual “tapestry.” The film is interwoven with interviews featuring prominent Black studies scholars, images from the archive of slavery, photographs from the civil rights and Black power movements, renderings of deep space, and contemporary slow-motion footage of Black people simply living, walking, talking, and moving through their everyday lives. The film moves “across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective” with what Alessandra Raengo dubs a “aesthetic liquidity.”[4] As such, the film is afforded a temporal liquidity: it traffics from past to present in a manner similar to Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, but does so at an even larger scale in the spirit of contemplating Blackness and its meanings in the afterlife of slavery.
Despite this larger conceptual scale, Jafa’s film begins as a “lyrical meditation” on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech[5]. This film takes on the legacy of King, not by memorializing him through images, but instead by prefacing the film with a central question: Has King’s dream been achieved in the present? The question remains throughout the film as an audible motif. Passages from the “I Have a Dream Speech” are interwoven into the film’s sonic layers. As interviewees such as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten philosophize on the meanings of Blackness, King’s intentionally slowed voice echoes and resonates underneath the scholars’ voices, enhancing the “dreamlike” quality of the slow-moving tapestry of images that appear on the surface.
In her examination of Arthur Jafa’s visual aesthetics, Tina Campt suggests that Jafa’s use of slow-motion, or more precisely “still-moving-images,” are a Black visual aesthetic of refusal. According to Campt, Still-moving-images are “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or still images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between the multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them.”[6] In Dreams are Colder Than Death, Jafa’s still-moving-images of Black life “refuse” both stillness and movement in a way that insist on the presence and humanity of their subjects. The sonic incorporation of Martin Luther King’s speech similarly insists on its own presence as present, refusing to be rendered “past.” In this film, the “I Have A Dream” speech acts not as a passive soundtrack for the film, but instead becomes an active catalyst for exploring questions about what Blackness means and does in the present.
Dreams are Colder than Death and I Am Not Your Negro are exemplars of active engagement with the civil rights archive, and in this post I’ve provided brief illustrations of how these films carefully curate archival footage, photographs, and audio in a manner that challenges the passive curation inside Fortnite’s March Through Time. It is not lost on me that Peck and Jafa’s films, two experimental documentaries, are the exact kind of media that we would expect to tackle history in ways that ask new questions rather than presume answers. However, in placing these texts in conversation with one another, what occurs to me is that Fortnite is the most accessible of the three. I Am Not Your Negro is available to view on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Kanopy by those who are able to pay the necessary fee, but Dreams are Colder than Death has not been distributed to any streaming services. Jafa’s film has been screened in very limited viewing contexts such as in film festivals or university talks. In contrast, Fortnite is free and available on several platforms. Despite the game’s seeming incompatibility with the subject matter, I don’t think that TIME Studios was entirely off the mark in their desire to collaborate with Epic Games given the company’s reach. If reworked and rethought, could Fortnite’s March Through Time provide an engagement with civil rights history that not only closes the distance, but could also reach a very large audience of active players ? Or, are mainstream texts inherently incapable of challenging our relationship to the history of social movement? While I’m not sure how to answer these questions, I do think that our evolving media landscape will continue to force filmmakers and archivists to weigh questions of access moving forward.
[1]https://broadlytextual.com/2021/11/20/march-through-time-fortnites-passive-engagement-with-the-photographic-archive-of-civil-rights/
[2] http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/synopsis
[3] Ellen Scott, “‘Some One of Us Should Have Been There with Her’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in I Am Not Your Negro and Contemporary Black Experimental Documentary,” Jaimie Bron and Kristen Fuhs. I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue. (New York, NY;: Routledge, 2021), p.39
[4] Alessandra Raengo, “Close-Up: #BlackLivesMatter and Media: Dreams are Colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8, no.2 (Spring 2017) p.120.
[5] https://liquidblackness.com/arthur-jafa-dreams-are-colder-than-death
[6] Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal”, Women and Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, p.80