“It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it do anything else, since the camera sees what you point at it: the camera sees what you want it to see,” James Baldwin wrote in “The Devil Finds Work,” published in 1976. “The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.” And the language of our dreams as they are projected on screen is the language of a people, he wrote, who see what they want to see but not always what is there.
But in films Baldwin found that, even though the camera rarely lies, its accessible nature allows us to easily see what is hidden, and brings it to the surface. “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film,” a series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center running September 11-14, combines work that Baldwin himself appeared in — his love for film equaled his love of being filmed — and those that he wrote about in various books and essays over a 30-plus year career. According to his biographer David Leeming, Baldwin “was a film enthusiast” from an early age who later “would long to see one of his own works on the screen.” He wrote so perceptively about cinema that it’s hard not to wonder what kind of film he himself would have made. Indeed, it seems, at one point he harbored aspirations: “About my interests: I don’t know if I have any,” he wrote in the essay “Autobiographical Notes,” which opens his most famous book, “Notes of a Native Son,” published in 1955, “unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.”
Baldwin never did make a film, although they seemed to dominate his life and work: He wrote a script about Malcolm X that was never produced; directors attempted, at various points, to adapt his work, although most were unsuccessful; he created many fictional characters who were film actors; he forged relationships with many filmmakers who he respected, including Joseph Losey (who at one time wanted to adapt Baldwin’s novel “Another Country,” with Robert DeNiro and Richard Pryor in the lead roles), Costa-Gavras, and Ingmar Bergman.
“Go Tell it on the Mountain” (1984), an adaptation of Baldwin’s first novel, first published in 1953, is a thin movie-of-the-week version of the autobiographical book. “Now, obviously, the only way to translate the written word to the cinema involves doing considerable violence to the written word, to the extent, indeed, of forgetting the written word,” Baldwin wrote in “The Devil Finds Work.” Directed by Stan Lathan, who has gone on to work in reality television, and starring a credible host of actors trying their best (if anything can be said about the film it’s that it doesn’t do enough violence to the written word), it remains faithfully plain. It fits nicely with Pierre Chenal’s adaptation of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” (1951), a novel that haunted Baldwin’s earliest essays, and which is only elevated by Wright himself starring in the lead role of Bigger Thomas, a meta-fictional experiment that is bold if not entirely successful.
Baldwin was better portrayed, his ideas better communicated, through documentaries in which he appeared. “Take This Hammer,” produced by public media station KQED, follows Baldwin around San Francisco in 1963, speaking to people in the different communities about their struggles. Produced almost two decades later, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” directed by Pat Hartley and Dick Fontaine, sees Baldwin on another trip, this time through the places he visited in the South during the Civil Rights era. Baldwin is a terrific public speaker — “Baldwin’s Nigger” (1968) is maybe the greatest example of this in the series — but in these documentaries he often gives over to listening and letting others speak. Without the cloak of a fictional narrative, with Baldwin present but his voice in the background, it was more difficult for the camera to capture the language of our dreams.
“James Baldwin: The Price of a Ticket,” newly restored and remastered, offers the most insight and is the most comprehensive film in the series. A portrait of Baldwin’s life and ideas told through a wealth of documentary footage — much of it found in the aforementioned films and others in the series — and talking-head interviews with collaborators and contemporaries, it seems to project something the other films can’t or are not willing to attempt, and which Baldwin’s best work always achieves: something revealing.
At the same time, maybe this is just the illusion of cinema. As Baldwin once wrote: “The distance between oneself — the audience — and a screen performer is an absolute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerading as intimacy.”
