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| Director Raoul Peck |
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| Ernest Cole gravesite |
ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND B+ France (105 mi) 2024 d: Raoul Peck
Not like the brazen giant of Greek
fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, November 2, 1883, bronze plaque inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty
Raoul Peck is the maker of The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), LUMUMBA (2000), SOMETIMES IN APRIL (2005), MOLOCH TROPICAL (2009), and 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro (2016), each one substantially different than the next. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which has a proud history of being one of the three major revolutions of the 19th century at a time when there were no other free black republics, his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1991, finding asylum and a new life working for the United Nations in the Republic of Congo, which became their second home for nearly twenty-five years, raised in the Congo, United States, France, and Germany, where Peck earned an economic-engineering Master’s degree at the University of Berlin and then studied film at the Academy of Cinema and Television in Berlin (DFFB). After the restoration of democratic rule, he served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from 1996 to 1997, while also spending two years as a professor for screenwriting and directing at NYU Tish School of the Arts graduate program, and is also an artist-in-residence at the New School, a Greenwich Village private research university in New York City. In 2010 he was appointed Chairman of La Fémis in Paris, the prestigious French national film school, a position that he retains as he continues to live in Paris, New York, and Haiti. He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events, pointing his camera where others prefer not to look, at racism, colonialism, genocide, but also resistance, where he has a unique ability to seamlessly blend art and politics, turning to people like James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois and other writers and intellectuals because he could see in their work that they not only had artistic visions about themselves as writers, but also as thinkers and activists, people who were parts of larger revolutionary struggles and movements. Having already made films about Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba, and James Baldwin, for Peck, the demythologizing of white supremacy and colonial ideologies has been a lifelong project, as genocide is an unspeakable word for some people. Black Lives Matter is an unspeakable phrase for some people. Trans rights are unspeakable for some people, yet these issues are crucial and transformative in the world of today, where there is a special urgency in the continuing struggle for human empathy, as we seem to have lost our moral vision and the ideals that helped define this country as a bastion of freedom.
Most have probably never heard of the featured artist before seeing this film, awarded the Golden Eye Best Documentary award at Cannes, where Peck has resurrected the career of a relatively obscure yet seminal artist of the 20th century, South African photographer Ernest Cole, the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a world audience, and in doing so accentuate the stark realities of colonial oppression. Born and raised in an all-black township near Pretoria, one of the traumatic events that shaped his life was witnessing the demolition of his neighborhood to make way for whites, bulldozed completely to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble in order to guarantee no one could possible return, a pattern that persisted throughout many black neighborhoods, typically given only a few hours notice, accompanied by a strong police presence, as this was an urban renewal project driven by an ideology of white supremacy. Ten percent of all South Africans, the majority white, owned more than 90% of national wealth, as some 80% of the population, overwhelmingly black, owned nothing at all. The core of apartheid policy and power revolved around land, beginning in 1948, as black South Africans were stripped of their land and relocated to racially segregated townships far outside the city, where home ownership was practically impossible. Black townships became extremely overcrowded and unsanitary, as they were distinctly cut off from infrastructure and urban utilities, living under tin roofs without services such as water and electricity, leaving people to fend for themselves. From 1960 to 1983, the apartheid government policy of Forced Removals moved 3.5 million black South Africans in one of the largest mass removals of people in modern history. Other incidents like the Sharpeville massacre left deep scars, as nearly 100 people were shot, many in the back fleeing police, including children, while over 200 were wounded. Amidst this climate of fear and oppression, Cole discovered photography, capturing raw moments through his lens, which was his way to process the insanity happening all around him, where collecting evidence was a matter of survival, impressing the editors at Drum magazine, loosely modeled on America’s Life magazine, one of the few publications giving a platform to black voices, where in 1958 at the age of 18 he worked as an assistant to Jürgen Schadeberg, the magazine’s chief photographer and picture editor, capturing images on the streets of Pretoria, exposing unvarnished truths that others tried to hide. Peck includes excerpts of interviews with Cole from Jürgen Schadeberg’s 2006 documentary about the artist, the only known interview of Cole on camera. Working as a photographer at Bantu World, the black daily newspaper of Johannesburg, he photographed the daily indignities black people endured, risking his life every day, learning how to shoot at eye level while hiding his camera as he walked inconspicuously down the street and blended into crowds, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip | LaKeith Stanfield YouTube (1:23). Cole also began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans, including journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement, so it helped radicalize his viewpoint to counter the official erasure of black history, as his anger only increased at the silence or complicity of the West in the face of the horrors of apartheid, where a jazzy score by Alexei Aigui and the music of Duke Ellington are beautifully integrated into the images of interconnecting worlds, Fleurette Africaine (African Flower) (Remastered) YouTube (3:36).
Ernest Cole is the first black freelance photographer in South Africa, and the first photojournalist, whose early pictures were shocking at the time of their first publication, as viewers of this film can see, perhaps for the first time, some of the decades-long compilation of work that formed his 1967 book House of Bondage, the only volume of Cole’s work to appear during his lifetime, comprised of 183 photographs accompanied by scattered texts, which was subsequently banned in South Africa. In the book, Cole writes, “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa have placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem, and surrounded us with hate.” These searing photographs shone a light on issues the world could no longer ignore, and practically overnight he became renowned, though it came at great personal cost. Arrested by the South African police because of his activities, declared a threat by the apartheid government, Cole had no choice but to seek asylum in America, managing to outwit the Race Classification Board, which classified people into one of three groups, native, coloured, or white (Racial Classification Under Apartheid), though Asians were later added as a separate group, when he was re-classified as “coloured” by changing his name from Kole to Cole. This gave him more freedom of movement privileges and he was soon able to leave South Africa in 1966, smuggling negatives with the help of Joseph Lelyveld (and intelligence officers from the U.S. embassy), then the New York Times’ South African correspondent, who also began to hire him for assignments. While the featured photographs are riveting, they are accompanied by a first-person commentary written by Peck, adapted from letters and testimonies of family, friends, and those who knew him that are read in voiceover by actor LaKeith Stanfield from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) as a stand-in for Cole, providing the detail of his life in his “own” words, elevating Cole to a full-fledged co-writer of the film, becoming a de facto narrator, providing existential insight into the artist himself, allowing his words and images to speak for themselves, which recalls similar commentary by Samuel L. Jackson appropriating the magisterial quality of James Baldwin in 2017 Top Ten List #3 I Am Not Your Negro. But unlike the eloquence of Jackson, this dry, off-putting reading is emotionally deflating, feeling overly detached, creating a distinct separation between viewers and the content, where he continues to narrate even from beyond the grave, a point of view that can feel confusing at times, which is the biggest hurdle for this film to overcome, and it’s not entirely successful, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:45). The photographs, however, are a different story, bringing with them an unending barrage of searing intensity, taking viewers back to a different time, reminding us that the hate and racial restrictions of apartheid have never really left us, as they have returned with a vengeance to a contemporary world that has no use for immigrants or minorities, who continue to be blamed for all the world’s ills, just as they were in the last century. Giving voice to a feeling that many marginalized people happen to experience, the essential question is what progress has really been made? Has it only been a façade? Has the appearance of tolerance and a quest for social justice only been a cover for deeper, crueler intentions that are rearing their ugly head today? This film quietly, and intently, answers those questions with a noxious force, as some lives are simply viewed as disposable, where we’ve lost the capacity to feel empathy for the plight of others. This past year, for instance, has been one of the deadliest in recent memory for journalists and photographers covering state-sanctioned violence, particularly in Gaza. But these pictures say it all, as they are agonizingly raw and unpretentiously honest, a towering achievement capturing the essence of humanity in some of our darkest moments.
At least initially, Cole was brimming with optimism about a new world that awaited him, filled with hopes and dreams of a world without prejudice, without the maddening fear, without the endless persecution and nullification of all identity, where there’s a gorgeous injection of music that is cleverly ironic, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found | Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:17), featuring the Manhattan Brothers, a popular South African singing group during the apartheid era with a harmony style that drew on American R&B Doo-wop music, and a very young Miriam Makeba, South Africa’s own (also exiled), still in her early 20’s, Lovely Lies - Manhattan Brothers And Miriam Makeba (1956) YouTube (2:50). One thing that surprised him was the presence of happy interracial couples and queer couples kissing and holding hands in public, as that was something he never saw in South Africa, with Peck creating a montage of photos, many of which have not been seen by the public before, where it was unprecedented to work with an archive of this massive size. Arguably the best sequence of the film is the artist analyzing one of his own photographs, detail by detail, where he’s able to see things that others overlook, evaluating the looks on people’s faces, either passive curiosity, or anxiety tinged with fear, or downright panic, watching the police go about their business of routinely stopping a young black boy on the street, as blacks were not allowed to circulate in white neighborhoods without a specific pass, described as a policy of “good neighborliness” by Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, where the demeaning and dehumanizing treatment the boy is subjected to is simply incomprehensible to imagine for whites, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found - Exclusive Clip YouTube (1:25). As improbable as it sounds, just the taking of that photo was considered a crime, as documentary photography was illegal by a government that feared photography so much that they also banned foreign journalists. Cole had a hard time adjusting to a new life in exile, feeling that he was pigeonholed into becoming a chronicler of misery, the only assignments magazines wanted to offer him, never allowed to expand into other areas of photography like his white counterparts, but he refused to subject himself to a life of unending personal trauma, having reached a creative and professional dead end that left him psychologically burdened, where he can be heard in exasperation, “exile is destroying us one by one,” where he was particularly troubled when his request for a passport to return home was denied. A recurring phrase heard throughout the film is Cole’s belief that “one day South Africa will be free,” which bears a resemblance to a controversial chant associated with Palestinian liberation, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The depth of his American photographs of New York City and the Jim Crow South carry the same weight, but were largely ignored, dismissed by his white editors as “having no edge,” so he never submitted them, but 275 photographs are the subject of a belated book release in 2024, Ernest Cole: The True America, with Peck writing in the preface, “On the contrary, it seems that most damaging for him, was the discovery that even in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, in a country that prides itself on being the bedrock of democracy and does not shy away from lecturing the rest of the world, there was misery, racism, ignorance, and solitude, regardless of one’s success or fame.”
Drawing unmistakable parallels between South African apartheid and the racism of the Jim Crow South, Cole came to the startling realization that in South Africa he was afraid of being arrested, while in the American South he was afraid of being shot, a reality that is particularly chilling for black men, who were still being lynched in the 1960's, Ernest Cole Lost and Found Movie - video Dailymotion YouTube (2:00). Think about that and allow that to marinate for a minute, as it creates a visceral reaction, suggesting that being black in America poses a much greater danger than the horrifying atrocities experienced during apartheid, which this country whole-heartedly deplored (James Baldwin reached the same conclusion, which is why he left America in 1948 to live in France), where this dichotomy caused Cole no end of grief, feeling homesick, falling into a spiral of depression and isolation, rarely finding stability or steady income, ending his life mired in poverty, homelessness, and anonymity, where he died a lonely death from untreated pancreatic cancer at the early age of 49 in 1990. Just days after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and one year before apartheid was dismantled, Cole died believing the bulk of his life’s work had simply disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace, as his book fell out of print for decades while his body of work was considered lost for over forty years. Cole made repeated trips to Sweden during the late 60’s and early 70’s, only for a collection of 60,000 35mm film negatives to inexplicably resurface in a bank vault in Stockholm in 2017, with most returned to his family, but 500 archival prints from House of Bondage are still a matter of dispute between his heirs, who founded the Ernest Cole Family Trust, headed by his nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, who provided full archival access for this film, and the Hasselblad Foundation, a not-for-profit Swedish foundation dedicated to promoting Nordic photographers, which organized the Ernest Cole Photographer exhibition that toured South Africa in 2010-11 and was later shown in the United States, featuring 113 rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s archive, yet stubbornly, or selfishly, refuse to relinquish control. The film never addresses the source of this dispute, or explain the secret of the missing items, or even the late disappearance of Cole, dropping completely out of sight, remaining an exile disconnected from his roots, all of which remains clouded under an unexplained mystery, leaving unanswered questions at the end of the film that simply linger in our thoughts, unable to fathom what really happened, but the value of these photographs today is inestimable. South Africa publicly displayed his photographs for the first time in 2001 with the opening of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where a permanent part of the museum is his collection entitled Life under Apartheid, forming a kind of elegiac collective memory, with so many artists failing to be recognized for their contributions until after their deaths, yet the fact that we are still discussing these works today speaks to Cole’s impact.
Postscript
While a dispute over ownership rights with other agencies continues, as documented here, Ernest Cole's photographs are finally coming home, but ..., the Hasselblad controversy has ended, as on May 7, 2024, just prior to the Cannes Film Festival premiere, the Hasselblad Foundation handed over 496 vintage Ernest Cole prints to Leslie Matlaisane, chairman of the Ernest Cole Family Trust (Hasselblad Foundation | We're pleased to announce a ...). Claiming they were “entrusted to us by image agency Tiofoto and its co-founder Rune Hassner, they’ve been safeguarded and maintained in optimal condition,” this puts an end to at least part of the contentious struggle to exercise control over the remarkable legacy of Ernest Cole, marking this as part of a recent pattern of European nations repatriating invaluable African artworks to their rightful owners, as depicted in the recent Mati Diop film DAHOMEY (2024), where 26 plundered royal artifacts from the African kingdom of Dahomey that had been exhibited in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris for more than 100 years were finally returned to Benin.
Director Raoul Peck Shares Thoughts on Ernest Cole Lost ... Curvy Critic (Carla Renata) interview with Raoul Peck, November 24, 2024 on YouTube (10:02)
Aljazeera— Studio B: Unscripted A filmed conversation between filmmaker Raoul Peck and Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, May 27, 2024 on YouTube (48:37)
Photographer, who inspired a generation of anti-apartheid ... Ernest Cole (2006) documentary by Jürgen Schadeberg on YouTube (53:41)
