FILM IN REVIEW: THE CINEMATIC AFTERLIFE OF JAMES BALDWIN
2019; Wiley; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2019.0010
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumo2 0 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W T H E C I N E M A T I C A F T E R L I F E O F J A M E S B A L D W I N A Y T E N T A R T I C I To navigate James Baldwin’s enduring interest in novelistic adaptations is to live through a wide spectrum of emotions. In his 1976 movie-going memoir-cum-essay The Devil Finds Work, he notes feeling haunted by They Won’t Forget (1937), a movie based on the American novelist Ward Greene’s Death in the Deep South. In one scene, a black janitor testifies against a white schoolteacher to avoid being framed for the rape and murder of a white girl, terri fied of being railroaded by a corrupt justice system. On seeing the black actor Canada Lee in Orson Welles’s stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941), Baldwin exclaims at his mental unpreparedness to be so moved, recalling that he almost tumbled down from his balcony seat at the St. James Theatre. And, finally, Baldwin describes his intellectual dizziness at constantly shuttling back and forth between the films and the novels that inspired them: ‘‘I read A Tale of Two Cities – over and over and over again,’’ he confesses, before his beloved schoolteacher Bill Miller eventually takes him to see the movie version, ‘‘at the Lincoln, on 135th Street.’’ Baldwin’s own relationship with Hollywood was rockier, re- flecting a fascinated yet ambivalent stance toward swapping writ- 2 0 3 R ten text for the screen. In 1968, despite his family’s opposition, he found himself in Los Angeles working on an ever-expanding twohundred -page screenplay for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Baldwin aspired to overcome persistent African American stereotypes that populated the American screen, as embodied in the racialized vaudeville numbers of Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best, performers whose success in Hollywood had come at the expense of their dignity: ‘‘It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it.’’ Yet in 1969, in part distraught by his own tortured relationship with Columbia Studios, which had suggested that his script was unrealistic and unfilmable, he attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, and ultimately abandoned the film project. Writing five years later, perhaps on the basis of this bitter experience , Baldwin concludes that adaptation is always a deliberately imperfect translation, a self-conscious but necessary act of ‘‘violence to the written word.’’ What seems to trouble Baldwin most are the invariable choices directors must make in compressing their source material, choices that come at the cost of all the other decisions that could have been made but were not. As he writes, ‘‘The e√ect of these deliberate choices, deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act – that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see.’’ Making an artistic choice is fateful, almost synonymous with selective forgetting, and it is into this critical context that the Oscarwinning director Barry Jenkins enters with the first-ever adaptation of Baldwin’s fiction in If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). Published in 1974, Baldwin’s penultimate novel initially received mixed reviews. Writing for the Negro American Literature Forum, the civil rights activist Mary Fair Burks found it repetitive ‘‘ad nauseam,’’ recycling tired Baldwinian themes such as black victimization, police violence, and white lust for the black body. The New York Times critic Anatole Broyard panned it as sentimental , brimming with ‘‘stale jazz.’’ The novel, set in 1970s Harlem, traces the story of two sensitive young lovers, Fonny and Tish. Fonny is a sculptor with dreams of moving downtown. Just as they are on the verge of getting married and welcoming their first child, a white cop named Bell, who is attracted to Tish, pins the rape of Victoria Rogers, a Puerto Rican woman, on Fonny. 2 0 4 T A R T I C I Y Under police pressure, Victoria identifies Fonny in a lineup...
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