The legacy of James Baldwin in cinema | Little White Lies

James Baldwin

The lega­cy of James Bald­win in cinema

16 Jan 2025

Words by Mathew Ko

A Black man in a suit and tie, wearing a thoughtful expression, leaning against a curtain.
A Black man in a suit and tie, wearing a thoughtful expression, leaning against a curtain.
A cen­tu­ry after the birth of James Bald­win, his words con­tin­ue to echo across film­mak­ing culture.

Sit­ting atop a Brook­lyn sky­scraper in his black Spi­der suit, red hood­ie, and Nike Air Jor­dan 1 sneak­ers, a young Black boy, Miles Morales, dons his mask and pre­pares for his leap of faith. Inspired by his fam­i­ly through voiceover (“I see this spark in you… What­ev­er you choose to do with it, you’ll be great… Our fam­i­ly doesn’t run from things… You’re the best of all of us, Miles. You’re on your way. Just keep going.”) he is remind­ed of who he is and what he rep­re­sents. Leap­ing off the build­ing, with his hip-hop anthem in the back­ground, the cam­era inverts as he is eman­ci­pat­ed and ris­es” to take his place as the sav­iour of his city.

This is a world descend­ed from the writ­ings of James Bald­win (Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time’ is seen on Miles’ table), and the pow­er of cin­e­ma and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Over 100 years after The Birth of a Nation, the Spi­der­verse films reimag­ine the con­cepts of author­i­ty and iden­ti­ty. Blur­ring the lines between real­i­ty and the myth­ic, cin­e­ma has the pow­er of imag­i­na­tion as the lan­guage of the cam­era is the lan­guage of our dreams.”

James Bald­win, the famed writer and civ­il rights activist, was one of the most impor­tant voic­es in 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. In his book-length essays The Dev­il Finds Work’ and The Fire Next Time’, he wrote about the role of race and its rela­tion­ship to fam­i­ly, author­i­ty, pop cul­ture, and pol­i­tics in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. Bald­win argues that Black par­ents and author­i­ty fig­ures such as the church, teach their chil­dren a mod­el of inequity and oppres­sion. Leav­ing his life as a Pen­te­costal preach­er, he believed a change in race rela­tions and social accep­tance could even­tu­al­ly come from writ­ing and the arts. On the anniver­sary of the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, Bald­win advis­es his nephew to active­ly par­tic­i­pate in con­struct­ing his own iden­ti­ty, rather than accept the nar­ra­tive hand­ed down to him by pre­vi­ous generations.

As a teenag­er, Bald­win recalls attend­ing Orson Welles’ Voodoo Mac­beth in Harlem – the first time I ever real­ly saw black actors at work was on the stage: and it is impor­tant to empha­size that the peo­ple I was watch­ing were black, like me”. In this self-reflec­tion, Bald­win express­es that rep­re­sen­ta­tion is impor­tant as it val­i­dates self and social accep­tance in soci­ety. Bald­win wrote about the dif­fi­cul­ties of the Black hero” in Hol­ly­wood. He believed that Black actors lied about the world” he knew and debased it. In Amer­i­can film, Bald­win argues that heroes, so far as I could then see, were white, and not mere­ly because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were sim­ply a reflec­tion”. Black heroes were used as ves­sels for White audi­ences to jus­ti­fy white his­to­ry and ide­ol­o­gy and could nev­er break free from stereo­typ­i­cal depictions.

White heroes on the oth­er hand expressed the self-image and desires of 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. In film, Baldwin’s expe­ri­ence as a Black man dif­fered from what he saw on screen and cri­tiques the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of the white gaze” and the cam­era. Bald­win describes Nor­man Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night as con­vey­ing the anguish of peo­ple trapped in a leg­end.”, not­ing the film­mak­ers are indebt­ed to the leg­end of White Amer­i­ca and encour­age White Amer­i­cans to keep dream­ing. White audi­ences want­ed to feel safe and per­ceive a real­i­ty that they had the com­mands of moral­i­ty. Cri­tiquing the fade-out kiss”, Bald­win felt for White Amer­i­cans, it was a device of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion” and need­ed among a peo­ple for whom so much had to be made possible”.

A close-up of a distressed Black man with tears in his eyes, looking alarmed.

At the begin­ning of 1968, Bald­win trav­elled to Hol­ly­wood to adapt The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Mal­colm X’. In the writ­ing of the screen­play, Bald­win was assigned a tech­ni­cal” expert where his deliv­ered scenes would be trans­lat­ed” into cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage. Peer­ing behind the cur­tain, Bald­win saw the loss of indi­vid­ual cre­ative auton­o­my as film­mak­ing is a col­lec­tive process. In cin­e­mat­ic trans­la­tion, Bald­win writes that adap­ta­tion involves doing con­sid­er­able vio­lence” to the writ­ten word, and the sub­tle choic­es in trans­la­tion result in an act that presents a film the way author­i­ta­tive fig­ures want to. Wit­ness­ing the back­ground machin­ery of the oppres­sive White author­i­ta­tive fig­ure, Bald­win asks the audi­ence, What do the film­mak­ers wish us to learn?”

In the alle­go­ry of Plato’s Cave, pris­on­ers are chained and forced to watch a wall where pup­peteers and fire project shad­ows. The shad­ows become the pris­on­ers’ real­i­ty, which dis­torts the real world. Once released, a pris­on­er adjusts to actu­al­i­ty, and when he tries to con­vince his fel­low pris­on­ers to leave, they do not desire to go as the cave is their real­i­ty. Film audi­ences are impris­oned in this sys­tem as their per­cep­tion of real­i­ty is dis­tort­ed based on what they see on screen. Black audi­ences must be eman­ci­pat­ed from this impris­on­ment, observe the world’s actu­al­i­ties, and become author­i­ta­tive fig­ures to change the per­cep­tions of their rep­re­sen­ta­tion on screen. In mod­ern cinema’s new col­lec­tive auton­o­my, Black artists have the free­dom to express their social iden­ti­ty on screen. With the emer­gence of Black artists includ­ing actors, direc­tors, cos­tume design­ers, edi­tors, and writ­ers, these artists are not bound to the racial char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and stereo­types of White audi­ences but become the author­i­ty of the nar­ra­tive of Black sto­ries on screen.

When Bald­win died in 1987, a new wave of Black artists were already begin­ning to explore the social-polit­i­cal themes of Baldwin’s writ­ings. Led by Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, this marked the begin­ning of the free­dom to explore the chal­lenges of being Black in Amer­i­ca. This peri­od was ground­break­ing in its ambi­tion of por­tray­ing the Black expe­ri­ence in diverse gen­res and styles. Oth­er touch­stone films dur­ing this peri­od include exam­in­ing South­ern Goth­ic fam­i­ly ten­sions in Julie Dash’s Daugh­ters of the Dust and Kasi Lem­mons’ Eve’s Bay­ou, explor­ing the role of Black actress­es and being gay in Cheryl Dunye’s The Water­mel­on Woman, and the por­tray­al of polit­i­cal fig­ures in Spike Lee’s Mal­colm X. Black film­mak­ers were cre­at­ing films for the black gaze” and audi­ences could final­ly see them­selves in the Black heroes” of these sto­ries. From Black Pan­ther as a sav­iour of Black utopia to Get Out as a cau­tion­ary tale of Black dystopia, mod­ern film­mak­ers con­tin­ue to find new ways to reflect the image and feel­ings of the Black experience.

Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light and his adap­ta­tion of Baldwin’s nov­el If Beale Street Could Talk’ rep­re­sent the core themes and image of James Bald­win. The strug­gles of liv­ing with injus­tice in Amer­i­ca while explor­ing gen­er­a­tional and self-love offer a glimpse into Baldwin’s expe­ri­ences and expres­sion of mod­ern cin­e­ma. Bald­win saw the poten­tial of cin­e­ma to pro­vide a cel­e­bra­tion of the Black expe­ri­ence and social accep­tance if it could over­come the foun­da­tions of the white gaze” in Amer­i­ca. In this eman­ci­pa­tion, cin­e­ma offers a rev­e­la­tion of new author­i­ties and identities.

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