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France 24
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Trump turning US into authoritarian regime, says Emmy winner
Raoul Peck -- who also won an Emmy for "I Am Not Your Negro", his acclaimed portrait of Black American writer James Baldwin -- told AFP that "all the signs are there, all the facts are there, where every section of society is attacked. "I hope Americans will realise that they are already in an authoritarian regime," said the New York-based Haitian filmmaker. "Journalism is attacked. Justice is attacked. The truth is attacked. All the elements that build a democratic society are under attack," he added, saying that Orwell had warned us how it would happen in his novels "1984" and "Animal Farm". "But we still have people saying, 'Oh, they just came for the neighbour, but I'm fine. And no, it's not us, it's Harvard, it's Columbia'," referring to the US universities which have come under attack from the White House. But Orwell and history have taught us that people are always slow to realise that their freedom is being taken away, Peck said. "That's how dictatorship implements itself in society. It terrorises," he said. Peck said the parallels between how academics are now under attack in the United States and the thought police of Orwell's last book were striking. "When you fear to voice your opinion at work, at school, in your everyday life, and God forbid, in public. What do you call that?" he asked. "Orwell: 2+2=5" follows the dying British writer through the last years of his life as he struggled to finish "1984" in a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura as he died of tuberculosis. 'Big Brother is watching you' Peck sees it as Orwell's last warning to the world, exhausting himself typing it from his bed as he gasped for air. "Orwell has an almost allergic reaction to any attempt at authoritarianism," he said. He had seen it with Stalin and witnessed it first-hand in the Spanish Civil War in which he fought for the defeated republicans against the dictator Francisco Franco. The filmmaker said Orwell knew the mechanisms of oppression intimately having worked as a colonial policeman in Burma and then seen fascism and Stalinism tighten their grip on Europe. "Whole populations were groomed... You scare them. You take them one by one. You go against a judge. You go against lawyers, scholars... You go against public radio, a guy at the CIA. So the whole system becomes a shambles. "Orwell also predicted a type of internet with mass surveillance through screens" -- the chilling "Big Brother is Watching You" -- and the thought police that enforced total loyalty to supreme leader. Peck said he felt impelled to make film the film because "people know so little about Orwell" despite the huge influence he has had. He said Orwell's works had been "spinned" by the West as an attack on Communism during the Cold War, when in fact his work was an attack on all kinds of oppression. Having grown up in a dictatorship himself in Haiti, and seen his own father jailed, Peck said he knew how "people don't want to stick their head up when everybody seems to be lowering theirs". But he said his greatest legacy was to question the "doublethink", where people allow themselves to be cowed and manipulated into "going along with things they know not to be true". The film is showing out of competition at one of the most political Cannes film festival in years. It began with a fiery speech by US actor Robert De Niro denouncing Trump as "America's philistine president" and warning that democracy there was under attack. Peck echoed his warning, telling AFP "democracy is something you fight for every day. It's not a consumer good that you buy once for all".
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Trump turning US into authoritarian regime, says Emmy winner
Donald Trump is turning the United States into an authoritarian regime, an Oscar-nominated director warned as his documentary about George Orwell was screened at the Cannes film festival Monday. Raoul Peck -- who also won an Emmy for "I Am Not Your Negro", his acclaimed portrait of Black American writer James Baldwin -- told AFP that "all the signs are there, all the facts are there, where every section of society is attacked. "I hope Americans will realise that they are already in an authoritarian regime," said the New York-based Haitian filmmaker. "Journalism is attacked. Justice is attacked. The truth is attacked. All the elements that build a democratic society are under attack," he added, saying that Orwell had warned us how it would happen in his novels "1984" and "Animal Farm". "But we still have people saying, 'Oh, they just came for the neighbour, but I'm fine. And no, it's not us, it's Harvard, it's Columbia'," referring to the US universities which have come under attack from the White House. But Orwell and history have taught us that people are always slow to realise that their freedom is being taken away, Peck said. "That's how dictatorship implements itself in society. It terrorises," he said. Peck said the parallels between how academics are now under attack in the United States and the thought police of Orwell's last book were striking. "When you fear to voice your opinion at work, at school, in your everyday life, and God forbid, in public. What do you call that?" he asked. "Orwell: 2+2=5" follows the dying British writer through the last years of his life as he struggled to finish "1984" in a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura as he died of tuberculosis. - 'Big Brother is watching you' - Peck sees it as Orwell's last warning to the world, exhausting himself typing it from his bed as he gasped for air. "Orwell has an almost allergic reaction to any attempt at authoritarianism," he said. He had seen it with Stalin and witnessed it first-hand in the Spanish Civil War in which he fought for the defeated republicans against the dictator Francisco Franco. The filmmaker said Orwell knew the mechanisms of oppression intimately having worked as a colonial policeman in Burma and then seen fascism and Stalinism tighten their grip on Europe. "Whole populations were groomed... You scare them. You take them one by one. You go against a judge. You go against lawyers, scholars... You go against public radio, a guy at the CIA. So the whole system becomes a shambles. "Orwell also predicted a type of internet with mass surveillance through screens" -- the chilling "Big Brother is Watching You" -- and the thought police that enforced total loyalty to supreme leader. Peck said he felt impelled to make film the film because "people know so little about Orwell" despite the huge influence he has had. He said Orwell's works had been "spinned" by the West as an attack on Communism during the Cold War, when in fact his work was an attack on all kinds of oppression. Having grown up in a dictatorship himself in Haiti, and seen his own father jailed, Peck said he knew how "people don't want to stick their head up when everybody seems to be lowering theirs". But he said his greatest legacy was to question the "doublethink", where people allow themselves to be cowed and manipulated into "going along with things they know not to be true". The film is showing out of competition at one of the most political Cannes film festival in years. It began with a fiery speech by US actor Robert De Niro denouncing Trump as "America's philistine president" and warning that democracy there was under attack. Peck echoed his warning, telling AFP "democracy is something you fight for every day. It's not a consumer good that you buy once for all". fg/phz
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found review – the man who turned his camera on apartheid
Before anything else, this lyrical documentary homage by Raoul Peck (Oscar-nominated for I Am Not Your Negro) is about the work: the axis-shifting impact of Black South African photographer Ernest Cole's intimate insights into life in his home country under apartheid. His extraordinary 1967 book, House of Bondage, exposed the realities of South Africa's racial oppression to a wider world. This film, though, goes beyond the initial impact of Cole's photography to explore the personal cost of his work. Following the publication of the book, he was forced to live abroad, making America his home, but found himself increasingly unmoored and creatively disfranchised. There's also an element of mystery to Lost and Found. A question mark lingers over the fact that Cole's archive, long since believed lost, turned up in a Swedish bank vault. The narration, by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks on behalf of the photographer, who died in 1990. It's through his remarkable pictures of South Africa and Black America, however, that we really hear his voice. In UK and Irish cinemas
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ernest Cole: Lost & Found review – tragic story of fiercely pioneering photographer
Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck won an Oscar nomination for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin, whose writings were voiced by Samuel L Jackson; now he takes a comparable approach to a more elusive and in some ways more complex subject. This is the black South African photographer Ernest Cole whose fierce pictures of life under apartheid brought this political reality home to the US and the west, and played a real part in the pressure brought to bear on the South African government. But it was Cole's terrible destiny to live as a stateless exile, mostly in the US, finally dying penniless in 1990 just as Nelson Mandela was being released. Cole died of pancreatic cancer, but it's not too fanciful to say that he also died of depression and simple homesickness, anguished by his alienation from a homeland for which he felt a wrenchingly passionate yearning. In the US, where his photo collection House of Bondage was published, he found that his public and grant-giving bodies wanted more of the same from him: more images of racism. But Cole wanted to escape the prison house of racial identity, and so resisted obvious agitprop work; yet he also irritated his sponsors by claiming that racism was just as bad in the US. Meanwhile, anti-apartheid activists left behind in South Africa felt that he had left the struggle's frontline for a pampered American life of artistic celebrity. The truth was very different: Cole suffered poverty and homelessness. Peck's film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole's own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood. And the film has a curious footnote. As a result of a spell in Sweden before he returned to the US, a precious trove of his photographs and negatives were saved and deposited in a bank vault in Stockholm. So a huge part of his legacy was saved. But who did this? Cole had no idea. Should Cole's descendants and admirers be very grateful to someone who clearly anticipated the artist's personal catastrophe and preserved his work? Or should they resent the way Cole was separated from his precious work, without his consent, throughout the final agonised years of his life, something which deepened his depression? Even now, the Cole family doesn't know how to feel about this mystery and neither do we, the audience; it is a complicated state of affairs, which Peck puts before us without comment. Stanfield's sonorous, laid-back performance intuits the romantic part of Cole's identity as a photographer and an artist. Ernest Cole: Lost & Found is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 March.
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Politically, it's important. It's important for humanity': the long-lost civil rights images of Ernest Cole
A group of Black men stand naked in a line with their arms up, facing the wall, as they undergo a medical examination before being sent to work in the mines. The image is just one of many by the late Ernest Cole depicting the dehumanisation of Black people during apartheid. Writing for Ebony magazine in 1968, the South African photographer explained how he wanted his work to 'show the world what the white South African had done to the Black'. Since the late 1950s, he had been chronicling, up close and in detail, the horrors of racial segregation for publications such as Drum and the New York Times and had become arguably the most significant photographer documenting the country's oppressive regime. 'Ernest's photos are the first ones that gave us an idea of what apartheid was, from the belly of the beast,' says Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck, whose documentary essay I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, won an Emmy in 2019. Now, with his new film, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Peck turns his focus to the triumphs and tragedies of Cole's life, covering his time not only in South Africa but in the civil rights-era US. Peck had first encountered Cole's work while studying in Berlin in the 1970s. 'At the time, it was about politics and propaganda. It was not about the photographer.' It wasn't until years later, when Peck read Cole's one and only book, House of Bondage – showing scenes of violence, poverty and malnutrition – that he understood the depth of his work and legacy. 'When you see what he has done within 10 years of photography, it's incredible. The scope and the diversity and the thematics – I don't know if there are many photographers that were able to accomplish that,' says Peck. After living through the terrors of apartheid, Cole fled the country of his birth in 1966, and lived in exile in the US. At 28 years old, he became one of the youngest people to appear on South Africa's list of banned individuals. He arrived in New York at the height of the American civil rights movement. Initially, Cole was moved by what he witnessed. He saw interracial and gay couples expressing affection publicly; he saw protests and uprisings, and began to photograph these moments of everyday Black American life. He even travelled to Lowndes County in Alabama during the freedom struggle, and to the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr in Atlanta. However, it wasn't long before Cole saw that the American dream was a myth. 'Within two years, he got it,' says Peck. 'He had a clear judgment about what segregation meant, not only in the [American] south but also in the most cosmopolitan city of the US.' Cole eventually succumbed to the difficulties of being both an artist and an immigrant in the US and suffered periods of homelessness before dying of cancer in 1990 at the age of 49. His photographs of the US remained unseen until 2017, when his estate got a call from a Swedish bank informing them that about 40,000 negatives had been locked away in three safety deposit boxes. The estate eventually got in touch with Peck and asked if he would be interested in making a film. 'Politically, it's important,' he explains. 'It's important in terms of his own legacy. It's important for South Africa. It's important for humanity. Imagine if all of those pictures of the US, which nobody knew even existed, would have been lost? For me, that was the happy ending. That despite his death, we were able to save that incredible amount of work.' Cole felt like an outsider in the US and often felt homesick even though he understood he could never return. He saw the similarities between racism in South Africa and the US and once said in an interview with the New York Times in 1967: 'In apartment houses, doormen eyed me distrustfully as if I were there to steal something. In restaurants, white people physically shy away from black men.' From joy to destitution, Cole witnessed the breadth of the Black American experience while in New York and the deep south. 'He never took a photo from far away. He's always within the story, both in South Africa and in America,' says Peck. 'It's like: 'I want to feel you, I want to see you, and I want you to see me. You can intervene at any time.' That dialogue is important. He's a very humanistic artist.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Many of Cole's pictures capture the racist signage that existed in South Africa during apartheid. As LaKeith Stanfield narrates in the film: 'South Africa is the land of signs. A total separation of facilities, on the basis of race. Sometimes they say only 'goods', but if you're Black, you know that elevator is for you.' Although Cole had received criticism from his US editors that his work lacked 'urgency', Cole captured the everyday lives of Black Americans authentically. 'He embodied [the idea] that photography is not just an intellectual process. It's about life. It's about the human condition. It's about taking risks. It's not just about beauty. It's about meaning. It's about people,' says Peck. In a letter to the Alien Commissioners in both Sweden and Norway, Cole had expressed concern that he was becoming a 'chronicler of misery, and injustice and callousness'. He desired a break from capturing provocative scenes. Still, there are moments from his time in the US, such as this image of three smiling girls, that would have felt like a breath of fresh air. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found by Raoul Peck will be released in the UK and Ireland on 7 March by Dogwoof.
