James Baldwin and Britain at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
To mark the centennial of his birth, HOME presents a season of films reflecting key moments from American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s time in Britain. Baldwin was acclaimed for both his novels and non-fiction essays, exploring race, equality and queer sexuality while drawing upon his own experiences and observations as an African American in New York, where he was born and raised, and Paris, where he spent much of his twenties.
In addition to his written work, Baldwin also became known as a public intellectual, and leading voice of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, using a sharp tongue to speak truth, justice and equality within a hostile media landscape. It’s Baldwin’s relationship to Britain that is the focus of the series of screening’s at HOME this September though.
Scheduled in partnership with the University of Manchester’s ‘James Baldwin and Britain’ project, the film season highlights an under-examined element of Baldwin’s activism, with every event scheduled with live introductions and discussions featuring experts, critics and filmmakers who will offer added insight and reflections on Baldwin’s trips to Britain.
Every event [is] scheduled with live introductions and discussions featuring experts, critics and filmmakers who will offer added insight and reflections on Baldwin’s trips to Britain
The screenings include the full, blistering 1965 televised debate at the Cambridge Union, where he faced conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. to discuss “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?”. That debate screens on Monday 16 September alongside pioneering Black British filmmaker Sir Horace Ové’s 1968 film Baldwin’s N****r, which sees Baldwin address a group of radical West Indian students in London, discussing Black experience in both Britain and America.
Rarely seen documentary I Heard it Through the Grapevine, first screened on ITV in 1981, is presented at HOME on Thursday 19 September. The film has been recently restored in 4K by Harvard Film Archive, and features Baldwin as a guide through the American South, reflecting on the aftermath and contested legacy of the civil rights movement.
Tere is also a chance to see Raoul Peck’s 2016 doc I Am Not Your Negro (Wed 11 Sep), which picks up Baldwin’s unfinished final project for a radical narrative about race in America that tracks the lives and assassinations of Baldwin’s friends – Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
