Image courtesy SFFILM
Walking into Ernest Cole: Lost and Found on Day 3 of Doc Stories, I knew a thing or two about the documentary I was about to see. The director, Raoul Peck, I knew from this 2016 doc about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. I read that Cole was a South African photographer who captured images of violence and oppression in his home country of apartheid South Africa. And that's about it. Whereas with Janis: Little Girl Blue, the subject's work and some of their life story are part of the cultural milieu, Cole's life and art were largely unknown to me, and to most of the audience at the Vogue on a warm October afternoon last weekend. But owing to Peck's ability to heavy-handedly orchestrate biographies while his final products show little or no sign of having been edited, Lost and Found wasted no time drawing me in. With the familiar voice of a narrator I later learned to be LaKeith Stanfield and a beautiful slideshow of Cole's images lovingly hitting audience members over the head with their raw imagery and the truth of Cole's account of life under apartheid setting the stage, something happened. Let me try to explain. I grew up in the late-Seventies and Eighties. Like most suburban American kids in that era, movies and TV were a huge part of my life. But it probably wasn't until the late-Eighties that, now a teenager, I learned about a segregated nation at the southern tip of the massive African continent. I have punk rock to thank for my education on apartheid. I wasn't seeing it the news, but I also didn't watch the news regularly. Since those formative years, it's a subject that I failed to ever really do a deep dive on, probably owing to the fact that it's something that happened so far away, and now, so relatively long ago. My memories and knowledge center around a freed Nelson Mandela, who would eventually become president of a desegregated South Africa. I'd heard a thing or two of the capitalist ransacking of that country, in the form of gold, diamonds, and other precious metals. But that's it, really. Back in the day, again, thanks to political music, I learned that the Shell Corporation was implicit in some of the worst machinations of the white supremacist regime in South Africa. I'm sure today that Shell and all the other major oil companies are ultimately up to no good. But I digress ... All this to say that Peck's documentary successfully took me in, allowed me to more deeply consider the lived experience of African people in the years of apartheid. I sat with myself in that dark theater and thought about what it must have been like to have no agency, to constantly be subject to fearful, distrusting stares, to police brutality, whippings, and sometimes, worse. Cole left his homeland with his evidence in tow. His photographs were banned back home, of course, but he never gave up on both trying to convince the world that there was bad, bad trouble in South Africa that needed to be stopped and for him to one day return to his homeland liberated. The former eventually happened, of course. The latter did not. He died in New York City. I owe a debt of gratitude, to Ernest Cole, to Raoul Peck, for driving home the horrors that once existed in South Africa. The lessons of, 1) never giving up in the struggle for freedom, and 2) that oppression takes many forms and really can happen anywhere, are successfully conveyed in this documentary. I now know who Ernest Cole is.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |