He’s scornful of the liberal pieties which infest and circumscribe ostensibly progressive fare like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He jumps off the train in order to reassure white people, to make them know that they are not hated; that, though they have made human errors, they have done nothing for which to be hated. THE DEVIL FINDS WORK. ‧ And from there he plunges deeper into a conflation of literature and film, illuminating the ways his consciousness was alerted to the connections between what he was taking in culturally and how that reflected the world he lived in. As Baldwin aged, his on-camera contributions became more reflective and elegiac. That remains a rare and special quality. Baldwin has the enthusiasm of a film lover, the sharp, analytical eye of the very best critics, and the hard-won skepticism of a realist. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account.

And he never allows his outrage and disgust to rise above the banks of his consciousness. There is also room for a startling digression into the sexual politics of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; a catty thrashing of Billie Holliday biopic Lady Sings the Blues which, in his words, has “a script as empty as a banana peel, and as treacherous”; and, in closing, a disturbing extrapolation from William Friedkin’s notorious The Exorcist (“The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented . The recurring theme is how the issue of race continually informs American films, even when they are not ostensibly about race. Today, some 30 years after that Times interview, and nearly 28 after his death (from esophageal cancer, in December 1987), Baldwin’s reputation has never been stronger, or his work so frequently cited. The fire next time had arrived. In a 1960 essay entitled “The Northern Protestant,” he praised Ingmar Bergman’s warped psychosexual melodrama The Naked Night aka Sawdust and Tinsel—about the romantic travails of an etiolated circus ringmaster (Åke Grönberg)—as “one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made.” Meanwhile, Baldwin’s celebrity status and frequent American presence in the 1960s brought him into close proximity with a number of the era’s major stars, including trailblazers like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Categories: begins with the early depictions of racial and class difference on display in 19th-century literature and grows directly out of his experience of reading Charles Dickens’s, “trying,” as he laments, “to find something out, of immense import for me.” The scenes of righteous indignation, cross-racial longing, biting sentimentality, and a violent coming to racial and economic terms that Baldwin considers function not only to reproduce American attitudes at particular historical moments, but also work to distract the national imagination from the necessary moral reckoning with the thorny and too often fatal history of the country. ‧

. on . The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie”). For the church and the theater are carried within us, and it is we who create them, out of our need and out of an impulse more mysterious than our desire. You can read more about Spike Lee’s use of Baldwin’s screenplay treatment for his own 1992 film, Malcolm X, here.). In a 1960 essay entitled “The Northern Protestant,” he praised Ingmar Bergman’s warped psychosexual melodrama, Here Baldwin’s words presage satirical films like Robert Townsend’s.
As the essay continues, Baldwin describes how the movies became a source of fascination and disillusionment for him, a place where he observed the ways in which white people chose to represent black people (when they chose to, which was rare at best); where he observed what white people seemed to think an accurate depiction of reality looked like on their terms, and how far it was from the reality of what his life looked and felt like.

She thus became, and indeed, remained, the toast of Harlem because her prison scene with the black chauffeur was cut when the movie came uptown. Gregory Andracke. A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm. The Devil Finds Work is not his best book but I recommend it all the same.
Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depending on how one manipulates one’s reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant.”. Image of Joan Crawford from http://lts.brandeis.edu/research/archives-speccoll/exhibits/crawford/CrawfordHome.html, From that realization he segues to a memory of being sent to a store and encountering “a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford.”. The Devil Finds Work is not his best book but I recommend it all the same. Retrieve credentials. . “Joan Crawford’s straight, narrow, and lonely back,” is the first line from The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin’s 1976 book-length essay about the home that racism made for itself in the America film industry and in the minds of its viewers. In the course of the dialogue, Baldwin boldly questions received, binary notions on race: “White men lynched Negroes knowing them to be their sons.

RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2012. With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing. Famously, he was barred from speaking at the March on Washington in August 1963 after clashing with Robert Kennedy, who believed that his words would be too militant. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Baldwin, best known for novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and nonfiction treatments of race in America (The Fire Next Time) was not afraid to tie the tricky undercurrents of race to the fears and evasions which underlie so much of American cinema. The new leaders to emerge from the ruins of the movement, particularly those from the Black Panther Party, advocated violent revolution as the only means for achieving justice and overthrowing the lethally stubborn, white social structure. ), with stirring eulogies from Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka.