The brutes are the savages, those whom the Europeans discovered (the word “encounter” is out of place here) upon arriving in another part of the world. And the one who gives the order for their extermination is an imaginary creature, Mr. Kurtz by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a settler established at the bend of the Congo River at the end of the 19th century.and century in In the heart of darkness (1899) – later, much later, Francis Ford Coppola made him a colonel in the United States Army in Apocalypse Now (1979), his adaptation of Conrad’s novel. “Exterminate all these brutes”, it is the annotation added by Kurtz at the end of a manifesto celebrating the civilizing work of colonization. From this admission, the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019) made the title of a concise and cutting book which draws the line which goes from the imperial hold of Europe on the African continent to the extermination of Jews of the same Europe by the Nazis and their allies.
And, to come to the end of this century-old family tree, here is the‘Exterminate all these brutes by Raoul Peck, film-essay in four parts, which further broadens the perspective. Haitian familiar with Africa (he grew up partly in Congo-Kinshasa), artist recognized in the United States, Raoul Peck draws a fresco (more like an atlas) of the movement that led Europeans and their descendants to claim their supremacy over the rest of the world, from the crusades to the wars of the XXIand century.
Image bombardment
The first moments of the enterprise are disconcerting: everything is going too fast, one has the feeling that the bombardment of information and images, the jostle of eras and continents are made to obtain the surrender of the miscreants. The martyrdom of the Seminole nation and the severed hands of the Congolese subjects of Leopold II, the Atlantic slave trade and the vassalization of the monarchies of India by the British, we see at first no other reason for this accumulation than a legitimate anger.
Especially since we go from one format to another, from archive images to graphic representations (the end of the Amerindian nations of North America is put into images by the comic strip author Maël with infinite grace), from computer graphics as sophisticated as they are fleeting to fictional sequences in which a white soldier (played in all eras by Josh Hartnett) imposes the new law with gunpowder and iron.
Through films and family photos, Raoul Peck makes sensitive the legacy of these tragedies as it is experienced on a daily basis.
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