Six years after the international triumph ofI Am Not Your Negro, his cinematographic essay around the work and the person of the Afro-American writer James Baldwin (1924-1987), the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck returns to this form, giving it an unprecedented scale.
The director relied on three books: Exterminate all these brutes! (published in 1992, Les Arènes, 2007), by Swede Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019), who examines the link between European colonization and the Shoah; The Counter-History of the United States (Wildproject, 2018), by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born in 1939), who re-establishes the place of indigenous peoples and their extermination in the process of nation building; and Silencing The Past (Beacon Press, 1995, untranslated), by the Haitian anthropologist established in the United States Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012).
This intellectual foundation merges with autobiography, since Raoul Peck (who grew up between Haiti, where he was born in 1953, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France and the United States) was the friend of these three intellectuals, two of which are now missing. Contrary to convention, Exterminate all these brutes ignores borders – between documentary and fiction, between history and intimacy, between continents – to produce a fresco that is as much collage as incantation, historical analysis as requiem. Met in Paris, a few days before broadcast on Arte of this “film in four parts”, as he calls it, Raoul Peck offers some keys to approaching this vertiginous intertwining.
“Exterminate all these brutes” was born from your realization, at the time of the release of “I Am Not Your Negro”, of the ignorance which reigned around the subjects which you approach. Who are the ignorant?
In an era where opinions are displayed as decorations, where thoughts are closed once and for all, it is very difficult to open your mind and even to accept the idea that you are ignorant on a certain number of subjects. . And that’s the opposite of what I’ve been through all my life. I had to adapt to each of the territories where I lived. Learn their history, grow with them. I couldn’t live otherwise than through this effort to reach out to the other. That’s why I was involved in the fighting where I was. Today, after all these experiences, I remain amazed, stunned by this kind of leaden screed that prevents you from seeing beyond your own immediate interests, your privileges.
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