#QuarantineBalling = Getting to watch Raoul Peck talk abut #ExterminatetheBrutes at @sundancefest while I eat lunch before my department meeting

@RemiGrellety for posting - @rachmag_2 are you in too now?

You can see #TheFireNextTime prominently on the shelf behind him. He is talking about having discovered Baldwin at age 17.

No offense to the abbe Gregoire, but being a Peck scholar is way better right now!! I want to know everything about #ExterminateAllTheBrutes.

He’s also talking about the bifurcated reception of @IAmNotYourNegro.

Now they are talking about Peck’s essay j'étouffe, & about how too many people in France interpreted #IANYN as about racism being a problem, while they themselves engaged in NO self reflection about racism in & the points raised in the film.

Peck is adding that J’etouffe was not something prompted only by 2020, but the result of an **accumulation** of aggressions and scars, over 50 years of being a black man in

Tabitha Jackson, the new director of @sundancefest, is asking amazing questions. And now we get to see a sneak peek of the opening minutes of #ExterminateAlltheBrutes!!!!!!! #SundanceFilmFestival2021 #RaoulPeck

The subject is painful so I am trying not to gush - but (!!!) Peck is the narrator & is starting w/the genocide of Native Americans. He introduces a Seminole woman - & then says she reminds him of his mother - & as a Peck scholar, I am plotzing to see her invoked here too.

#ExterminateAllTheBrutes may become Peck's master work - which is HUGE to say after so many brilliant films. I'm overwhelmed just watching clip. Here's the rushing ocean, rep'ing Eur. arrival in the Amers- which he sums up in 3 words: #Civilization #Colonization #Extermination

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW - I don't want to reproduce too many images, but this is an EPIC doc mixing reenactment & postmodern elements breaking the third wall.

& Peck script, so many lines; here you can see some Trouillotian influence: "History is the fruit of power...."

Peck notes that he only makes "a film when I feel I can say something... that I need to say s'thg." What was left to say after @IAmNotYourNegro? But when he realized some ppl still wanted to deny what Baldwin had highlighted about the , then...

he needed to go back & show this bigger story, the story of genocide & slavery that were the background to the reality that Baldwin identified. (& of course here is where #Silencing will come in too).

Yes, I'm looking at Raoul Peck's bookshelf! The #IANYN companion volume, a book on #Lumumba &&. I know he has our Peck volume (ed. Toni Pressley-Sanon & Sophie Saint-Just) somewhere - but it would have been fun to see us on his shelf while watching him! #FanGirlScholar

Peck says he wanted to look back in history 200 years to look at how race (an artificial thing) was constructed - how this noxious idea was brought to the Americas from Europe, where it would wreak destruction.

Another #ExterminateAlltheBrutes clip!!

If you're teaching US history, Native American hist., Atlantic world, you're going to want to recommend that students with @HBO watch this when it drops April 7!!!! He's breaking down #settlercolonialism, as only Peck can!

Data viz in the film clip of Native nations disappearing between Eur. arrival & 1900. #ExterminateAlltheBrutes

SO many techniques too. Sprawling epic shots, GIS style viz, Ken Burns effect over stills of Indian schools to show the scope of this forced "civ'zn" alternating w/extermination.

I've argued that Peck can't be pigeonholed in one style - but here he's a master cine-mixologist!

(I rather like that phrase - if I'm not swamped in April, someone can ask me to review this, and I'll stick "Peck the master cine-mixologist" in there somewhere!)

This script...

"The nature of this historical process is still blurred by the notion that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer" !!!

THIS IS WHY I WRITE ABOUT PECK & why I say: "History is Too Important to Leave to Hollyw'd!"

There are def. shades here of #ProfitandNothingBut, one of Peck's lesser-known films, looking at the exploitation at the heart of global capitalism.

Also sweeping views of "the land" recalling #FatalAssistance, in particular, Sean Penn's excitement to fill...

...the emptiness of Corail, no matter what a idea it was!!! #ExterminateAlltheBrutes

Not going to screenshot - y'all need to look forward to watching the whole thing in April, like me (April 7!!!)

I am such a , I keep blowing up the bookshelf as different camera angles reveal diff books. Spotted this time: #StolenImages, the wonderful volume with several Peck scripts & reflections. It has pride of place on my shelf too! https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Images-Lumumba-Early-Films/dp/1609803930

Still seeking Trouillot

He's talking about how this film came to be. After #IANYN, ppl kept asking "What's next?" & he was épuisé! But Richard Plepler, w/whom he made #SometimesinAprilfor HBO, gave him time & resources to do research, for him to think & decide. That's the #GREENLIGHTING we need!!

And once someone gave him Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, he realized that all he'd been trying to say over his oeuvre was in this book. All the sweeping transnational scope of his work was also reflected in this book. Later he found Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's work.

And then he decided to add #SilencingthePast, which he saw as the perfect link. As I've said, Michel-Rolph Trouillot + Raoul Peck in film is going to be .

AND he says, adding Trouillot brings him back from the sweeping transnational story - & history - and back to .

(I no longer have a bk in progress to insert this film into - & like Peck, I'm épuisée. But I MUST write about this film when it comes out, even if only #onhere).

ALL THE GOOSEBUMPS, as Peck discusses how Haiti & the Haitian Revolution were *central* to the making of the modern US.

I am in awe of you, @TABULA4. I'm so glad you are in charge of @sundancefest now - someone with the savoir & background to be asking such amazing questions & to have made this event happen!!

(but also #LumumbaDeathofaProphet needs to be available for sale, so people can see that this first-person narrative doc style, going from what his mother taught him to the sweep of the history of imperialism, is not brand new for Peck!)

I just that HBO did not simply *fund* this film - they gave him $$$$ so he could *find* the film - he could figure out what he wanted to say next.

I hope that young filmmakers in will one day get these kinds of opportunities that Peck gets.

He's describing the process of creating the "libretto" for the film. He threw up different passages from the 3 books on the wall, and thought about how they fit together! (like a DJ - or like a "master cine-mixologist" to quote myself 15 mins. ago).

Peck says that sometimes ppl don't see the artistic side of his films, b/c the subjects take up a lot of room.

I SEE IT!! I ALWAYS SEE IT! #IANYN had so many Peck elements, even just using Baldwin's words, as I talked about in our #docuhistory tweetwatch this summer!

More of the cine-mixology - he had archives, photos, texts, images, other things, that he needed to figure out how to stitch together. And he ended up adding a fictional element - an invented character tying it together. He was ready to tell this story by #AnyMeansNecessary!!

But he did not want to do conventional (& bad #docufiction) but rather to invent a new kind of hybrid genre, with the doc & fiction really "threaded" together, to reach different "emotional level[s]."

I'm not transcribing all he's saying about the #MiddlePassage - we'll have to watch for that. But remember, Peck is dropping this on *April 7*. This will be a POWERFUL film about *colonialism, genocide & memory*, 3 of his recurring themes - but farther back in the past than ever.

@TABULA4 is speaking beautifully about #SometimesinApril - & how Peck used fiction to transform all of his historical research into a *feeling*, about how a genocide could have happened, by getting into the interiority of his characters.

Another clip - with a line reminiscent of #LumumbaDeathofaProphet:

"This story is painful....but we need to know it."

(also like @ChTaubira's argument for memory that I wrote about earlier this week!)

But these images.... . I'm not reproducing them. You'll have to watch. Devastating. The colonists' pleasure = hell for the colonized, & esp. if you're a woman....

DEVASTATING pastiches of images. I have the same devastated feeling as on my first viewing of @IAmNotYourNegro. He is exposing so much about the pathology of white supremacy, in 30 seconds.... Intellectually I love the clips.... & also, I feel sick....

YES @TABULA4 - that has Peck's authorial signature all over it! As you said, "witty, transgressive, [&] profound" in an "efficient" fast way - with the music & images taking us to so many emotional places.

& she's linking what he's showing to Jan. 6, as it most definitely is....

Yes, the absolute impunity with which they took pictures of themselves engaging in their crimes, just like the colonial images Peck showed... expecting to have no consequences, as is their "natural" right as whites.

Just like I asked Tyler Stovall on Sun for @thesfhs, since #WhiteFreedom had been written before Jan. 6, @TABULA4 is asking Peck to reflect on how this series helps us understand the moment we're living in RIGHT NOW.

I may end up need to write about all of this more formally than here....There's too much to say (but I'm also a teacher-mother-scholar in 2021 doing #COVIDCampus & #Pandemicparenting, so we'll see if I can make that happen in April, or not....)

What he's saying about the #violence of the last 4 years.

I CANNOT wait to watch #ExterminateAlltheBrutes on 4/7 (unless someone wants to hook me up with a rvw copy b4 then, in my capacity as a Peckologist!!). Incredible interview. @TABULA4, @sundancefest & @VelvetFilm__ (& @RemiGrellety who is behind this too!!)