Wright, Baldwin, and Film


Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Film in 2019

When the world premiere of Native Son (2019) occurs at Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2019, how spectators respond to what Rashid Johnson has made of Suzan-Lori Parks' screenplay will expose significant critical questions. How do diverse readers process the implications of narrative as literature?  How do those same people, as spectators, make sense of the more complex materiality of narrative as film?  Does film as a prior interpretation of what might obtain in a solitary reading of print lead to better or worse behavior in the conduct of everyday  social life?  Does film occasion anything more than temporary examination of ethical options?



Those who have read Richard Wright's 1940 novel and have seen the 1951 and 1986 film versions of it bring to their viewing of the 2019 version a body of knowledge that enables nice discriminations about options.  They will be able to produce commentary which makes us aware of what is always lost in genre transformation, a loss of cognitive innocence.



 We do not, however, live in an ideal world wherein the commentary can guarantee that we will become better, more tolerant or compassionate, less hate-driven and stone-hearted  people in the long term.  The human condition in the United States in 2019 is such that small gains of aesthetic  experience are merely ephemeral, that only a statistically insignificant number of American citizens will be changed in ways that truly matter.  The jury has yet to deliver a verdict on Irving Howe's stunning, hyperbolic  claim in "Black Boys and Native Sons" (1963)  that the publication of Native Son in 1940 forever changed American culture. That American citizens are still tormented by nuanced systemic racism is evidence that one book or one film does not a culture change. Or, at least, the illusion of fundamental change is no more than one more delusion to be dealt with.



If some of those spectators have also viewed Barry Jenkins' film If Beale Street Could Talk (2019), what they may want to donate to possible conversations is profound. The conversations will have the weight of Richard Wright and James Baldwin debating the functions of art over glasses of wine at one café or another in Paris.  An imaginary film of those conversations is screened in my mind as I write a book , Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life, with the prejudices implanted by my viewing to the Jenkins film on January 5, 2019 awaiting adjustments from seeing the third version of Native Son in a future.  Prejudice and  scholarship tantalize me with onus.  Perhaps the burden will allow me to further enhance what Barry Jenkins has said so convincingly in film about nature and nurture, inequity and incarceration, and the paucity of love in our nation.



Access

https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/if-beale-street-could-talk/278109/barry-jenkins-nature-nuture-beale-street-and-moonlight



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 6, 2019

  

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