An art movie challenges biopic polemics.
James Baldwin, best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the race-relations essays in The Fire Next Time, is typically used as a figurehead exploited by activists for social justice projects. It’s become tiresome. But Jimmy, the new art film by Yashaddai Owens, gives Baldwin his humanity.
To earn the familiarity of its title, Jimmy has to be an art film — not of the dreaded PBS format that has put claims on the lives of black American martyr figures, from Matin Luther King Jr. to Adam Clayton Powell on down to Elijah Cummings, John Lewis, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, merely for purposes of nebulous social change.
Relating to Baldwin as an outsider, Chicago-born Owens understands the importance of recovering Baldwin’s individuality. He must recognize Baldwin’s personal experience rather than his political importance. This 67-minute feature pays attention to the pre-fame Baldwin — the searching, yearning youth (portrayed by Benny Q. Arthur) who left the U.S. in 1948 to visit Europe on an arts grant. The cultural contrast allows Owens to realize the essence of Baldwin’s future significance.
A skinny black kid from New York’s Harlem arrives in Istanbul, then Paris. Dark-skinned and with a large forehead, gleaming teeth, and hooded eyes, Arthur’s Baldwin could also be a young Miles Davis. Only a sensitive, judicious film technique can capture the truth that Baldwin’s alien appearance represents exile as escape.
Owens shot Jimmy on a 16mm Bolex camera, returning us to the days of experimental art films that explored subcultures. The shutter glare and shifting aspect ratios share Owens’s/Baldwin’s POV. Blur on the screen’s right edge continues the vérité conceit, and a squiggly line on the left frame indicates a feat of period re-creation. It is quietly thrilling at a time when Nolan’s ostentatious The Odyssey is all the rage.
To dare experimental analog technology in the digital era is a challenge to perception and reception. Creating Baldwin’s experience through faded, almost monotone gray gives the effect of aged film stock, lending truth to scenes of Baldwin as an American traveler on the streets of Paris, walking through overhead-lighted tunnels while balancing a suitcase on his head like a Senegalese migrant in a marketplace. Baldwin purchases a portable typewriter from a pawn shop specializing in cameras and mingles with jazz-loving locals.
These evocative images ring a private variation on Melvin Van Peebles’s Story of a Three-Day Pass, truer to Godard’s one-room Charlotte et son Jules than Sembène’s Black Girl. Such a narrative suggests how Baldwin’s art plays in Owens’s head — imagination, cogitation, like that controversial Morrissey T-shirt bearing Baldwin’s face encircled with the lyrics “I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside” from the song “Unloveable.”
Baldwin’s homosexuality is conveyed with discreet amazement. He awakens in his rented residence beneath a bas-relief headboard sculpture of a male-and-female coupling. This surreal manifestation of erotic musings (like Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters) leads to him playing hide-and-seek in corridors, then bedroom frolicking and smoking, with an Arab lad. These muted, virtually silent scenes (except for a softly droning music score) suggest that all is private thought as if these are memories screened — but in whose mind? It’s a superb method of resurrecting the private Baldwin, his self.
In this context, the politicized term “queer” properly describes Owens’s project of challenging Baldwin’s social image and its contemporary grift. As Arthur/Jimmy bikes through Paris, we are in and out of “Baldwin.” Baldwin is reclaimed from political enslavement. Owens owes his audacity to Isaac Julien’s extreme stylization in Looking for Langston (about Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes), yet this truly impressionistic style also evokes Dmitri Kirsanoff’s 1927 bohemian masterpiece Ménilmontant. Arthur/Baldwin also retraces Brando’s steps under the Pont de Bir-Hakeim at the beginning of Last Tango in Paris.
Owens preserves Baldwin’s lonely idiosyncrasy, running through foreign streets always, like the boy at the end of 400 Blows but without a freeze frame. Owens told Bomb Magazine, “Jimmy weaves between what’s biographical [about Baldwin] and autobiographical to me. It can’t be denied that anything anyone makes is a reflection of themselves.” This dream of James Baldwin isn’t a political gesture or stuck in activism; it’s emotional and aesthetic, constantly moving and challenging.
