“The forces involved here are less visible than gunfire, class property or political crusades, but they are no less powerful, ”says Raoul Peck in his new docuseries. Exterminate all raw, premiered on April 7 on HBO.
The critically acclaimed filmmaker refers to the series of myths that encompass white supremacy, the subject of the four-part series that explores the brutal methods and ideological justifications of Western colonization. In his latest project, Peck reapplies experimental techniques from his 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary about writer and activist James Baldwin, I’m not your black man, to challenge our collective understanding of America as a strong nation and commonly labeled a “great.”
Exterminate all raw it is loaded with accounts of historical events, such as the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, clearly and poetically narrated by Peck, who also serves as a unique narrator to the writer and director. Like his previous documentary, the series is also in conversation with literature, film, and other works of art that have influenced either the denunciation or the spread of false narratives about colonialism and non-white populations, including the non-white book. fiction by Sven Lindqvist from 1992, from which the series takes its name (it is also a line from the novel Joseph Conrad Heart of darkness, which is mentioned in the series).
In the first part of the documentary, entitled “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance,” Peck speaks admirably of his late Swedish historian, who died in 2019, while appearing in archive footage working in an office. Lindqvist’s desire and desire to discover the horrors of colonialism through a journey through the Sahara Desert, the subject of his acclaimed book, serves both as inspiration for Peck in his current research and as a model of productive trans-racial relations – even if all white people they were so eager to question their position in the world.
Likewise, Peck spends most of the documentary emphasizing the importance knowing the truth of white supremacy, especially the involvement of genocide in the establishment of African and American colonies, rather than providing a roadmap to decolonization. This approach will probably attract viewers who are struggling with this topic for the first time and want to learn about significant events in world history in a relatively short time.
It’s easy to imagine that this series would appear on anti-racist watch lists if it had premiered before last summer’s protests over the Black Lives Matter issue. But for those who consider themselves familiar with our colonial past and understand how these stories fit into current conversations about removing Confederate monuments or ending capitalism or abolishing the police, Peck’s statements throughout the series “lack” the “courage” to “Draws conclusions” from the past or that dominant historical narratives “must be challenged”, as if they were one of the few to do so in public, can feel patronized and unrelated to the work of non-white historians and movements current policies being led by people of color around the globe.
That being said, I’m not sure I would recommend it Exterminate all raw to someone digging into the subject for the first time, despite the introductory nature of the series. Peck’s travels through different periods of time and parts of the globe, not to mention the countless list of politicians and military leaders who are briefly mentioned and never mentioned again, are hard to follow and even keep after. a few minutes, as shown, passes from one invasion to another without establishing links between these incidents of violence. It is particularly confusing given that, in the first episode, Peck offers his audience a set of basic terms that “summarize the entire history of mankind” – civilization, extermination and experimentation. He does not give up these terms, but it would be useful to viewers if he tried to classify the information in this way, as well as to follow the designated subject of each special episode, which he often deviates from.
Peck’s experimental impulses, which are at least captivating, also hinder the path of coherence. We are inundated with a wide range of videos from On the city to Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Wolf of Wall Street, illustrations, animated maps and charts that move at an illegible pace, paintings, home videos about Peck’s childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo and fictional recreations. Many of these segments are accompanied by Peck’s monotonous vocal voice, which viewers might find grateful because there are no visibly talking heads. But, in particular, the dramatizations, especially the interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous people, feel particularly useless and out of place in the documentary.
“But, in particular, the dramatizations, especially the interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous people, feel particularly useless and out of place in the documentary.”
In the third episode, “Remote Killing or … How I Fully Enjoyed the Exit,” which begins to explain the role of weapons in imperialism, we spend a few minutes on a fictional slave woman undressing a colonist (played by Josh Hartnett) and he takes a bath. After hearing a woman start screaming outside, she looked out the window at the sight of the four black men, Hartnett’s character just licking. This is the whole scene and it’s not clear what we should get out of it in relation to the theme of the episode or as an independent vignette. Likewise, the rest of the reconstructions are poorly conceived and subscribed, including an embarrassingly clichéd reimagining of black people enslaving white people. Others, who present free graphic descriptions of black and indigenous death, feel that Peck holds a special part in his audience and does not consider viewers who do not need to visualize, say, a shot indigenous woman who is facing violence. terrible after her death to believe that such brutality took place.
Highlighting all these disorders is fascinating images of Peck’s childhood in Haiti, which add an element of intimacy and warmth to a rather gloomy film. I was interested, of course, in how Peck’s education in Haiti (and his subsequent education in Berlin) shaped his worldview. In the second part of the documentary, he talks briefly about his fascination with the pomp and circumstances of Catholicism as a child and his disillusionment with religion after receiving a beating from a priest at his school. Peck touches on the relationship between violence and religion in terms of the crusades and how Europeans have labeled non-Christians as savages, but not in direct relation to this story, which is left as a free end. However, Peck’s voice as a writer feels more confident and relaxed in these autobiographical portions of the film, while, when he editorializes historical events, he can become breathless and rigid.
In its early stages, Exterminate all raw it was a 15-part series. I can’t say if a greater allocation of time would have helped Peck’s project feel more or less crowded and mixed. One thing is certain, it is impossible to expose the ugly truth of colonization without naming sexual violence as the main instrument of oppression. Surprisingly, Peck’s docuseries allude only to the non-consensual relations between white settlers and black, indigenous, and Asian women (Lindqvist fails to articulate the ramifications of gender-based violence in his book), despite European colonists’ reliance on rape to terrorize communities and support slavery. . In 2021, this type of surveillance simply feels erased.