“The forces involved here are less visible than the shootings, class property or political crusades, but they are no less powerful, ”Raoul Peck postulates in his new docuseries Exterminate all the dirty, released on April 7 on HBO.
The acclaimed filmmaker refers to the series of myths that make up white supremacy, the subject of a four-part series that explores the brutal methods and ideological justifications of Western colonization. In his latest project, Peck re-applies experimental techniques from the 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary about writer and activist James Baldwin, I’m not your black, to challenge our collective understanding of America as a powerful nation and commonly labeled as “great”.
Exterminate all the dirty is laden with accounts of historical events such as the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told bluntly and poetically by Peck, who also serves as a unique narrator as well as a writer. and director. Like its previous documentary, the series is also in conversation with literature, film, and other works of art that have influenced the denunciation or spread of false narratives about colonialism and non-white populations, including the nonfiction book Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 series takes its name (it is also a line from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of darkness, which is mentioned in the series).
In a part of the docuseries, titled “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance,” Peck speaks admirably of his late Swedish friend historian, who died in 2019, as he appears 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 as both an inspiration for Peck in his current research and a model of relationships. productive between races, even if they are only all white. they were so anxious to question their position in the world.
Similarly, Peck spends most of the documentary emphasizing the importance of knowing the truth of white supremacy, particularly the occupation of genocide in the establishment of African and American colonies, rather than providing a roadmap to decolonization. This approach is likely to attract viewers struggling with this topic for the first time and want to know significant events in world history in a relatively short time.
It’s easy to imagine this series appearing on anti-racist watch lists if it had premiered before last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. But for those who consider themselves knowledgeable about our colonial past and understand how these stories fit into current conversations about the removal of Confederate monuments or the end of capitalism or the abolition of the police, Peck’s statements throughout the series indicate that we “lack” the “courage” to “draw conclusions” from the past, or that “dominant historical narratives need to be challenged,” as if he were one of the few to do so publicly, he may feel condescending and disconnected from task of non-white historians and current political movements are led by people of color around the world.
That said, I’m not sure I recommend it Exterminate all the dirty to someone who delves into the subject for the first time, despite the introductory nature of the series. Peck’s excursions through different time periods and parts of the world, not to mention the countless list of politicians and military leaders that are briefly mentioned and never talked about again, are hard to keep track of and even of preserving it after a few minutes, as the series moves from one invasion to the next without establishing connections between these incidents of violence. It is especially disorienting considering that, in the first episode, Peck provides his audience with a set of basic terms that “summarize the entire history of mankind”: civilization, extermination, and experimentation. It does not abandon these terms, but it would be useful for viewers to try to classify the information in this way, in addition to following the designated theme of each particular episode, from which it often departs.
Peck’s experimental impulses, at least captivating, also hinder coherence. We are inundated with a wide range of movie clips In the city a Raiders of the Lost Ark a The Wolf of Wall Street, illustrations, animated maps and graphics moving at an unreadable pace, paintings, home videos of Peck’s childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and fictional recreations. Many of these segments are accompanied by Peck’s monotonous voice-over that viewers might find misleading, as there are remarkably no talking heads. But it is the dramatizations in particular, mainly the interactions between black and white settlers and indigenous people, that feel especially fruitless and out of place within the documentary.
“But it is the dramatizations in particular, mainly the interactions between black and white settlers and indigenous people, that feel especially fruitless and out of place within the documentary.”
In the third episode, “Killing at a Distance or … How I Thoroughly Enjoyed the Outing,” which begins by explaining the role of weapons in imperialism, we spend a few minutes watching a fictional slave woman undressing a colony (played by Josh Hartnett) and giving him a bath. After hearing a woman begin to howl outside, she looks out the window at the sight of four dead black men, Hartnett’s character just lynched. This is the whole scene and it is not clear what we are supposed to get out of it in relation to the theme of the episode or as a standalone vignette. Similarly, the rest of the recreations are poorly conceived and subscribed to, including a shamefully clichéd reimagining of blacks enslaving whites. Others, with graphic and gratuitous depictions of the deaths of Indians and blacks, consider that Peck holds a specific section of his audience in his hand and ignores viewers who do not need to visualize, say, that an indigenous woman is shot and experiences additional horrible violence after his death to believe that some kind of brutality occurred.
Highlighting in all this clutter are the fascinating images of Peck’s childhood in Haiti that add an element of intimacy and warmth to a rather bleak film. It’s true that I was very interested in how Peck’s training in Haiti (and later education in Berlin) shaped his worldview. In the second part of the documentary, he talks briefly about his fascination with pomp and the circumstances of Catholicism when he was a child and his disillusionment with religion after being beaten by a priest at his school. Peck refers to the interrelationship between violence and religion in terms of the Crusades and the way Europeans labeled non-Christians as savages, but not in direct relation to this story, which is left as a free end. Still, Peck’s writerly voice feels more confident and relaxed in these autobiographical portions of the film, while when writing historical events, he can be breathless and rigid.
In its early stages, Exterminate all the dirty it was a 15-part series. I can’t tell if a longer time would have helped Peck’s project feel more or less congested and confused. One thing is certain, it is impossible to expose the ugly truth of colonization without calling sexual violence the main tool of oppression. Surprisingly, Peck’s docuseries only allude to non-consensual relationships between white settlers and black, indigenous, and Asian women (Lindqvist also does not articulate the ramifications of gender-based violence in his book) despite European settlers ’reliance on rape to terrorize. communities and advocating slavery. . In 2021, this kind of neglect simply seems to be erased.