Seeing In; With, and Through: James Baldwin in Paris, on Film

I. Portraits of Baldwin in Paris

Two portraits of James Baldwin hang to face each other across Gallery 1 of Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Part of Paris Noir (the Centre’s final exhibition before a planned five-year closure), they are the work of Baldwin’s friend and mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney. Each portrait affectingly weds portraiture to abstraction, and taken together they deftly capture shifts in Baldwin’s spirit over 20-odd years. The first depicts Baldwin c.1945-50, cross-legged amongst pastel blues, pinks, greens and yellows; tentative but incandescent. This is Baldwin as he was when, in November 1948, 24 years old and without a word of French nor a contact in the country, he left New York for Paris. As he reflects in No Name in the Street (1972), the precise fact of Paris was secondary: “my flight had not been to Paris, but simply away from America (…) I ended up in Paris almost literally by closing my eyes and putting my finger on a map.”¹ In Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (Terence Dixon, 1970), Baldwin explains that leaving, “was a matter of life or death.” He continues: 

You can’t turn your back, in America, long enough to write a book or to find out who you are. I had to be in a desperate situation, to come so far, with forty dollars. I don’t know how I lived.

It was in this way: through great adversity, by greater necessity — and namelessly — that Baldwin first went to Paris. 

The second Delaney portrait, c.1967, is a vibrating yellow field from which Baldwin emerges in green outline. It shows Baldwin as he was in the years leading up to his 1969 return to France — a return made, in part, to recover the ‘namelessness’ with which he first went. 20-odd years further into a life lived as “a kind of transatlantic commuter,” he is grave-faced, but still, always, curious. My use of ‘return’ is something of a misnomer, on joint account of the fact that Baldwin had lived a significant portion of those 20-odd years in Paris, and because he continued to travel widely in the years that followed. Perhaps more accurate is re-leave: in 1969, it was time, again, for Baldwin to get out of America. His 1969 exodus was, like his 1948 flight, an act of self-preservation. Having spent much of the 1960s at the height of his celebrity, Baldwin was by 1969 beginning in earnest to reckon with the impact fame had on his life; finally returning some attention to a private life long left on pause. In 1948, he left the U.S. for France to find the space to become himself; in 1969, he left in search of a “renewed sense of mutuality (…) in which he hoped to regain, or maybe build anew, his sense of who he was, what was what, and why it mattered.”² 

Yashaddai Owens’ feature debut, Jimmy (2024), is a lyrical imagining of Baldwin’s first arrival in Paris. It is a film of such loving non-imposition as to call to mind, by sheer force of contradistinction, Dixon’s rather incurious documentary short, Meeting the Man, shot during that moment of pivotal ‘return.’ Both films work toward capturing something of Baldwin in Paris at each of the moments the Delaney portraits capture, respectively. It is with Dixon and Owens’ cinematic portraits of Baldwin in Paris — and Baldwin’s own reflections on film — that I am concerned here, though we will be returned to Delaney by way of these. 

II. A Sense of Relief

Baldwin is absent from the first minutes of Jimmy — as is Paris. Instead, the film opens by lingering over the street cats, fishing poles, street vendors, and swinging tea trays on the streets of Istanbul. This prelude gestures towards the extended periods of refuge Baldwin took in Turkey through the 1960s — as intimately captured in From Another Place (Sedat Pakay, 1973) — and Baldwin’s absence sets the tone for an idiosyncratic portrait which mounts a fierce defence of its subject’s privacy. 

Then: Paris, 1948. A wide shot of Place de la Concorde ensures we rise immediately into consciousness of our new locale, and provides our first sight of Baldwin, portrayed by Benny O. Arthur — who bears striking resemblance — striding across the square. He hails a taxi in front of the Luxor Obelisk, and, in what will prove to be one of the film’s few moments of dialogue, the taxi driver asks where he has come from. Baldwin’s reply, ‘New York,’ prompts the driver to remark that he has always wanted to visit, to which Baldwin responds that he “always wanted to leave.” As the taxi speeds off, Baldwin drinks in the City of Lights through the car window. In the hour that follows, as we glimpse him rushing up and down the staircase to his hotel room; dancing around the room — or lying in the bath; then bursting onto the city streets; smoking at a bistro table; carving an apple with a penknife, we see a 24-year-old Baldwin extending outwards and outwards, unfurling into himself.

Jimmy

Baldwin’s first year in Paris, with little money; no command of French; and no contacts in the country, was by no means an easy one. Writing in 1987 for Architectural Digest, he recalls falling severely ill that first Paris Winter, 1948/49. 40 years later, he still brims with gratitude for the matriarch of the family that owned the hotel in which he lived, for the fierce dedication with which she cared for him in his illness, and wonders why she didn’t just call the U.S. Embassy and have him sent home, save the sense that perhaps she intuited, “to have done that to me then would have been tantamount to murder.”³ Owens is certainly aware of the struggles that plagued Baldwin’s 1948 exodus to Paris — but, in Jimmy, the exposition of that struggle isn’t the point. Neither is perfect historicism — the film can’t quite hide that it was shot in the 21st century, and doesn’t quite try to. Instead, Jimmy glows with Owens’ determination to give the indomitable Baldwin a “sense of relief,” as he has it in a 2024 interview with Bomb Magazine.⁴

 Filmed semi-improvisationally on location in Paris and Istanbul, and shot on rich, textured black-and-white 16mm, Jimmy is given over to an aesthetics of obfuscation. Baldwin is most often seen in wide shots, through shadows, or in reflections, rather than close-up. At times, it is as though Owens asks us to mind our business — reminds us that we cannot know everything, and we shouldn’t expect to. When an encounter with a man in an antique store leads to a tryst in Baldwin’s hotel room, heavy grain and shadow obscure the bed that nonetheless fills the screen: the newness of freely expressed sexuality is celebrated and obscured at once; celebrated by being obscured, even. 

Obfuscation in Jimmy extends also to the notably sparse presence of Baldwin’s work in the film. “I believe Baldwin’s voice is instrumental to all of us, but I wasn’t particularly interested in using it,” Owens explains in the Bomb interview. Indeed, aside from a relatively brief excerpt from No Name in the Street, deployed well into its runtime, almost nothing of Baldwin’s own writings features in the film. In fact, noticeably few words are present in Jimmy at all: the film’s soundscape is largely given over to Parisien composer Paco Andreo’s score — the driving pulse of the film, whose minimal dialogue and freewheeling spirit has gained it apt comparison, by Phuong Le, to city symphonies. The minimal speech present is often muted and never subtitled; as Baldwin’s French improves, he goes increasingly uncomprehended by non-French-speaking members of the film audience. 

In the rare moments when Baldwin does speak unobscured in Jimmy, he is not yet the exemplar of conviction and style present in public memory. Owens instead makes us privileged witness to exchanges infused with as much uncertainty as excitement. The hint is in the film’s title. In his essay, ‘You Pay for Your Life with Your Life,’ Ed Pavlić distinguishes “James, the illustrious public writer, civil rights icon, and ‘spokesman for the Negro’” from ‘Jimmy,’ as Baldwin was called by intimates, the “friend and lover, expansive partier, raconteur, and friend to the people of the night, among others.”⁵ It is Jimmy, not James, that Jimmy shelters and celebrates. 

Jimmy’s obfuscatory aesthetics amount to an embrace of what Martiniquan poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant discusses as the ‘right to opacity,’ which suggests that people need not render themselves always more transparent. Instead, Glissant urges us to move with a willingness to participate in a world “in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others” whose irreducibility we do not seek to diminish; to “speak with the knowledge that there are other languages in the world.”⁶ Embracing opacity, Owens offers a portrait, not of the indefatigable Baldwin who — particularly with global celebrations of the centennial of his birth in 2024 — is so vivid in public imagination, but rather of a young man beginning to break free. 

III. I Am Not at All What You Think I Am 

Director and subject are at odds throughout Meeting the Man. Re-evaluating the film in contrast to Jimmy, this tension is more readily identifiable as deriving from Dixon’s failure to countenance Baldwin’s right to opacity. The documentary opens with Baldwin — in a striking karakul hat — walking in the blue light of a crisp evening. Shots of him, first ambling alone along the Seine; then weaving through Algerian Quarter crowds, are intercut with passing boats and stern faces, establishing Paris’ bustling surrounds. In a preening voiceover, Dixon announces that he had wanted to make a film about Baldwin, “as a writer, rather than as a political figure,” but found Baldwin “uncooperative.” Over the film’s 27 minutes, Baldwin keeps steadfast in his refusal to be reduced, as Dixon would have him, into a somehow apolitical, and easily intelligible figure. 

Following this preamble, we next see Baldwin in front of the Bastille monument in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, in an interview-standoff with Dixon. Cinematographer Jack Hazan brings Dixon, Baldwin, and Baldwin’s acolyte-cum-protector, a young man named Carl, intermittently in and out of frame. In the midst of this clamouring web of complex forces, Dixon petulantly accuses Baldwin of having “veered the film off your literary work, and on to what you feel,” to which Baldwin responds, with palpable frustration: “It isn’t so much what I feel, Terry, it’s what I know.” Baldwin goes on to insist on the political nature of his public status, an idea Dixon denies on the basis of the non-reasoning: “because you are a writer.” Dixon is misguided, partially, due to his inability (or unwillingness) to accept the inextricability of the various elements of Baldwin’s public role. More than this, Dixon simply fails to countenance the possibility that there may be more to Baldwin than he, Dixon, knows: as Baldwin identifies, “none of you know it, who this dark stranger is, none of you know it! And that is what this quarrel is really about: I am not at all what you think I am.” 

A second interview in Meeting the Man sees Baldwin, now in a tan, striped blazer and sporting a turquoise ring, sitting on a floral couch. Dixon, now more firmly off-camera than before, guides the conversation to a discussion of the relative political efficacy of essays versus fiction, in which Baldwin refuses to be complicit in any flattening of complex ideas. When Dixon, vindicating the capacity of fiction to engender empathy, suggests that Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1962) faces readers with situations “with which no one can not identify in some way or another,” Baldwin, who knows well how easily, and how often, people fail to identify with one another — and who knows the cost of this frequent failure of empathy — pushes back. Dixon suggests to Baldwin that fiction derives its power from relatability; that Another Country is resonant because “everyone’s been in love” — a generalisation Baldwin finds unevidenced: “if everyone had been in love (…) they’d treat each other differently.” Dixon’s suggestion that the force of storytelling derives from universal relatability misses the generativity of encountering difference.

 The conclusion Baldwin is willing to make about ‘everyone’ is of a different nature: “everyone you’re looking at is also you.” This sentence is capacious, and it echoes multiply. In one sense, it vindicates expansive, instructive empathy; as Baldwin continues, “you could be that person.” At the same time the suggestion that “everyone you’re looking at is also you” belies consciousness of the limitations of what we can know of each other: we see others always refracted through the inescapable lens of our own perspective. Baldwin’s supposition about ‘everyone’ moves in the opposite direction to Dixon’s: rather than making a claim, as Dixon does, on universal experience, Baldwin expresses the value — and limits — of seeing oneself in another. 

In capturing Baldwin’s wilful refusal to bend to Dixon’s limited perspective, Meeting the Man (inadvertently) presents a striking document of the inimitable resilience and fierce intellect for which Baldwin is so celebrated. Jimmy’s project is in some sense the opposite: to relieve Baldwin of living in our imaginations as solely this titanic public figure, and remind us of that which is more private and less knowable in him. Next to Jimmy’s easy acknowledgement of the idea that the fullness of Baldwin’s humanity is beyond the scope of anyone else’s complete knowing, tension in Meeting the Man is seen to bubble up from Dixon’s incurious, insidious misapprehension that it is not only possible to know Baldwin fully, but that he, the filmmaker, already does. The two films circle the suggestion of an ethics in which empathy embraces, rather than vanquishes, interpersonal illegibility.

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris

IV. What’s at Stake, or, Baldwin Goes to Hollywood

In ‘Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin,’ Fred Moten muses:  

What if we stand not opposite but apposite to the painting, so that we can both better receive and better pass on its refractive practice, looking not at but with and through its disbursive eyes …⁷

Baldwin’s book-length tapestry of film criticism and memoir, The Devil Finds Work (1976), stands, in this way, ‘not opposite but apposite’ to American cinema, embracing film and life as mutually constitutive interlocutors. In it, Baldwin bodies forth an extraordinary testament to the cinema with and through which he lived, learned, and became. What emerges is, in part, a treatise on the repercussions of Hollywood’s failure to embrace its Black characters’ right to opacity. In Devil, Baldwin moves between sharing the impact his teacher, Orilla ‘Bill’ Miller, had on him — recounting how, when he was 12, she took him to “what we called the movies, but which was actually my first entrance into the cinema of my mind” — and astute examinations of how self-congratulatorily liberal films like In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967) flatten the complexity of their Black characters.⁸ As Baldwin’s indictment of Hollywood’s upholding the white American status quo unfolds in and amongst his own memories, the full significance of his recollections and criticisms are felt as they are seen in light of each other. 

Devil takes on a new and particular force towards its close as Baldwin, himself moving between memoir and criticism, enters into a discussion of biopics. This section culminates in an articulation of all that is lost in Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972), a Billie Holiday biopic which — on sparkling form — Baldwin condemns as being related to the Black American experience in “the same way, and to the same extent, that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine: by courtesy.” But before he gets to Lady, Baldwin recounts how, in the Winter of 1968, he agreed to write the screenplay for a blockbuster biopic of his late friend, Malcolm X. It didn’t end well. The studio’s intention of siphoning out the nuances of Malcolm’s life in service of producing a defanged action-adventure movie, à la Che! (Richard Fleicher, 1969), quickly became apparent, and Baldwin ultimately walked from the project. I would like to linger, for a moment, with a scene in Baldwin’s original, unused screenplay, and the edits he describes receiving to it in Devil. 

The brief scene dramatises Malcolm’s first encounter with West Indian Archie — a formidable figure in the Harlem numbers racket in which Malcolm was involved in the early 1940s. Through the scene, Baldwin introduces a complex, father-son inflected dynamic between a young Malcolm and the mentor who, some years later, ran him out of town — and with whom, later still, he would have a heart-rending reconciliation in a dilapidated Bronx apartment. In it, a young, zoot-suited Malcolm enters Smalls Paradise late one afternoon and orders a drink. West Indian Archie and friends, ‘old heads’ of the Harlem numbers racket, sit at their table in the back of the bar, joking amongst themselves at Malcolm’s expense. When Malcolm, crossing the bar from the jukebox, trips over West Indian Archie’s shoes, he invites Malcolm to their table. That is all. Under Baldwin’s hand, the scene is all subtlety. In the Hollywood editor’s rewrite, all such subtlety is washed out. When Malcolm trips over West Indian Archie’s shoes in the rewrite, a shoot-out ensues. Baldwin’s editor insists that with the shoot-out, the audience would “see what Archie saw in Malcolm: he admired the ‘country boy’s’ guts.” Baldwin is clear: “this was not what Archie saw in Malcolm, nor was it what I (Baldwin) wanted the audience to see.”⁹

Baldwin’s original (unused) screenplay was eventually published as One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1972). This scene, as Baldwin wrote it, is rich with the contradictions of life: the wonder with which Malcolm looks around is “so honest that, while it is funny, it is also moving,” and when the bar “cracks up,” it does so “silently.”¹⁰ These ambiguous moments are where cinema fulfils its all-important potential to surprise — to make us alive to the full complexity of the worlds it wings our way. Through this embrace of opacity, layers of identification take on their significance. We feel that the jokes between West Indian Archie and his friends carry an “oblique confession: they see themselves in Malcolm.”¹¹ Baldwin’s scene description reads, “all of them, in one way or another, have been Malcolm once.” They see each other in Malcolm, too: one notes, “remind me of you, when you come to the city.” Archie sees in Malcolm the son (“just about his age”) that he has but has never known.¹² 

Baldwin is keenly aware of his position as “one of very few dark people in the world who has a voice,” and it follows that his refusal to bend to Dixon’s expectation of transparency in Meeting the Man gathers force from his consciousness of the scarcity of films which embrace marginalised peoples’ right to opacity. More than this, it seems Baldwin is particularly conscious of the bearing of the right to opacity on identification and mentorship.

V. Seeing In; With and Through

All that Baldwin knows of the bearing of opacity on mentorship enters directly into Meeting the Man, in a section between the two aforementioned interviews. In front of the Bastille, Baldwin declares: “I got to be able to talk to somebody, if we’re going to get this movie done” — and we cut to Beauford Delaney’s rue Vercingétorix studio, where an audience of 20-something Black Americans are gathered. ‘These children’ act, in part, as a chorus to the sparring between Baldwin and Dixon, but they also voice Baldwin’s impact on their lives. One shares that Another Country is the first and only book he ever read cover to cover. Another is forthright in addressing Baldwin as “an inspiration to the young Black people in America.” When Baldwin answers, “it was in a sense all for you,” it rings true down to his very refusal, in the documentary itself, to submit to Dixon’s oversimple vision of him. 

Baldwin’s awareness of what he means to these young people is amplified by the knowledge that the conversation is taking place in the studio, and in the presence, of Baldwin’s own greatest mentor, a man he would later call his “primary witness,” according to David Leeming (friend and biographer to both). When, at 16 years old, Baldwin walked into Delaney’s Greenwich Village apartment, he met a man of whom, over 40 years later, he would write: “Beauford was the first walking, living, proof for me that a black man could be an artist.”¹³ Certainly Baldwin saw himself in Delaney — saw in Delaney both the expansive possibility and enormous difficulties nascent in himself, and felt both the assurance and the terror of that. In a 1965 essay for Transition Magazine, Baldwin writes that Delaney “comes from darkness” — immediately qualifying, “as I do” — before explaining, “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney (…) his seeing caused me to begin to see.” He recalls seeing a brown leaf on black asphalt, “and because I was seeing it with Beauford, because Beauford caused me to see it, the very colours underwent a most disturbing and salutary change.”¹⁴ Ever entwined with Baldwin’s seeing himself in Delaney, was seeing with Delaney, and, growing out of this, seeing the world anew, through Delaney. 

Baldwin’s knowledge of the value — and rarity — of representation which is hospitable towards seeing in, with, and through certainly underpins tension in Meeting the Man, and informs Jimmy. In his Bomb interview, Owens expands on the decision to omit so much of Baldwin’s language from his film thus: “I wanted to challenge the audience to engage (…) the feeling of walking with him,” and goes on to explain “Jimmy weaves between what’s biographical (about Baldwin) and autobiographical to me” — an idea underscored by modest admissions of identifying with Baldwin that Owens makes in public conversations about the films — including during Q&As at the 62nd NY Film Festival, and at its UK premiere at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. In offering Baldwin “a sense of relief,” Owens also allows us, and perhaps himself, to see with and through Baldwin. The abundant, fructifying faults in Dixon’s documentary raise questions and break promises about seeing one-self in, with, and through an other — promises Baldwin knew intimately the importance of, and which Yashaddai Owens’ Jimmy, at its best, makes good on.

Jimmy

Endnotes