Haiti: Witnessing as Revolutionary Praxis in Raoul Peck’s Films

This essay discusses Haitian Corner and L’Homme Sur le Quais / The Man by the Shore, two films by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, as what scholar Teshome Gabriel would call “intolerable gifts.” It argues that the films’ narrative structures and framing demand that the audience act as witness to the violence and trauma depicted onscreen. Not only do they “witness,” as in to watch the violence and trauma unfold in the narratives, but they are also compelled to “witness”; that is, to testify about what they have seen to others. Both acts of witnessing are indispensible to revolutionary action, as liberatory pedagogue Paulo Freire has argued.