Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination ed. by Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just (review)

Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination, edited by Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, provides insights into the work of contemporary transnational filmmaker Raoul Peck. The main strength of this collection is how scholars from film studies and Haitian studies place Peck's work at the forefront of various disciplines. The contributions also integrate Peck's vision and reflections as a filmmaker, activist, and artiste engagé.

In the first of fourteen chapters, "History Is Too Important to Leave to Hollywood: Colonialism, Genocide, and Memory in the Films of Raoul Peck," Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall argues that Peck's invisibility in world cinema, especially in the United States, is due in part to the fact that "the histories he recounts are painful, in ways that can discomfit Western viewers" (15). (Though it should be noted that since his 2017 Oscar nomination for the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, Peck has become increasingly well known in the United States.) Sepinwall analyzes various film forms from Peck's corpus, ranging from documentary to feature, to demonstrate how Peck as an educator, social activist, historian, and guardian of memory represents history, a central concern in his work. Peck asserts: "I tend to make historic films, films for posterity. … To me, making a movie is … preserving who we are" (16). For him, making film is making history and "reversing the Western gaze" (17).

In chapter 2, "Disrupting Conventional Film Structure: Letters, Voice-Over, and Traumatic Irruption in Raoul Peck's Films," Joëlle Vitiello notes that Peck is "one of the most cosmopolitan, transnational, and complex filmmakers to have emerged since the 1980s" (37). Through her analysis of Corps plongés (1998), a telefilm that tells the story of a medical examiner in New York whose job is to analyze corpses for homicide cases, Vitiello depicts the vital role of violence and trauma in Peck's films. In the second part of the chapter, Vitiello explores how Peck cleverly uses letters, whether through voice-overs or journals, to disrupt the narrative. Peck's disruption of traditional filmmaking is also enacted by challenging viewers' notions of time, space, and memory.

Chapter 3, "My Story Is Not a Nice Story: Sometimes in April (2005) and the Rwandan Genocide Film," by Jane Bryce, emphasizes Peck's unique portrayal of the Rwandan genocide. Bryce contextualizes Sometimes in April within the larger framework of films on the genocide, such as 100 Days (2001), Hotel Rwanda (2005), Shooting Dogs (2005), Munyurangabo (2006), A Sunday in Kigali (2006), and Kinyarwanda (2011), to demonstrate how Peck avoids the traditional binary that represents Africa as poor and corrupted and the West as rich and democratic in order to tell a nuanced story about human relationships and the complexity of culture as well as the interconnectedness of time, space, history, and memory. One of the strengths of Sometimes in April is how Peck chose to control the narrative by remaining conscious that he was not creating a film to appeal to Western audiences. As Bryce notes, "Peck's achievement… is to bring the viewer home to an Africa that is not exceptional, where genocide has a history as long as colonialism, where the Other is the Self" (83).

In "Framing the Dispersal in Diaspora: Raoul Peck, Transnational Filmmaker," the fourth chapter, Sophie Saint-Just stresses the centrality of Haiti to Peck's work by underlining his role as a "transnational" film director whose trajectory has been very influenced by his Haitian identity and the events of the Duvalier regimes. As Peck notes: "I do not have the impression that I made several films but rather from the beginning I was making the same film and used the same motivation as a foundation… . I express my vision of the world through Haiti. Haiti is a medium. It is through Haiti that I seek out others...