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"The Year Of Baldwin" Rolls Into Best Video

Danielle Campbell | April 30th, 2024

Best Video Film & Cultural Center  |  Hamden  |  Arts & Culture  |  Arts & Anti-racism  |  Possible Futures  |  Kulturally Lit  |  Year of Baldwin

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Danielle Campbell Photos.

The crowd stared intently at James Baldwin’s face as it filled the screen. In one universe, the year was 1969, and Baldwin was seated beside professor Paul Weiss, listening patiently as a studio audience looked on. Weiss, then a philosopher based at Yale, had suggested that discrimination was a distraction. Baldwin, a cigarette perched between his fingers, prepared to respond. 

“I’m not interested in whether a person is white, or Black, or green or yellow,” he started. “I am talking about the force of the state, which, at this moment, is oppressing Black people all over this nation. Which is oppressing every Black person in this nation.”

On a recent Sunday, that scene came to Best Video Film & Cultural Center (BVFCC) as part of “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket,” a film screening and discussion between Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin and filmmaker Karen Thorsen. Part of “The Year of Baldwin,” the event was a partnership between the James Baldwin Project, Kulturally LIT, BVFCC, and Possible Futures.   

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Possible Futures' Lauren Anderson.

From now through December, “The Year of Baldwin” includes monthly book club discussions, a theatrical reading at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, a literary festival, and swag designed by New Haven artist and curator Juanita Austin.

“If you read the essays in Notes of a Native Son, he [Baldwin] is struggling with identity and he's also struggling with his nation,” said Thorsen, who directed and produced Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket for PBS in 1989. “And I connected on the page.”

When it premiered over three decades ago, Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket reintroduced viewers to Baldwin using archival and filmed footage of the author and his funeral service, with no narrator or opinion slipped in (although Thorsen does not shy away from talking about her love for the writer and thinker, and the film features interviews with other literary luminaries, including Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka). In the years since, it has held up, a pressing reminder of both how perceptive Baldwin was and how pernicious racism in America still is today.

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In conversation with Gardin, Thorsen said she decided to create the film both because of her love for Baldwin, and her concern for his legacy. When she produced it, he was no longer “popular” with the masse, and she thought that it would be powerful to give him a platform entirely in his own words. She recalled reading Notes of A Native Son after returning from study abroad in France, and feeling so much of the work resonate with her.

“I was not pleased with my country,” she recalled. Baldwin gave a voice to much of what she was feeling. She considers the documentary, which was released two years after Baldwin’s death, a months-long collaboration with the writer and thinker. As she spoke, both she and Gardin noted how much a contemporary reader can learn from his work, during and well beyond his centennial year.

After the film, audience members expressed their admiration for Baldwin and the strength in his words.

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“Tears dripping down my face,” said Susan Clinard, a sculptor based in New Haven. “First of all, super powerful film.”

Clinard has sculpted Baldwin’s face, read some of his work, and thinks about him often, she said. The main thing she took from the film was how “deeply honest and truthful” he was. She added that she was blown away and inspired by his determination and integrity.

“Seeing him and hearing him at the same time really impressed upon me how brilliant he was,” chimed in Jonathan Q. Berryman, assistant principal at James Hillhouse High School. “There was a stream of consciousness that he carried throughout his entire life. That didn't waver. It didn’t waver when he was younger, it didn't waver when he was older. So being able to see that sense of purpose, I think it was important to me.”