One undisputed gem that turned up in Cannes’ Special Screenings is Raoul Peck’s moving Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. It marks the director’s return to the militant, hard-hitting documentary form of I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which poignantly quoted James Baldwin on race relations in America. Here the subject is South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990), who grew up at the height of Apartheid and documented its devastating effects in thousands of heart-wrenching photos, many collected in his epochal book House of Bondage published in 1967.
Though very differently conceived, the two films have a lot in common, not just as portraits of major undervalued or forgotten artists, but as revealing reminders of history and the open sore of racial injustice. Ernest Cole approaches its subject as a rise-and-fall biography, from his youth in Pretoria where he witnessed and photographed historic moments of Apartheid’s cruelty and injustice, and chronicled the rebellion against racial laws passed by the white minority, to an interlude in Norway, followed by his devastating exile in New York, where he sold his camera, lost his negatives and stopped taking pictures.
What makes the film unique is the decision to structure it almost entirely around thousands of stunning photographs, many of them never before seen; they are given context and meaning in a rapid-fire montage by Peck’s regular editor Alexandra Strauss, heightened by Alexei Aigui’s music and a piercing jazz and blues selection. Offering the eye visual pleasure and the heart emotions ranging from anguish to bemusement, this is a historic doc of tragic beauty that sticks in the mind. It should be a welcome guest at festivals and in selected theaters (Magnolia Pictures holds North American rights, MK2 is handling international sales), with a long shelf life guaranteed.
The first-person voiceover is read by actor and musician LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) in a strong young voice that outlaws pity or commiseration for Cole’s artistic and existential decline, but which rather puts the tragedy of his life within a numbing social context of racism and poverty that almost amounts to a conspiracy to destroy his talent and self-esteem. He died at 49, tormented by restlessness, homesickness and despair, a vagrant in New York.
Cole’s early photos sweep us into the dusty, crowded world of 1960’s South Africa, where the self-taught photographer, with only a few years of high school behind him, began nervously snapping his shutter “at eye level, while walking”. What he captured in electrifying, clear images was a society ruled by whites and divided in two very unequal parts: park benches for whites only, Black townships heartlessly bulldozed into the ground, people forcibly moved to remote prison-like reservations in the desert. When House of Bondage came out, it caused a furor. It was immediately banned in South Africa, and Cole found himself in the same position.
He found political asylum and a grant to spend a year shooting pictures in America, but his initial elation soon changed to feelings of anger and worthlessness as he documented the homeless Black men lying listlessly on the streets of Manhattan and the poverty and racism of the American South, which so much reminded him of South Africa. In 1968, he wrote, “the world is still not free”. “I turned my camera on you and saw nothing.”
Ernest Cole’s astounding work is presented in collaboration with the Cole estate, which gave Peck’s team access to his archive, including some 60,000 negatives that were believed lost. The latter turned up in a Swedish bank vault under the most mysterious of circumstances, and Cole’s family, represented by the photographer’s articulate nephew Leslie Matlaisane, was never told what they were doing there or who put them in the vault.
In a dispute that raises some of the same questions, the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg has recently agreed to hand over to the Cole Family Trust the 504 prints in its possession, which Peck cites in the film.
Director, screenplay: Raoul Peck
Voice of Cole: LaKeith Stanfield
Producers: Raoul Peck, Tamara Rosenberg, Olivier Pere, Rémi Grellety
Cinematography: Moses Tau, Wolfgang Held
Editing: Alexandra Strauss
Music: Alexei Aigui
Sound: Stéphane Thiebaut
Production companies: Velvet Film, Arte France Cinéma
World Sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In English
105 minutes
