Fading to Black: Embodied Spectatorship and Empowered Subjectivity in James Baldwin’s Cinematic Imagination

This essay explores the life and work of James Baldwin in relation to the cinema. It begins by using his book-length essay, The Devil Finds Work, to interrogate ideas of spectatorship and identification, placing Baldwin’s personal movie-going experiences in conversation with Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, as well as theories of ‘oppositional’ reading from Stuart Hall and bell hooks. It goes on to explore Baldwin’s largely unsuccessful attempts to become a filmmaker himself, in particular his unrealised screenplay for a biopic of Malcolm X, examining questions of public iconicity and the role of the cinema as an instrument of mass culture, both reflecting and actively perpetuating dominant narratives and perspectives. It concludes, via a brief consideration of posthumous engagements with Baldwin’s work, by characterising his “cinematic imagination” as one which not only foregrounds a radically embodied black subjectivity, but also leads us to aspire towards a reimagined politics of the cinematic gaze.