Peck’S Hollywood Lumumba: A Masculine Hero

Abstract

This is a true story.” These words figure prominently at the beginning of Peck’s feature film. In his documentary Peck had questioned the creation and dissemination of images, but he reverses his preoccupations in the feature. Rather than presenting multiple points of view and emphasizing the fact that all knowledge is constructed by people situated in a particular time and place, he contends that the story does not need to be crafted since it is already there, inherent in the events as they unfolded. Playing with ideas of reality, truth, and fiction, of events as mirroring conventions associated with different genres, he says that the story of Lumumba’s life “is an incredible thriller with all the characters of traditional crime fiction” and goes on: “I want to extract the cinematic narrative from the reality by remaining as true to the facts as possible” (Zeitgeist).1 This choice is deliberate, as Peck reveals in an interview: “my documentaries try to be as fictional as possible and my narratives try to be as ‘real’ as possible.” He explains this stance as an attempt to “create an active viewer” (Taylor 246). But it is debatable whether viewers of the Hollywood film would be alerted to the questioning role they are supposed to play, since everything conspires to draw the viewer into the action.KeywordsWhite WomanAfrican WomanFeature FilmTrue StoryNational HeroThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.