The Tree that does not hide the Forest: Raoul Peck's Aesthetical and Political Approach to Cinema

Abstract

In Culture and Customs of Haiti, Trinidadian critic J. Michael Dash states: For [Haitian] feature films, there are only two filmmakers worthy of mention: Rassoul Labuchin (Yves Medard) and Peck. (92) He further specifies: Raoul Peck is the most critically acclaimed Haitian Filmmaker to date because of his first feature film Haitian (93) and concludes: If there are more directors like Peck and Elsie Haas, Haitian cinema may well have a place among the films that continue to flood Haiti from North America and Europe. (94) Though accurate and entirely justified, Dash's appreciation is notnetheless symptomatic of what I call the-tree-that-hides-the-forest phenomenon. I say this in the sense that production of local filmmakers from the South is usually overlooked/neglected by critics since they do not match international standards. Because of his oustanding achievements, Haitian filmmaker Peck could be easily seen as that tree that hides the forest. However, his various commitments in the film industry indicate that he refuse to stand in isolation. In this article, I examine Peck's three fiction movies in search of recurring features with a view to characterizing his cinematographic style, and also try to assess his action in support of Haitian and South emerging cinema. Power and Exile: Some Recurring Themes Born in Haiti in 1953, Peck left the country in 1961, at age 8, at the peak of Francois Duvalier's repression against Mulattoes and Intellectuals. He followed his father in exile in the former Belgian colony of Congo just after the killing of Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu's accession to power. These two experiences have marked his imagination as shown by his creative work. On the one hand, three of his fiction movies deal with the issue of exile and the memory of the Francois Duvalier dictatorship (Haitian Corner, 1987, L'homme sur les quais [The Man by the Shore] 1993, Corps plonges [Diving Bodies], 1998. The third film deals with the problematic of exile. On the other, he dedicated a documentary and a feature narrative to Patrice Lumumba (Lumumba-Death of a Prophet, 1991 and Lumumba 2000). In various interview, Peck explained his interest/obsession with Lumumba as follows: . . . I had no inkling this story would dredge up so many things for me. After a year of research, I rediscovered my childhood, my life in the Congo - that of my family its place, its role. (Production notes on DVD) In an interview with Claudine Michel and Christopher McCauley for Journal of Haitian Studies, he defines the influence of Haiti on his creative work in the following terms: Oui, je suis haitien, oui, l'essence de mes films a sa legitimite du fait que je viens de ce pays. Mais, en meme temps, ma vision, elle essaye d'etre universelle. Je cherche les autres a travers Haiti. J'exprime ma vision du monde a travers Haiti. (134). (Yes, I am a Haitian. Yes, my films draw essentially their legitimacy from the fact that I am from that country. Yet, at the same time, I try to have a Universalist vision. I reach for other people through Haiti. I express my worldview through Haiti.) Based on these premisses, one can see Peck's production through a different eye and look for the tension between the particular and the universal. Indeed, L'homme sur les quais (The Man by the Shore) and Haitian Corner speak to anyone who has lived under a dictatorship and at the same time, through empathy, teaches to those lucky enough to have been spared the experience, how it would be like to be tortured or terrorized by a dictator's henchmen. Both films talk about the experience of torture, the inability to live a 'normal' life after this experience. Joseph Bossuet, the poet and central character in Haitian Corner has become neurotic while Gracieux - The Man by the Shore - has turned mad. In his 2003 interview with Claudine Michel, Pecks gives us - in retrospect - the key to the response of family and friends to George's neurotic behaviour and mood switches in Haitan Corner (1987) [. …