Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Raoul Peck’s new documentary captures the experience of apartheid in the 1960s.
Image courtesy of Dogwoof Releasing.
The Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck was born in 1953, made his first short film in 1982 and his first feature in 1987. His has been a notable career but it could well be that he will always be remembered first and foremost for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, an exceptional essay film about James Baldwin which set a dauntingly high standard for him to match. Peck’s 2017 drama The Young Karl Marx was effective but not on the same level and that was also the case with his next documentary, 2023’s Silver Dollar Road, a sympathetic study of the history of an African-American family living in North Carolina. With his latest film, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found the comparison with his Baldwin triumph is even more acute because these two works have so much in common. Both look back at the life and work of a distinguished black artist, both feature archive footage of the man himself but also use an actor reading his words on the soundtrack and both emphasise this latter element to the extent that the writing credit is shared between Peck and the man who is his subject.
However, striking though they are, these similarities are counterbalanced by the key fact that Baldwin was a writer who both on the page and as a speaker was a genius with words whereas Ernest Cole was a photographer who, born in Pretoria in 1940, became the first black freelance to use his camera to capture life in South Africa under apartheid. This was in the first half of the 1960s and in 1966 Cole moved away from his own country and made New York his base. He would gain support from the Ford Foundation and in addition to capturing shots of New York City would travel around the deep south. Fine as much of the American material was, it won less recognition than his earlier black-and-white images which in 1967 would appear in his book House of Bondage.
Cole had moved to America expecting to find that the black man's experience there would be a substantial improvement on the severe limitations he had been living under as a young man constrained by the restrictions imposed by apartheid. However, how that turned out is summed up by his statement that whereas in South Africa he had lived in fear of arrest in the USA it became a fear of being shot (he was now in Jim Crow land). Such disillusionment doubtless contributed to Cole leaving for Sweden in 1968, but again he found that as a black man he was disadvantaged and after 1972 save for one later brief visit he turned his back on Sweden.
Cole’s words spoken by LaKeith Stanfield with ideally judged delivery are often telling but inevitably lack the force that James Baldwin could muster. Consequently, whereas I Am Not Your Negro had words and images in balance, the stronger element here is always the visual. Since the main purpose of Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is to bring the work back into prominence it needs to be stressed that, while the photographs and especially those from South Africa are individually very fine, Peck captures even more tellingly what it meant to be a black person living under apartheid by bringing together images that increase in power when viewed en masse. One also finds that throughout the film its atmosphere is enhanced by Peck's choice of music which, through blues, jazz or otherwise, expresses it so potently (that was also one of the strengths of Silver Dollar Road).
Nevertheless in other less important respects Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is an uneven work. In part this stems from the nature of Cole’s later years. There is now a family trust that looks after his legacy and there is fresh footage of Cole's nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, who is now the head of it. He is able to tell us of how a vast archive of 60,000 pictures and notebooks was found in a bank in Sweden in 2017 long after Cole’s death although how they got there is a mystery. Rather oddly that aspect is used neither as a preface (it could have been an effective hook for the rest of the film) nor as the final section. Instead, what has been a mainly chronological narrative of Cole's life is interrupted by this footage and then resumed from 1982 up to his death in 1990. Not only in this instance but earlier too there have been instances of material inserted which interrupts the timeline and the commentary can itself confuse on occasion when statements are included which are of somewhat uncertain date. At one stage Cole tells us through the voice-over that despite problems he never stopped taking photographs and that suggests that there was no change in that respect. However, not long afterwards he refers to taking less pictures leaving us to sort out if this now relates to a later period. Cole certainly became a forgotten man and by 1986 was probably a vagrant and at that point he does clearly indicate that he hadn't used a camera for eight years. With other statements, including his denials of rumours about his drinking and drug-taking, we can't necessarily be certain where the truth lies and what is probably a lack of certainty about the last decade and more of his life does limit the clarity that is possible here. Furthermore, Peck does not help by allowing Stanfield when speaking as Cole to describe his own deathbed: remembering that shared screenplay credit we start to wonder how many words come from Peck rather than Cole and on what they are based.
But, if one ultimately sees this film as something of a mixed bag, the fact remains that it will bring knowledge and appreciation of Ernest Cole’s photographs to a wide public and, whatever other questions may arise, it does that with real distinction.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Leslie Matlaisane, narration by LaKeith Stanfield and archive footage of Ernest Cole.
Dir Raoul Peck, Pro Tamara Rosenberg and Raoul Peck, Screenplay Ernest Cole and Raoul Peck, Ph Wolfgang Held and Moses Tu, Ed Alexandra Strauss, Music Alexeï Aïgui.
Velvet Film/Arte France Cinéma/Canal+ etc.-Dogwoof Releasing.
106 mins. France. USA. 2024. US Rel: 22 Nov 2024. UK Rel: 7 March 2025. Cert. 15.
