The forces involved here are less visible than gunfire, class ownership or political crusades, but they are no less powerful, ”says Raoul Peck in his new docuseries. Destroy all brutes, which premieres April 7 on HBO.
The acclaimed filmmaker refers to the series of myths encompassing white supremacy, the subject of the four-part series that explores the brutal methods and ideological justifications of Western colonization. In his latest project, Peck applies experimental techniques from his 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary about writer and activist James Baldwin, I’m not your nigger to challenge our collective understanding of America as a powerful and widely labeled “great” nation.
Destroy all brutes is full of accounts of historical events such as the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Anglo-Powhatan wars and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told bluntly and poetically by Peck, who serves as the sole narrator in addition to being a writer and director. Like its previous documentary, the series also engages in literature, film and other artworks that have influenced the denouncing or propagation of false stories about colonialism and non-white populations, including Sven Lindqvist’s non-fiction book. 1992 from which the series takes its name (it is also a line from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of darkness, which is mentioned in the series).
In part one of the docuseries, entitled “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance,” Peck speaks admirably about his late Swedish historian friend, who died in 2019, as seen in archive footage in an office. Lindqvist’s desire and willingness to uncover the horrors of colonialism through a journey across the Sahara, the subject of his acclaimed book, serves as both an inspiration to Peck in his current research and a model of productive racial relationships – if only all. whites were so eager to question their position in the world.
Likewise, Peck spends most of the documentary emphasizing the importance of know the truth of white supremacy, especially the use of genocide in the settlement of African and American colonies, rather than providing a roadmap to decolonization. This approach is likely to attract viewers who are grappling with this topic for the first time and want to learn more about important events in world history in a relatively short time.
It’s easy to imagine this series would be on anti-racist watch lists had it premiered ahead of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. But for those who consider themselves knowledgeable about our colonial past and understand how these histories fit into current conversations about removing Southern monuments or ending capitalism or doing away with the police, Peck’s claims throughout the series that we’re brave Missing to “ Draw conclusions ” from the past, or that dominant historical narratives should be “ challenged, ” as if he’s one of the few to do so publicly, can feel condescending, and out of touch with the work of non-white historians and the current political movements are led by people of color all over the world.
That said, I’m not sure I’d recommend it Destroy all brutes for someone looking into the subject for the first time, despite the introductory nature of the series. Peck’s excursions through different time periods and parts of the world, not to mention the innumerable list of politicians and military leaders who are briefly mentioned and never discussed again, are difficult to keep track of and even stick to after a few minutes. like the series goes from one invasion to another without making connections between these violent incidents. It is especially disorienting when you consider that in the first episode, Peck provides his audience with some basic terms that “sum up the whole history of mankind” – civilization, extermination and experimentation. He doesn’t abandon these terms, but it would be helpful to viewers if he tried to categorize the information in this way, as well as follow the designated topic of each specific episode, which he often strays from.
Peck’s experimental impulses, which are fascinating to say the least, also get in the way of coherence. We are inundated with a wide variety of movie clips from On the city to Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Wolf of Wall Street, illustrations, animated maps and graphics that move at an illegible pace, paintings, home videos of Peck’s childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and fictional reenactments. Many of these segments are accompanied by Peck’s monotonous voiceover that viewers may find annoying, as there are noticeably no talking heads. But it is mainly the dramatizations, usually interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous peoples, that feel particularly fruitless and out of place within the documentary.
But it is mainly the dramatizations, usually interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous peoples, that feel particularly fruitless and out of place within the documentary.
In the third episode, ‘Killing at a Distance or … How I Thoroughly Enjoyed the Outing,’ which begins by explaining the role of weapons in imperialism, we watch a fictional enslaved woman who is a settler for a few minutes. undresses (played by Josh Hartnett) and gives him a bath. After hearing a woman crying outside, she gazes out the window at the sight of four murdered black men who have just lynched Hartnett’s character. That’s the whole scene, and it’s unclear what to get out of it in relation to the episode’s theme or as a standalone vignette. Likewise, the rest of the reenactments are poorly thought out and endorsed, including an embarrassingly clichéd re-imagination of black people enslaving whites. Others, with free, graphics of the Black and Indigenous death, feel that Peck is controlling a certain segment of his audience and ignoring viewers who don’t need to visualize an Indigenous woman being shot and experiencing additional gruesome violence after her dead to believe this kind of cruelty took place.
Noticeable in all this clutter are mesmerizing images of Peck’s childhood in Haiti that add an element of intimacy and warmth to a rather gloomy film. Admittedly, I was most interested in how Peck’s upbringing in Haiti (and later education in Berlin) shaped his view of the world. In part two of the documentary, he tells briefly about his fascination with the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism as a child and his disappointment with the religion after a beating by a priest at his school. Peck examines the inter-relationship between violence and religion in relation to the Crusades and how Europeans labeled non-Christians as savages, but not in direct relation to this story, which is left as a loose end. Still, Peck’s voice as a writer feels more confident and relaxed in these autobiographical parts of the film, when when he edits historical events, it can become breathless and stiff.
In the early stages, Destroy all brutes was reportedly a 15-part series. I can’t say whether a greater amount of time would have helped Peck’s project feel more or less overloaded and jumbled. One thing is certain: it is impossible to expose the ugly truth of colonization without mentioning sexual violence as one of the main means of oppression. Surprisingly, Peck’s docuseries only refers to consensual relationships between white settlers and black, indigenous and Asian women (Lindqvist also fails to articulate the consequences of gender-based violence in his book), despite European settlers being dependent on rape to terrorize communities and uphold slavery. . In 2021, this kind of mistake just feels like erasure.