Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Ernest-Cole:-Lost-and-Found
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

The tragic portrait of the famous author that the director Raoul Peck tries to recreate as a core of his And I Am Not Your Negro is Baldwin’s overwhelming perception of being black in America combined with his struggle with despair and self-loathing in the relentless pursuit of the truth. For Baldwin, the individual and the political intertwined in the darkest and most interesting ways.

Peck’s recent film, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found can also be seen as a sort of sequel to the aforementioned animated documentary. No, it’s not, even remotely, as potent. But it still stands as an acrid assessment of another black man – the photographer Ernest Cole, a native of Eersterust, South Africa, who in the late ‘50s began chronicling the horrors and the banalities of everyday life in apartheid’s South Africa with a camera in his hand. He fled the regime and relocated to New York in 1966, and the collection of South African photographs that he published, House of Bondage (1967), what sobering truth was to the American people concerning apartheid. For the first time, it taught people what apartheid actually was. It taught people what it actually is.

Until the very end of the movie, Baldwin’s text was read by Samuel L. Jackson, who gave it an almost musical strength. In “Lost and Found,” LaKeith Stanfield is the voice of Ernest Cole, however in this picture, for where Baldwin’s literary splendor can be directly expressed in the words of letters, journals, etc. (as dramatic as some of them are) – it‘s like Cole’s image; they Weston included in it all. Looking at a book of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, Cole wanted to be a photographer, and now his photographs are– black-and-white like Cartier-Bresson.

Social in style his street scenes become windows of a world where life is being lived within a caste system and their struggles as the people are. He documents the uneven relationships between black South Africans and their white (and some black) policemen, the apathetic white population, and the agonizing existence of the black population in the midst of poverty and violence. We, for example, observe South African Jim Crow, when entrances and fountains bear the inscription “Only for Europeans,” and one is startled to comprehend this variant of his own abhorrent system of apartheid. They ambush us with images of signs.

Every day, Cole faced life-threatening situations all because his camera annoyed the officials. This is what it is like filming the functioning of a totalitarian state. “I’m gathering proof,” he explains. “And sometimes it’s the monster who stared at me.” Cole documented $15 wage earners in ancient Mali and the wretched survival along the diamond, platinum, iron, and gold columns which created the economy of South Africa and strengthened the regime. He documented the consequences of apartheid’s underlying structures, a politically vindictive attitude of white supremacy, observing neighborhoods where slum clearance occurred and Black South Africans had “passbooks.” He also captured the outright barbarism; on March 21, 1960, when 69 civilians lost their lives at the hands of the regime, he was present during the Sharpville massacre.

Cole’s 10-year effort that resulted in ‘House of Bondage’ earned him a place in the limelight as a celebrated figure. It did, however, have it’s limitations in terms of the opportunities that came his way; he was stereotyped as a black photographer with a social conscience. He was awarded a Ford Foundation grant aimed at making a portrait of the Deep South. Other than that, his Jim Crow photos, while heartrending, lacked both the rich tenderness and jagged intensity of his other South African work. He had always been an outsider, and this distance can be seen in his photographs as well.

What can be said about Cole’s life other than his profession? Here the film becomes much more complicated and in a way, disturbing. It appears as though he led an uneventful life. Meandering about New York with a camera, he witnessed a type of freedom he had never experienced whilst taking pictures (we view his pictures of interracial and homosexual couples along with liberated women), but it was not a type of freedom he felt he could participate in fully. He was an alienated person, out of place and almost depressed with homesickness. He talks about,” the story of my gradual fall into moral degradation and into hell. He could not go back to Africa as he would have been jailed by the regime but he was just a shadow in New York. He was short, only 5 feet 4 inches, austere, had an is on his face that conveyed a lost curiosity and slowly, his camera slowly consumed him. His book remained in the archives, he lost his shelter and he passed away of cancer in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released just a couple of weeks from prison. He started to be inexistent.

But as it appears, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is also a crime fiction thriller. Bank employees in Stockholm opened three safety deposit boxes and found a number of negatives, which were never seen before, of textures created through the lens of Cole’s camera. They say nothing and it is unknown how they ended up there. The bank as the end title explains – is not talking (though this is rather suspicious). But the movie takes and follows – the path of the investigatory process the boxes are opened and files, most of which are filmed views of America, are properly arranged mid its exposure. Many of the images, however, appeared in the photo essay collections. When viewing “Lost and Found,” there is a feeling of great sorrow due to a life that tragically went off course, and the use of the other places where it winds up grips you. Not only a fine artist, Ernest Cole focused on something drastic. In the closing scene,s you are left with the perception that the apparition is addressing you.

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