First, there are his hands, slender and delicate, moving slowly over a long rosary, with the slow, light movement of someone who has learned to savor every second of existence. There is a bare room, where he lies on his back in the middle of a large bed. The windows and the stool topped with a pack of cigarettes highlight a minimalist decor, white as a blank page. And then, suddenly, there is his voice, as quick as it is relentless: “I suppose that many people do blame me for being out of the States as often as I am. But one can’t afford to worry about that, because one does, you know, what you have to do, the way you have to do it.”
James Baldwin gets up. Wearing only underwear, he lazily scratches his back and opens the curtains before the camera’s eye glides over the Bosphorus, following the boats crossing between the European and Asian shores of the vast city of Istanbul, which is just waking up. This footage, from the 11-minute black-and-white documentary James Baldwin: From Another Place, directed by Turkish photographer Sedat Pakay, was shot in May 1970. Until two years ago, it was impossible to find – except for a brief excerpt on YouTube – and it reveals one of the most important and creative, yet still relatively unknown, periods in the North American writer’s career.
At the time the film was made, Baldwin was 45 years old and at the height of his powers. Known for his incisive and often dazzling writing, recognized as one of the most important authors of his era, an openly gay man and pioneer for gay rights, as well as a leading voice of the civil rights movement, he had been living in Istanbul intermittently for nearly 10 years. That Turkish decade, filled with parties and friends, self-questioning and struggle, would come to an end a few months later, marking the beginning of a long and unique period of exile that, as he would often repeat to those close to him, “saved [his] life.”
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