27/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Raoul Peck’s rousing documentary eulogises the famed South African photojournalist and chronicler of apartheid

From Finding Vivian Maier to the previous year’s British gem Tish [+see also:
film review
film profile], a documentary about a famed photographer will likely also concern a neglected one. Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole, Lost and Found, the recently anointed L'Œil d’Or winner at Cannes (see the news), shows the titular subject’s work etching itself into the historical record of apartheid South Africa, whilst the figure behind that work fades away. A companion piece in its method and argumentative clarity to Peck’s Oscar-nominated James Baldwin tribute I Am Not Your Negro [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], the film remarks aptly on the ensuing fortunes of those who fought apartheid, but were then damned, punished and, in Cole’s case, exiled. Boasting sizeable French production support, it premiered as a Special Screening on the Croisette.

Like Asif Kapadia, Peck began in drama but has achieved greatest visibility in documentary, albeit authored with a certain dynamism and panache. His focus always privileges the visual, however articulate the composite voice-over of Cole’s thoughts performed by LaKeith Stanfield: Cole’s own vivid black-and-white 35 mm photography is better than any historical reconstruction, and occasional cuts to contemporary-shot colour footage – such as a windshield-POV wide angle of the rural South African plains – helps the viewer bask in sheer pictorial splendour. The narrative thrust follows Cole as he collates materials over ten years – exemplified by a reportage on the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which he was present for – to form his canonical photo book House of Bondage, a vital document of institutional segregation, which focused minds internationally as Britain and others inaugurated boycotts and diplomatic isolation.

With anti-apartheid movements forced underground, and Nelson Mandela commencing his 27-year imprisonment in 1962, the temperature was hot for Cole and others like him. He decamped to civil rights-era New York, as artistic contemporaries Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim had done, and initially saw grant-giving bodies like the Ford Foundation back his work, an institution for which he would collaborate on an ostensibly similar photo series of the Jim Crow South. Yet in spite of how his pictures both artfully and directly anatomised the bleak situations at hand, Peck bravely makes the latter part of his film far more indirect and elliptical.

And then there was, essentially, nothing. In spite of Cole so forcefully distilling the tenor of his former home, his geographic exile was gradually joined by an emotional and mental one. With his ardour for photography waning and his South African passport confiscated, he was temporarily allowed into Sweden (of which more in a moment), Denmark and the UK, before returning impoverished to the USA, where Stanfield’s narration corroborates rumours that he was a New York “bag person”, his destitution sadly contrasting with winds of change back home, with democratic elections on the horizon in the early 1990s. It’s a poignant reflection of how creative activity, entwined with political agitation, might metaphorically power a person’s heart; with neither, and in whatever fresh locale he settled, the impact of statelessness and alienation destroyed him.

Negatives mysteriously recovered in a Stockholm bank provide the crisp-resolution scans deployed by Peck. History comes back to life, the revivified photos indexing a past reality we can’t let slip 30 years since the demise of apartheid, and when analogies to it are convincingly given to contemporary crises. As someone of Jewish South African heritage, it gradually dawned that this writer had heard Cole’s name and seen some of the images before; very fitting indeed.

Ernest Cole, Lost and Found is a co-production by France and the USA, staged by Velvet Film and ARTE France Cinéma. mk2 films represents its international sales.