The Spoken Word

READING JAMES BALDWIN WITH A MIND TOWARD ADAPTING him was a daunting prospect. I’d always worshipped James Baldwin. For me, as it pertains to exploring humanity through writing, he was the monolith at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: oblique, unassailable.

This adaptation was different and distinct from the previous film., the visual inspirations were largely rooted in cinema, the work of Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Claire Denis. With , we took a course dictated by Baldwin’s words—the lyrical poetry of his syntax. Baldwin had a way of making sentence structure expressive, a mastery of craft in which the tools used to deliver the message, the very words themselves, became art. In a film so driven by the interior voice of the author as embodied and spoken by our main character, the pace and rhythm of the film is a direct reflection of the rhythm of Baldwin’s words.