Orwell went to fight. I Thought I Should Do the Same: Raoul Peck on His Intimate Relationship with the Writer | Documentaries

‘I “I have to admit, George Orwell was not at the top of my list of authors who I thought fit my current worldview,” says Raoul Peck from his book-filled Parisian apartment. This outlook – anti-imperialist, intellectually curious, and fiercely independent – ​​has been shaped by an extraordinary life. Beck was born in Haiti, and grew up under the violent Duvalier regimes, before his family fled in 1961. He was educated in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then in New York and Orléans, France, before moving to Berlin, where he studied industrial engineering and economics. He spent a year as a taxi driver in New York and five years as a journalist and photographer, before earning a film degree in Berlin in 1988. In 2010, he was appointed head of the French State Film School.

He is best known for his dramatic and documentary works, which often highlight his intellectual heroes. He profiled Patrice Lumumba, the first leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; He made a drama about the friendship between two young men, Engels and Marx, the crucible that created communism; He created a tender portrait of the South African photographer Ernest Cole; He won a BAFTA for his 2017 documentary about writer James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. In 2021, he made Annihilation of All Savages, a four-part television series about colonialism and ethnic cleansing. His 2005 film Sometimes in April depicted and explored the Rwandan genocide. No one – except Adam Curtis – has interrogated the big ideas and structures that shape our world in a more creative and consistently exploratory way.

When Peck won a BAFTA for I Am Not Your Negro, he praised Baldwin in his acceptance speech, saying: “He left us words that today are so necessary in a world of unapologetic ignorance.” The same can be said for almost all of Beck’s subjects, but especially Orwell, which the director explores in his latest film, 2 + 2 = 5, despite having previously excluded him. “I’ve always been interested in what’s happening now, wherever I live,” explains Beck, still as curious as ever at 72, who barely sits still throughout the Zoom call. “Orwell was sold to me at school and university as a kind of science fiction writer.”

Peck builds his portrait of the writer using Orwell’s own words (brought to life by the gravelly-voiced Damien Lewis), many of which come from the diaries he kept before his death from tuberculosis in 1950. Orwell died six months after publishing his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Peck intertwines scenes from the various adaptations, from Rudolph Cartier’s 1954 BBC version to Michael Anderson’s version. 1984 film with Eurythmics soundtrack and John Hurt as Winston Smith. The famous Apple Super Bowl ad that suggested that 1984 would not be like Orwell’s vision as the Macintosh personal computer also appeared.

The euphemistic “new discourse” imposed by the novel’s Big Brother regime in order to stifle dissent is interspersed with modern political slogans such as Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, while clips from “Animal Farm” sit alongside footage of Chinese soldiers trampling the goose in a military parade. Pictures from the Iraq war, excerpts from Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist speeches, and terrifying clips from Yemen and Gaza appear before us. It is the sensory overload that puts Orwell in the here and now. “I grew up with New Modern,” Beck says. “I had to dismantle everything around me. Because Kennedy and the United States were supporting dictatorship in my country, while lecturing us about democracy.”

When Peck began researching Orwell, the author quickly felt familiar to him. Instead of being a mysterious Englishman from a different world, he looked like a fellow traveler. “I discovered the Orwell of the Third World,” says the director. “He returned to Burma [now known as Myanmar] When he was 20 years old and discovered colonialism, he went on to fight the Spanish Civil War in his 30s. That’s what young people did in the world I come from. We fight for truth, we fight for justice, we don’t fight through Twitter. Until 1986, there was a dictatorship in Haiti. So, for most of my young life, I was prepared to go back to my country and fight and possibly die. This was the political logic in which we grew up. So I found myself completely Orwell.

The film came about after Alex Gibney, a documentary director and the film’s producer, was given unprecedented access to the Orwell archive, and Peck was given carte blanche to make the film he wanted. While the director was digging, surprises appeared. He was stunned to find photographs of the author with his Indian nanny when he was a child, which suddenly placed the writer in a new vulnerable context with a close connection to the far reaches of the British Empire.

His curiosity was also piqued after discovering the writer’s reflections on his time in Burma as an imperial police officer. Orwell’s most famous work from this period is his story about an officer shooting an elephant, which begins with the line: “At Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by great numbers of people – the only time in my life I was important enough for this to happen to me.” Peck found the writer’s self-loathing and support for the Burmese people surprising.

“Why would a young British man return to Burma as a colonial agent?” Beck asks. “He’s searching for something, but he discovered colonialism – and that’s a wake-up call. He wrote about it in a way that few people did at the time. He was denouncing the crimes and crimes of his people. It took courage to do it so openly.”

In Peck’s film, Orwell targets not only the colonial process in Burma but also the British class system, media complicity, and the authoritarian tendencies of populist movements. Beck calls Orwell’s analysis a “toolbox” that can still be used today to diagnose unhealthy societies. “It shows how political systems become authoritarian,” Beck says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the left or the right: they’re both attacking language, attacking intelligence, attacking justice, attacking the press or trying to control it. You have to have some kind of cult of personality. We see this in any kind of skewed regime – any institution can go there if there are no checks and balances.”

Beck has first-hand experience of political failure from within government. Convinced that this was the patriotic thing to do, he served as Haiti’s Minister of Culture from March 1996 until October 1997, when he resigned in protest at what he saw as former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s anti-democratic seizure of power. Peck wrote about the experience in a book whose title loosely translates to “Mr. Minister…Until Patience Runs Out,” a chronicle of political ineptitude, lies, and dashed hopes. Today, he says: “I know how weak governments are, how corrupt they are, and how afraid they are.” “As a society we give them too much power.”

How does he feel about democracies in the West? “They are very fragile,” says the director. “They don’t see their democracy collapsing day by day. Remember Berlusconi in Italy? People were making jokes about it. I never took it as a joke. For me, it was a deterioration of democracy in Europe. So at some point I realized it would reach the United States.”

Beck has a clear vision of America’s slide into authoritarianism. “Look at Donald Trump. He has 40 journalists in front of him and he’s attacking a woman, calling her a ‘pig’ or saying ‘You never smile’. If the whole room doesn’t stand up and leave, you give him power, because next time he knows he can attack every one of you. And that’s what he does – he doesn’t attack you en masse, he points to one person and then everyone backs down. That’s how an authoritarian regime works. He doesn’t attack all the law firms, he attacks one, the most powerful one. He attacked the largest university, Colombia.

Despite his ordeals in office and his poor assessment of Western politics, Beck did not lose faith in all political movements. The last few minutes of 2+2=5 feature footage of protests around the world, and examples of the power people can break through the fog caused by new rhetoric and dishonest leadership. He talks every night with his friends in Haiti, checking on the latest developments and coming up with ideas to improve the situation on the ground in a dysfunctional and divided country.

Are protests the solution? “I wouldn’t call it a solution,” Beck says. “I would say, as Orwell also said, that the status quo is also a political position; doing nothing is also a political statement. The question for each of us, individually and collectively, is what is our decision? Because if you do not participate, history will be made without you.”