These are the words of Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck, spoken in the trailer for his new four part HBO series Exterminate All the Brutes, which premiered on April 7.
Peck, whose 2016 film on James Baldwin I Am Not Your Negro, garnered numerous critical awards, has crafted a film that should be required viewing for every person in the United States, especially in these times fraught with white supremacist uprisings and racial inequities in everything from policing to health care in the time of COVID-19.
Where we are today is an ongoing story rooted in the history of genocides, brutality, and colonialism and Peck’s series covers a lot of historical ground, much of which is still erased from school textbooks.
My husband and I sat glued to the television last night, watching the first episode. It wasn’t that this was history we didn’t know—we were surprised that it is actually being aired and we hope that it will be adopted by every teacher who claims to teach history:
Exterminate All the Brutes, from acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, HBO’s Sometimes in April), is a four-part hybrid docuseries that provides a visually arresting journey through time, into the darkest hours of humanity. Through his personal voyage, Peck deconstructs the making and masking of history, digging deep into the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism — from America to Africa and its impact on society today.
Based on works by three authors and scholars — Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past — Exterminate All the Brutes revisits and reframes the profound meaning of the Native American genocide and American slavery and their fundamental implications for our present.
The series disrupts formal and artistic film conventions by weaving together rich documentary footage and archival material, as well as animation and interpretive scripted scenes that offer a counter-narrative to white Eurocentric history. Through a sweeping story in which history, contemporary life and fiction are wholly intertwined, the series challenges the audience to re-think the very notion of how history is being written.
Here are a few of the reviews.
Robert Daniels, writing for IndieWire wrote:
From the first Crusades to the current racial landscape of America, Peck identifies centuries of oppression forced upon Black and Indigenous people and narrates an ever-shifting arrangement of historical atrocities that chart the rise of scientific racism. It’s a sprawling academic narrative, but it’s Peck who makes it approachable with his own passion and ambition.
Stylistically, the docuseries is as broad as its timeline. Peck combines reenactments of historical events, provocative fictionalizations, arresting documentary footage, and animation. There’s also self-reflective references to his own films and comedic callbacks to other movies. More than 1,000 years of genocidal events are a lot to consume, but Peck creates a cohesive journey that shows how original sins manifest into present-day racial injustices.
Robert Ito writes in The New York Times:
Throughout the series, Peck takes down a succession of sacred cows, including the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (“a murderer”); Winston Churchill, who as a young war correspondent described the slaughter of thousands of Muslim troops at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman as “a splendid game”; and even “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” author, L. Frank Baum, who advocated the extermination of Native Americans after the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Among his most frequent targets is Donald Trump, which the film compares — through a series of powerful juxtapositions — to bigots throughout history. “I am an immigrant from a shithole country,” Peck says at one point, one of several references in the series to Trump’s racist rhetoric.
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Lisa Wong Macabasco’s Guardian piece:
“Everybody needs to acknowledge that the story of the United States started with a genocide,” Peck says. “Until you can do that, nothing makes sense.” He believes this is the first time such concepts have been delineated in a film. “I don’t know any other film that voices it so clearly and so solidly. It’s like a no-no in the US – you don’t play with their origin story. There clearly have been big differences between immigrants, refugees and natives. They decided to call it a country of immigrants, but it’s not.”
The selected film clips are an indictment of cinema’s role in propagating these myths, ranging from Apocalypse Now to Tarzan, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Gangs of New York, The Last Samurai and even the 1949 musical On the Town. (Peck has admitted that it was challenging to secure the rights to some of these clips given the context.) Many literary classics are also marshaled as evidence: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, HG Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Dr Moreau, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. As Baldwin put it: “We have made a legend out of a massacre.”
All together, the series is a strident deconstruction of western narratives, both popular and academic, that prods the audience to probe their assumptions. And some of the moments that most challenge are ahistorical or scripted dramatizations: a black priest encounters a group of white children who are shackled and beaten in a jungle; a white photographer brusquely poses Congolese rubber workers whose hands have been cut off for a portrait; a 19th-century scholar lectures on racial hierarchy to jeers from a multicultural, modern audience. “I had feelings, emotions, experiences that were very difficult to convey through normal means, but I knew that I could in fiction,” Peck says of these sequences. (Actor Josh Hartnett, who has portrayed several all-American archetypes in his career, was the director’s choice to play a murderous white Everyman throughout history.)
Peck talks about his intent in making the film.
"I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary."
I hope you not only watch the series, but also that you pass the word to friends, family, and co-workers.