Ernest Cole, the first Black freelance photographer in South Africa, is known today for his contribution to documenting the Apartheid in the 1960s and racial attitudes in America in the 1970s. Born in 1940, he grew up in segregated South Africa before moving to the United States in his youth to evade persecution for his work. He died in 1990 in New York City, in a state of near homelessness, vagrancy, and ignominy. The rediscovery of over 60,000 of his photographs in 2017, long thought lost, helped restore his place as one of the most important and influential photographers of our time. His life and work get the epic documentary treatment in Raoul Peck’s new film “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.”
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Laura Poitras’ award-winning “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed” serves as a benchmark for what Peck is trying to accomplish here. Poitras used an elaborate scheme to cover not just Nan Goldin’s photography but also present an overall biographical portrait as well as interweave her considerable activism work. Poitras was, of course, helped by the fact that Goldin is alive and can herself offer commentary and testimony about all that had transpired in her life. Peck doesn’t have that access, so he has to rely on approximations to provide insight into Cole’s life and work. Some of his inventions work, others not so much.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is slightly shapeless, although certain distinct sections can be discerned. The title cards in the beginning promise to tell us what transpired between 1967, when Cole published his seminal book “House Of Bondage,” and 2017, when his long-lost archive was rediscovered. But the film doesn’t really deliver. The entire first part of the film is essentially a straight documentary about the history of Apartheid in South Africa and the indignities suffered by Black people under the white supremacist regime. Cole’s pictures are used to illustrate this section, and Lakeith Stanfield’s voiceover narration often uses Cole’s own words. It is illuminating and helps provide context about Apartheid and South Africa. However, it doesn’t have the intimacy or insight of Cole’s personal life story; it is an expansive, omniscient overview.
Things pick up when Peck covers Cole’s photography work in South Africa, often conducted clandestinely, before his eventual move to the United States. After being turned down several times, Cole is finally able to publish House Of Bondage, the only notable work he could release during his lifetime. It lays bare in stark images the shattering dehumanization and human rights violations faced by Black people in South Africa. The images are searing. Pictures of the persecuted Black people in peril, often surrounded by uniformed officers about to execute an atrocity, horrifyingly recall Nazi Germany.
Cole’s next assignment is even more revealing as he starts photographing the South of the United States with Jim Crow laws in full force. He offers a devastating assessment—America, the land of the free, was almost identical to Apartheid South Africa in the racist South. If anything, Cole states he felt safer in South Africa because he could only be arrested, but in America, he could be shot—with relative impunity.
He briefly moved to Sweden for a few years, from 1969 to 1972 and again in 1979, before moving back to the U.S. and giving up photography for good. This visit sets up the modern-day thread where Leslie Matlaisane, Cole’s nephew, is invited to Sweden to collect his rediscovered archive in 2017. This is also where the shortcomings of Peck’s organizing scheme are most apparent. “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is essentially formed of several smaller parts, what one might conceive of as smaller doc shots mushed together to form the larger whole.
There’s the broad survey of South African history, after the initial setup we return several times to news footage showing pivotal historical moments including Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For good measure, Peck also throws in footage of considerable upheaval throughout the world, including Vietnam War protests in the US. There’s also the most pertinent exploration of the subject—the biographical sections—which chart Cole’s state of mind and work through the ’60s and ’70s. Peck’s attempt to recreate Cole’s state of mind in the ’80s and early ’90s is less successful as Cole had stopped photography at that time, and hence, the pictures and footage used and the description of his psyche seem misaligned.
Finally, the most underserved section, which honestly could have been the basis for an entire feature-length documentary, is the discovery of Cole’s archive of 60,000 photographs in a bank vault in Sweden. Peck asks some of the right questions—how did the archive get in the bank, who delivered it, who paid for the upkeep all these years, and why contact Cole’s descendants now? But he then proceeds to answer none of them. There is a vague suggestion that a suppression effort was at play, but the bank implausibly has no records of any kind, and no information is offered about the archive’s history. It is the perfect subject for an investigative documentarian to explore at length.
Lakeith Stanfield’s voiceover is soulful and gripping and actually delivered in the first person, a stand-in for Cole as he is not alive today to deliver his own testimony. It is unmoored in time, in the sense that this version of Cole, sounding like a young man, comments on and recounts events from his life as well as after his life. It is a neat storytelling device and helps provide psychological insight into Cole without deploying a million talking heads of the people who knew him.
The film is also largely well-paced and zips through its first half but loses steam towards the end. The lack of a single throughline begins to weigh it down a little. Even so, the nearly thousands of images taken by Cole used throughout aptly communicate the immensity of his contribution to our understanding of race. It only confirms his stature as an extraordinary journalist with a singular eye for composition and capturing the truth of Black lives. Cole deserves much greater fame and recognition, and hopefully, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” will lead audiences to revisit his essential work. [B-]