“As a filmmaker, I am compelled to stay hidden in the background, restrained, moderate, balanced, judicious, neutral even,” says filmmaker, educator, historian, and gentleman Raoul Peck about a half-hour into the first chapter of “Exterminate All the Brutes,” his new HBO docuseries. “You learn to avoid becoming the subject of your film. It’s not about you, unless the story is bigger than you. In that case, you go for broke. Neutrality is not an option, and those who seek history with an upbeat ending, redemption, or reconciliation may search in vain. Such a conclusion cannot be expected.”
If you know Peck’s work, you likely know it best, or at least first, through “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary adapted from an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. There is no Peck in “I Am Not Your Negro”: The words belong to Baldwin, the speech to Jackson, the images to history as well as the people who suffered and died in the formation of that history. He is most certainly not that film’s subject. Nor is he the subject of “Murder in Pacot,” “Moloch Tropical,” “Sometime in April,” or “Lumumba: La mort d’un prophète,” films, both features and documentaries, about atrocities of the past. (He certainly isn’t the subject of “The Young Karl Marx,” but that movie holds many of his interests as a storyteller.) So “Exterminate All the Brutes” reads at first as an act of brave vanity, as if Peck has chosen from the outset to boldly center his latest on himself.
READ MORE: The 65 Most Anticipated TV Shows & Mini-Series Of 2021
That’s unfair, of course. For one, Peck never makes “Exterminate All the Brutes” about him; he just figures into it, because as a citizen of the world and a product of a history comprising massacres, slaughters, and other assorted barbarities that were trendy at one time or another in mankind’s awful lifespan, he cannot help figuring into it. For another, when he does take an active role in the telling of man’s inhumanity to man, he does so with a sort of calm, bereaved remove. Maybe that’s the only way Peck can talk about horrors beyond count as he must in order to construct the truth of human beings’ longstanding inclination toward wanton cruelty. It’s either that or play a drinking game with 9-1-1 on speed dial. (Whenever white people do a genocide or a subjugation, take a shot. Whenever white people attempt to prove their own primacy over others, take two.)
All roads in the series lead back to Peck, and all roads lead from him, too. Similar to “I Am Not Your Negro,” “Exterminate All the Brutes” is adapted from a text of the same name by Swedish nonfiction author Sven Lindqvist, which connects the dots between Hitler’s rise and the prevailing opinion of the era that imperialism was a necessity of man’s biology. Peck’s quadriptych documentary expands that lens and carries forward Lindqvist’s original work, using wartime photography to draw comparisons between carnage wrought in Bergen-Belsen (Germany 1945), Adana (Turkey, 1919), Saigon (Vietnam, 1968), and Rwanda (1994); to find the inequity in history’s elevation of the American Revolutionary War (in 1763) and the French Revolutionary War (1789) over the Haitian Revolutionary War (1790); to trace a common lineage binding European ethnocentrism and American white supremacy to the nationalist movements stinking up otherwise lovely countries all over the planet.
Small potatoes, in other words! No biggie, no sweat! Peck was wise to give himself four hours—one hour per episode—to conduct this great academic work; to squeeze this into a film would mean biting off way, way more than he or anyone else could chew, unless that film clocked in at three hours. Maybe that would’ve worked. But “Exterminate All the Brutes” works in the shape Peck gives it, even if ultimately that shape proves unwieldy, bulky, practically Herculean in its intention, except Hercules probably would’ve said, “No thanks,” and left Peck to his own devices. The series’ scope is massive. In truth, it might work better as a book, though Lindqvist’s text obviously and by no fault of its own lacks Peck’s present-day vantage point. Could Peck have successfully translated his voice, not only literal but figurative, into literature? Possibly. There’s apparently not much the guy can’t do. But he’s a filmmaker. Cinema is his voice.
“Exterminate All the Brutes” is made for TV, and yet it’s still cinematic in its scale and purpose. Peck brings a belt’s worth of tools to construct his argument: His voiceover, of course, as well as archival footage and news clips, subtitled factoids, animation, classical artwork, and reenactments in which Josh Hartnett typically figures. (Hartnett’s casting in these segments feels like a stroke of genius on casting directors Francesca Bradley, Valerie Daniella, and Hernandez Oloffson; even today, he’s a pop culture icon, the spitting image of bygone American male idealism, handsome and rugged. Using that image to facilitate Peck’s point works to terrible, wonderful effect.) There’s so much technique, in fact, that the overall experience becomes overwhelming in tandem with the sheer volume of information woven into the series’ framework.
Even a streamlined version of “Exterminate All the Brutes” would overwhelm, though. The material is by its very nature inundating. It’s too much. That isn’t a criticism. It’s a statement of observable fact. Peck’s presence in each episode actually serves a greater function than his own self-reflection and accounting of how history has informed his life and career; each time he guides the narrative to himself, he narrows the focus, gives us all room to breathe. It’s not as if his story is neither interesting nor germane to the conversation, after all. His family wisely got the hell out of Haiti during the François Duvalier regime and put themselves far beyond the reach beyond his death squads. Not all tyrants are white, Peck argues, and not all oppressed peoples are Black. (As if to invoke the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Peck turns an eye to England’s brutal conquest of Ireland and the Irish, whom the English saw as subhuman. Even Irish people used to be Black.) The more Peck reveals, the more grounded “Exterminate All the Brutes” becomes.
The series isn’t an example of vanity. It’s a demonstration of how individuals reckon with the past. “Exterminate All the Brutes” does its best work under these conditions, and the rest of the time remains watchable, even if it’s several weight classes higher than what the average viewer can go toe to toe with. Even above average viewers may find the series outmatches them. But watching it is a challenge worth meeting. [B]
“Exterminate All the Brutes” debuts on HBO on April 7.