In “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016), his profound and lacerating portrait of James Baldwin, the director Raoul Peck traced the haunted connection between two things: Baldwin’s staggering perception of what it was to be Black in America, and the depth of Baldwin’s struggle with melancholy, self-doubt, and his merciless ability to see truth. For Baldwin, the personal and political came together in uniquely despairing and revealing ways. Peck’s new documentary, “ Ernest Cole: Lost and Found ,” could be considered a companion piece to that earlier monumental film.
No, it isn’t as powerful. But it, too, is the penetrating portrait of a Black artist — the photographer Ernest Cole, who was born in 1940 in Eersterust, South Africa, and who beginning in the late ’50s took his camera into the streets to chronicle the evils and everyday experience of life under apartheid. He escaped the regime and came to New York City in 1966, and the book he published of his South African photographs, “House of Bondage” (1967), was a wake-up call to the world.
It showed people, for the first time, what apartheid looked like. It showed people what it was . “I Am Not Your Negro” was held together by Baldwin’s writing, read by Samuel L.
Jackson in a voice of almost musical fortitude. In “Lost and Found,” LaKeith Stanfield reads the words of Ernest Cole, but in this movie the equivalent of the lyric directness of Baldwin’s literary genius isn’t the passages we hear from C.
