‘The forces involved are less visible than gunfire, class ownership or political crusades, but they are no less powerful, ‘says Raoul Peck in his new documentation. Destroy all the brute, April 7 on HBO.
The highly acclaimed filmmaker refers to the series of myths involving white rule, the subject of the four-part series examining the cruel methods and ideological justifications of Western colonization. In his latest project, Peck again applies experimental techniques from his 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary about the writer and activist James Baldwin, I’m not your negro, to challenge our collective understanding of America as a powerful and commonly named ‘great’ nation.
Destroy all the brute is laden with reports of historical events such as the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Anglo-Powhatan wars, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told straight and poetically by Peck, who also serves as sole narrator alongside writer and director. Like his previous documentary, the series also discusses literature, film and other works of art that have been influential in condemning or disseminating false narratives about colonialism and non-white populations, including Sven Lindqvist’s non-fiction book from 1992 from which the series takes its name (it is also a line from the Joseph Conrad novels Heart of Darkness, which is mentioned in the series).
In part one of the documentaries, entitled “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance”, Peck talks admirably about his deceased Swedish historian friend, who died in 2019, while appearing in archive material working in an office. Lindqvist’s desire and willingness to uncover the horrors of colonialism via a journey through the Sahara Desert, the subject of his award-winning book, serves as inspiration for Peck in his current research and as a model of productive cross-racial relations – even if only all white people were eager to question their position in the world.
Similarly, Peck devotes most of the documentary to the importance of know the truth of white supremacy, especially the use of genocide in the establishment of African and American colonies, rather than providing a roadmap for decolonization. This approach is likely to attract viewers who are struggling with this topic for the first time and want to learn about important events in world history in a relatively short time.
It’s easy to imagine that this series would appear on anti-racist watchlists if it was before the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. But for those who consider themselves experts in our colonial past and understand how this history fits into current discussions about the removal of Confederate monuments or the end of capitalism or the abolition of the police, Peck’s claims are in the series that we lack ‘courage’. ‘Draw conclusions’ from the past, or that dominant historical narratives should be ‘challenged’, as if he were one of the few rare who do so in public, can feel patronizing and out of touch with the work of non-white historians and the current political movements are led by coloreds around the world.
That said, I’m not sure I would recommend it Destroy all the brute also to someone digging into the subject for the first time, despite the introductory nature of the series. Peck’s excursions through different periods and parts of the world, not to mention the innumerable list of politicians and military leaders mentioned briefly and never talked about again, are hard to keep up with after a few minutes and even retained, as the series moves from one invasion to the next without drawing any connection between these incidents of violence. This is particularly disturbing, as in the first episode, Peck provides his audience with a number of basic terms that ‘sum up the entire history of mankind’ – civilization, extinction and experimentation. He does not abandon these provisions, but it will be useful for viewers if he tries to categorize the information in this way, as well as to follow the designated topic of each specific episode, from which he often deviates.
Peck’s experimental impulses, which are at least fascinating, also get in the way of coherence. We are overwhelmed with a wide range of film clips from In the city on Raiders of the Lost Ark on The Wolf of Wall Street, illustrations, animated maps and maps moving at an illegible pace, paintings, home videos of Peck’s childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and fictional versions. Many of these segments are accompanied by Peck’s monotonous voice that viewers may find, because remarkably there are no talking heads. But it is especially the dramatization, mostly interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous people, that feels particularly fruitless and misplaced in the documentary.
‘But it is especially dramatizations, mostly interactions between white settlers and black and indigenous people, that feel particularly fruitless and misplaced in the documentary.”
In the third episode, “Killing at a Distance or … How I Thorlyly Enjoyed the Outing”, which begins to explain the role of weapons in imperialism, we spend a few minutes how a fictional slave woman pulled out a settler ( played by Josh Hartnett) and give him a bath. After hearing a woman whine outside, she peeks out the window at the faces of four slain black men, Hartnett’s character who had just struck lynch. This is the whole of the scene and it’s unclear what we should get out of it regarding the theme of the episode or as a standalone vignette. Similarly, the rest of the versions were poorly thought out and endorsed, including an embarrassing image of black people enslaving white people. Others, with free graphic representations of the deaths of black and indigenous people, feel as if Peck is holding a specific part of his audience by hand and viewers who do not need to visualize, for example an indigenous woman being shot in and out experiencing the gruesome violence, looking outside her death to believe that the kind of brutality had taken place.
To look out into all this clutter is enchanting footage from Peck’s childhood in Haiti that adds an element of intimacy and warmth to a rather gloomy film. Admittedly, I was most interested in how Peck’s education in Haiti (and later his training in Berlin) shaped his view of the world. In part two of the documentary, he talks briefly about his fascination with the splendor and circumstances of Catholicism as a child and his disillusionment with religion after getting a priest at his school. Peck touches on the interrelationship between violence and religion regarding the Crusades and how Europeans described non-Christians as cruel, but not in direct connection with this story, which is left as a loose point. Yet Peck’s voice as a writer feels more confident and relaxed in these autobiographical portions of the film, while it can breathe and become stiff as he makes the editing of historical events.
In its early stages, Destroy all the brute was reportedly a series of 15 parts. I do not know if a greater amount of time would make Peck’s project feel more or less crowded and cluttered. One thing that is certain is that it is impossible to expose the ugly truth of colonization without mentioning sexual violence as a major instrument of oppression. Surprisingly, Peck’s documentation refers only to non-consensual relations between white settlers and black, indigenous, and Asian women (Lindqvist fails to articulate the consequences of gender-based violence in his book) despite the fact that European colonizers relied on rape to terrorizing communities and perpetuating slavery. . In the year 2021, this kind of oversight simply feels like extinction.