Wide-eyed
Peter Ackroyd
The Devil Finds Work James Baldwin (Michael Joseph £3.95) At its worst the American cinema is an elaborate and colourful repository of social codes and beliefs, and it is natural for James Baldwin—in this book—to turn to it in his endless process of self-identification. But he is equivocal. Films are, as the title suggests, both insidious and malicious in themselves, and subtly corrupting to those who watch them. So American blacks are in an exposed position, and Baldwin is characteristically sensitive to all the racialist overtones in white, capitalist cinema (he is very good on such ostensibly 'liberal' works as Guess Who's Coining to Dinner?). But since he generally confines himself to the overt message or explicit themes of such films, his analyses are often pedestrian and sometimes clumsily written. The film becomes a vehicle for his preoccupation with current sexual and political matters and this is not the best position from which to make critical iudgments of any significance.
Baldwin has always possessed a 'white', or at least bourgeois, imagination which has been enriched by the language of his early store-front faith and by the rhetoric of his own self-indulgence. In other words, his is a literary sensibility and he characteristically turns to those films which have been made 'out of' novels. Again, 'the language of the cinema is also the language of our dreams'—giving him the freedom to become even more allusive and selfconcerned. This is a book more for those who read Baldwin than for those who go to the cinema.
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