George Orwell is so iconic that he has his own adjective, but his classic dystopian novel almost didn’t make it to completion.
“He’s trying to finish ‘1984,’ it’s the last year of his life, and he’s in and out of hospitals, sanatoriums. He doesn’t know if he will finish,” says filmmaker Raoul Peck.
That’s the struggle that anchors Peck’s latest documentary, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” as the British writer races against tuberculosis to publish his chilling vision of doublethink, thoughtcrimes and memory holes before his death at age 46.
For Peck, that’s only half the story. Scenes from Orwell’s life blend together with grim footage of our own time, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The mistake during the Cold War that people made is [thinking] he wrote exclusively against the Soviet Union or Stalinism,” Peck says. “In fact, he was writing down the very matrix of how an authoritarian developed. What are the signs? What is the language? What are the structures?”
Those questions are familiar to Peck, whose family fled Haiti during the François Duvalier regime. “When you have lived in a dictatorship, you recognize those signs very early on,” he says.
This interview has been edited and condensed. To hear the full conversation with director Raoul Peck, listen to the latest episode of the Political Theater podcast.
Q: When did Orwell first come into your world?
A: Of course I read “1984” in school, and “Animal Farm” as well. But Orwell was always a very far away character for me. I’m from Haiti, and then I grew up in Congo under Mobutu. My father was arrested in Haiti twice, and then he had to leave because he knew that the dictatorship would come after him.
But when I started to immerse myself in this project, I slowly discovered a different Orwell that was closer to my own reality. And I also profoundly understood that, in fact, he was not writing about some sort of future republic. He was talking about his own experience volunteering at 19 to become a policeman in Burma. He was confronted with the colonial forces, and he was on the bad side, and he recognized that.
And that brought me closer to him because he did a very humble thing of writing about it in the 1930s, when a lot of African countries were still colonized. There were a lot of dictatorships around the world, but he admitted what he did there, and he was not proud of it, and he criticized his home country about what they were doing in Burma and in India. And so I learned a new Orwell, and that allowed me to make a much more organic and intimate film.
Q: Within the film, you’ve got the aspects of Orwell’s life, but you’ve also got contemporary footage of Ukraine, or what’s going on in Gaza, or in Myanmar with the Rohingya.
A: I can see it in the reactions of the audience. It’s a shock for them, because we have learned how to isolate ourselves and just see our own little bubble. We are being fed by breaking news every day, and thus letting go a more universal look at what is happening in the world.
What the film does is to put in the foreground the simultaneity of all those places of war, places of misery, places of ending of democracies. You know, Orwell himself, he plays the story of “1984” in London because he wanted to make sure we understand that kind of system can happen anywhere, including in the Western world, and we are on the verge of looking at such a transformation here.
Q: How does this compare with your film about James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro”?
A: When you’ve never left your country, everything else is sort of obscure, sometimes savage territory. But these men left their own country and learned to know who the “other” is, who are the foreigners, who are the immigrants, who are the illegals, as you would use today as a word, and that changed them. They start reflecting on who they are as a human being, and they start seeing the “other” as fellow human beings.
Q: Just as a thought experiment, if you’re looking at where we’re at now in 2050, do you see 2025 as a tipping point year?
A: No. When I started working on Orwell, I thought Kamala Harris would be president, and the film was as important for me at that time as it is today because the problem didn’t start with the present administration.
There has been a deconstruction of everything since at least Ronald Reagan. The reorganizing of the whole press, whether it’s TV news, newspapers or the fact that there is no local press anymore, basically, in this country. The fragmentation of society, and it came from the economy as well. People forget, but during the oil crisis, as we used to call it, that’s when they started cutting budgets. They started cutting social programs.
So I don’t see that as something that suddenly happened because a majority of voters voted for a president. No, I think it had been long in the making. It’s just a sort of acceleration, and then we are looking at the ugliness of it and we can’t look away.
Q: Congress is particularly supine right now, abdicating their own constitutional responsibilities, letting the courts and letting the White House kind of call the shots.
A: I remember in the first Trump term, Republicans in Congress, a few of them started saying something. But then I saw that each time, it was somebody [not running] for reelection. I said, “Oh, my God, this is a problem” — that none of those elected officials dare say something that would go against the prince.
When you have lived in a dictatorship, you recognize those signs very early on. You start asking the question, where is this going? Because cutting off dissent, it starts when you can’t really fully tell what you’re thinking. It’s self-censorship because you’re afraid of the consequences of what you’re saying. We talk about freedom of speech in this country as if it’s natural. No, it needs that you act up upon it, that you prove that you have the freedom of speech. Otherwise, it’s just emptiness.
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