(Similarly, the effect of relating monstrous details from the lives of Thomas Jefferson or The Wizard of Oz author L. The aim is to make viewers aware of the prejudices we’ve passively absorbed through pop culture, in order to challenge those assumptions with jarring counter-narratives rooted in contemporary scholarship. Peck layers his narration over collages of archival materials, infographics and, hauntingly in this context, clips from movies, like the Conrad-inspired Apocalypse Now and John Wayne’s The Alamo, that mythologize shameful moments in our history. and its original sins-the long, slow genocide of Indigenous peoples as well as chattel slavery-it is really a non-chronological, revisionist history of the West since the Crusades. While the series concentrates most on the U.S. In each episode, he credits himself as having made the series “together with” all three scholars, even though Trouillot died in 2012 and Lindqvist in 2019.

Peck also draws heavily on historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History. It takes its title from Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist’s ruminative 1992 book about his travels through postcolonial Africa, which in turn wrestles with the source of the quote “exterminate all the brutes”: Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness. Bankrolled by HBO (where it premieres on April 7) after the success of the Baldwin feature, the series is Peck’s attempt to unearth what he has called an “origin story” for white supremacy. That makes Brutes the culmination of the 67-year-old filmmaker’s lifelong work. The unifying factor is not just an obsession with injustice-racial, economic, imperial-but also the history of resistance to it. While he has frequently focused on his home country of Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he spent much of his childhood, he’s lived all over the world, and his films have dramatized everything from the youthful adventures of an anticapitalist icon ( The Young Karl Marx) to the Rwandan genocide ( Sometimes in April). for I Am Not Your Negro, his Oscar-nominated 2016 film that paired the words of James Baldwin with a collage of images of the racist culture that Baldwin was critiquing, Peck has been making difficult films about cataclysm and revolution for almost four decades.

Dead space brute execution