What He Witnessed: Blackness, Film Spectatorship, and James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work

In this excerpt from his essay for Regeneration’s companion volume, film scholar Michael Boyce Gillespie looks at James Baldwin’s writing on Black film and how it served as a culmination of his long deliberation on race and America. 

James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, originally published in 1976, is a book-length essay that began as an article on black film for Esquire. Richly hybrid in form, the text is at once a history of American film, an autobiography, film criticism, and a treatise on the politics of popular culture. Baldwin, Francey Russell writes, “presents cinema not just as a popular art form but also as a shared, public site of collective instruction.”[1] Poignantly, this measure of instruction is mediated by rich reflections on Baldwin’s own experience as a film spectator. 

James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Dial, 1976), first edition

The book begins with microportraits of Baldwin’s early film experiences, including his nascent ideas of beauty by way of Joan Crawford, the cowboy hat and white horse semiotics of Tom Mix westerns, and a meditation on Bette Davis and their shared trait of frog-eyedness. Significantly, in this section of the book he mentions Orilla “Bill” Miller—“a young white schoolteacher, a beautiful woman, very important to me”—who took Baldwin to film screenings and theater performances [2], including his first play, Orson Welles’s 1936 production of Macbeth: “The first time I ever really saw black actors at work was on the stage: and it is important to emphasize that the people I was watching were black, like me. Nothing that I had seen before had prepared me for this—which is a melancholy comment indeed, but I cannot be blamed for an ignorance which an entire republic had deliberately inculcated.”[3]

Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night (1967), production still. Courtesy Margaret Herrick Library.

Later in the book,  Baldwin focuses on the Hollywood tendency toward the hackneyed and depthless regarding black representation, as evidenced by Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Baldwin takes issue with the depiction of Billie Holiday as a predictable victim, a Black woman gifted yet weak. His reckoning with the distance between Holiday’s accounts of her life and her life rendered on the screen speaks to the always diminished returns of cinema as truth.  In the book’s concluding comments on William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Baldwin refuses to believe that American audiences would be as untutored in matters of evil and fiendishness as the sensational responses to The Exorcist would suggest: “The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.” 

Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (1958), production still. Courtesy Margaret Herrick Library.

Full essay available in the Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 exhibition catalogue, available for purchase at the Academy Museum Store.

[1] Francey Russell, “‘How Shall We Put Ourselves in Touch with Reality?’: On Baldwin, Film, and Acknowledgment,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 87, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 999.

[2] Baldwin, Devil Finds Work, 480.

[3] Baldwin, Devil Finds Work, 500.

Michael Boyce Gillespie Michael Boyce Gillespie is associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. His research and writing focus on Black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. He is the author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film(Duke University Press, 2016) and coeditor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His recent writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, Criterion Collection, Film Comment, and Ends of Cinema.