Prof. Harold Hellwig (Idaho State University): "Family Discord: The Politics of Racial Time Unhinged in Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Barry Jenkins’ Adaptation, Beale Street" 

Tuesday, December 3, 12:15 - 13:45 Uhr, U5/02.18 (An der Universität 5)

Film adaptations of novels offer a fragmentary, often exaggerated, perspective of their sources, simply because of the compression of time, time itself being the focus of James Baldwin’s work and Jenkins’ visual representation. Narrative time in both mirrors the disintegration of the central black family as it faces the political racism it cannot seemingly challenge. It creates a sense of displacement and uncertainty that, at a distance, approaches the non-linear creation by Christopher Nolan’s Memento, a movie that demonstrates an extreme version of a detective lost in time.

In this talk, Prof. Hellwig will focus not on the decoding effort it takes to understand Nolan’s version, but on the meaningful ways Baldwin portrayed the black family, black women, and black men in a world that might seem equally confusing to Nolan’s detective, forever lost in his anterograde amnesia, unable to form new memories. The new memories formed by both Baldwin’s novel and Jenkins’ film are suggestive of strategies to cope with political repression and social uncertainty. Jenkins changed Baldwin’s narrative, to be sure, but the ending (allowing Frank to live and forcing Fonny, in prison, and Tish, raising their son, to live apart) may reflect a current anxiety about the status of the black family. In Baldwin’s novel there is hope that new memories can be formed, while Jenkins erases that hope in the abyss of political racism.

Professor of English, Harold Hellwig has taught at Idaho State University for many years. He published a book on Twain’s travel works, and more recently a book on American film noir in 2023. He has expertise in the fields of rhetoric and composition, with publications in those areas, and with administrative experience as the Director of Composition. He is currently researching the influence of Italian culture on American writers who traveled to and lived in Italy, primarily Venice. He is extending that work to the influence of Catholicism in Europe, primarily southern Germany.