In 1967 South African photographer Ernest Cole, who'd fled his homeland for exile in New York the previous year, published House of Bondage, his searing, groundbreaking photographic record of the reality of daily life for black people under the brutality of the apartheid regime.
In 2017 Cole’s nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, was summoned to Sweden, where he was handed more than 60,000 negatives and various other belongings of the photographer, which had been thought lost forever. There was no explanation offered of how the material had landed up in the vaults of the Swedish bank nor who had been paying for them to be stored there for the almost three decades since Cole’s death in New York in 1990.
Raoul Peck’s film Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, winner of the best documentary award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is ostensibly, according to its opening titles, the story of what happened in the 50 years that separate the publication of House of Bondage and the discovery of Cole’s negatives in Sweden, “told in the words of Ernest Cole himself”.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, which considered the life and legacy of James Baldwin through the text of one of the author’s unpublished manuscripts, voiced by Samuel L Jackson, Peck here uses Cole’s own words from the text of House of Bondage, letters and journals, narrated by LaKeith Stanfield in the first person, as the driving force of his poetic, lyrical attempt to bring Cole and his work to moving cinematic life.
Cole is credited as the film’s writer, along with Peck, whose credit carries a caveat that his contribution has been “adapted from testimonies from family, friends and witnesses of [Cole’s] short life”. Though the film briefly segues into moments that use archive material from apartheid South Africa, an interview with Matlaisane and a brief but revealing interview with Cole himself — shot by Swedish photographer Rune Hassner in 1969 — Peck’s main focus is the photographs that Cole continued to take through his early days in America until the 1980s when, disillusioned, broken, homesick and alienated, he put down his camera forever.
The first section of the film focuses on Cole’s birth in Eersterust in 1940, his early departure from the oppression of the Bantu Education system at age 17, his entry as a self-taught practitioner into the world of professional photography — where he became the country’s first black freelancer for newspapers and magazines like Drum — and the development of his techniques of subterfuge and fading into the background so as to inconspicuously record the iniquities of apartheid daily life that would take a decade to put together as House of Bondage.
One of the striking things about Cole’s masterpiece is that it was not only visually striking and forceful but also featured an impressively prescient and poignantly reflexive text, which here, read in tones of exhausted anguish by Stanfield, gets its proper due and offers the most knowable version of Cole that we have. The more elusive, heartbreaking and lonely Cole, whose crusading spirit seems to have been ultimately crushed by exile, emerges in the film’s second half.
As Cole’s own words reveal, House of Bondage was not a detached, objective record of black life in South Africa, it was a record of his own life and the lives of millions of others like him. In America he was immediately conscious of his outsider status and often felt it prevented him from capturing images of the same emotional weight as those he'd taken in South Africa.
Peck accepts Cole’s misgivings and failures, preferring to use the thousands of previously unseen American images to demonstrate the pervasiveness of his creative curiosity, even if its results weren't seen, rather than to make an argument that if they were exhibited at the time they were taken they may have stood as strongly on their own terms as those taken by other American photographers of the era.
The film makes depressingly clear that House of Bondage was the key Cole used to open a new world, both different and similar to apartheid South Africa, which imprisoned him in a new role where he lamented: “Exposing the truth at whatever cost is one thing but having to live a lifetime of being the chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another.”
American editors, publishers and philanthropists wanted him to expose injustice and prejudice as he'd done in his homeland, sending him to the Jim Crow South to record the life of black Americans. But they complained that the photographs he took “lacked edge,” and didn't pack the emotional punch of his South African work.
The overwhelming portrait that emerges in the second part of the film is of Cole as an exile and the complex interweaving of existential angst, longing for home and outsider anxieties that this itinerant existence entailed — the story, in Cole’s words, of his “slow disintegration and descent into hell”.
By the time he put his camera away in the 1980s, Cole had been mostly forgotten in America and the Western world. He spent his last decade living on the streets, in shelters, occasionally on the couches of other South African exiles, before he finally died in a New York hospital from pancreatic cancer. It was a week after watching Nelson Mandela walk out of prison in 1990 — a powerfully symbolic moment for Cole, who, at the age of 29, had asserted in a 1969 interview with Hassner: “South Africa will be free.”
Peck briefly detours into detective thriller territory with footage of Matlaisane and his son unlocking the deposit boxes in the Swedish bank vault in 2017, but ultimately that mystery is a red-herring.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is not a biographical documentary in a traditional sense. It's an elegiac, poignant visual essay paying tribute to Cole’s photographic legacy while offering a profound meditation on what it means to live so far from home yet be so psychologically shaped, concerned and despaired by home that nowhere else offers a substitute existence.
• Ernest Cole: Lost and Found opened the Johannesburg Film Festival this week. The Encounters South African Documentary and International Film Festival presents a special screening of the film at The Labia in Cape Town on Thursday March 20 at 6pm. Tickets are available from Webtickets.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.