Skip to main content

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. // Documentary Review



Published online by Trinity Film Review 2 March 2020. Republished in print 3 July 2020.


It’s been less than a year since Toni Morrison’s death at the age of 88: an event which resulted in an outpouring of public grief from her wide and diverse base of readers. It has brought her to the attention of people who had perhaps overlooked her novels before. The Pieces I Am is a documentary about Morrison, compiled from interviews with the author herself and several of her colleagues and contemporaries. These include Angela Davis, whom Morrison worked as an editor for, Morrison’s own editor Robert Gottlieb, Oprah Winfrey, and several others.

The documentary premiered at Sundance in January 2019, several months before Morrison’s death, and does a good job at introducing her to its viewers. We start from Morrison describing her burgeoning love of language as a child, her writing method, the topics her early books covered, and the trajectory of her career. The documentary brings us up to the point when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. I should note that there are spoilers to her early novels, especially Beloved, here.

The interviews are assembled together well, with a clear skillfulness in terms of pace and flow. There are no chapters or clear divisions in the documentary, but the movement from one topic to the next feels natural and smooth. The heart and soul of the documentary is, of course, Morrison herself. Her description of the writing process and her advice for young writers is well worth hearing.

There are no chapters or clear divisions in the documentary, but the movement from one topic to the next feels natural and smooth.

Morrison’s work didn’t emerge out of a vacuum. She wrote in opposition to a tendency in literature that defined serious work as that which describes the experience of middle class white people. I don’t think this context should be ignored, but I did find it a little disappointing that the documentary devoted time to examining the backlash Morrison received as she became an acclaimed author. After she was awarded the Nobel Prize, for example, some newspapers published opinion pieces that suggested that she was chosen as winner out of “political correctness”. Another interviewee notes that you could only hold that opinion if you’d never read any of Morrison’s work. If so, why did this documentary feel these ignorant voices had to be heard and repeated?

This documentary is founded almost entirely on interviews, and as such, there were some problems with superfluity on the visual side. At times, what was happening on screen amounted to a high definition PowerPoint presentation, with the camera slowly zooming in and out of different photographs as jazz music played innocuously in the background.

Overall, The Pieces I Am is a pleasantly structured introduction to Toni Morrison. I left the cinema with an eagerness to go read her novels. Despite this, the somewhat dry way it’s presented visually makes it seem more suited to Netflix than the big screen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory

Published in Cassandra Voices on 9 October 2021. Often overshadowed by his elder, Nobel laureate, brother W.B., Jack Butler Yeats occupies an exalted position among Irish painters. ‘Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’ is a new exhibition in the National Gallery commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s birth, and exploring a stylistic evolution that draws on both Irish and British scenes. Jack was born on August 29th, 1871 into a marriage of two Irish Protestant families, the Yeatses and the Pollexfens . Whereas the Dublin Yeatses embodied a faded aristocracy, priding themselves on genealogically questionable claims of descent from the Dukes of Ormonde, the Pollexfens were of a more recent vintage, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, finding prosperity through their shipping interests. Each of the surviving children of moderately successful portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen made significant marks in their respective ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Beginner’s Guide to Electronic Music Production with Arvo Party

Published in print by TN2 September 2020. Published online 26 October 2020. Over the Summer, I got around to doing something I’ve been putting off for years – producing electronic music. From the outside, this hobby can appear intimidatingly difficult, with its own jargon, software and online subcultures. Once I started digging into it, however, I was surprised to find there are a plethora of free, beginner-friendly resources available. The most difficult part was learning where to start. For help, I reached out to Irish electronic musician Herb Magee (AKA Arvo Party), for advice on getting into electronic music as a beginner. To produce electronic music, you need a Digital Audio Workstation (commonly referred to as a DAW). This software allows you to create, record and manipulate audio. There are many reputable free options, such as Garageband (which comes pre-installed on Macs), Reaper (recommended in a Q&A with Autechre) and Cakewalk. Arvo Party “started out with Logic and stil...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You // Book Review

Published online by Cassandra Voices, 24 September 2021. For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People(2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised. Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.  Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial. All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her. After laying Normal Peopl...
Post a Comment
Read more