Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) User Reviews

HER BLUEST EYES: SPECIFYING BLACK GREATNESS!

[babyjaguar · 9/10 · 11 July 2019]

This stunning documentary, "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" (2019) directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Its two hours full of tribute to Morrison by iconic literary figures from Sonia Sanchez to media celebrities like Oprah Winfrey.

It celebrates greatness as a written language about the human experience, illustrated by a selection of Black creativity from artists such as Kara Walker to Kerry James Marshall. It reminds the viewer of America's ties to human slavery through the backdrop stories (historic references to Black slavery) of what inspired Morrison to write great novels from "Bluest Eyes" to "Beloved".

Greenfield-Sanders explores her hometown of Lorain, Ohio; Morrison's childhood experience of an ethnic diverse perception of America. Not using sensational nor romantic devices, Morrison 's story is told as her literary works, as an everyday experience. It topped with a dash of sobriety leaving the viewer to hear and see more.

This production also give a honest telling of Morrison's personal life towards her professional as well as artistic accomplishments. Full of archival interviews with the author from different decades of her life. It creates a myriad, but almost a kaleidoscope effect in viewing her various stages as a single mother, professional editor, literary agent to a visionary!

Restores your faith in humanity.

[jt-pdx · 8/10 · 9 April 2022]

Others have written well about the content and history related to this film, so read those. What this film did for me was to restore some of my faith in humanity. Learning about her and hearing her speak was like medicine for the soul. She was such a superior being, and we are so lucky to have her grace the world.

The jazzy soundtrack by Kathryn Bostic is pretty wonderful, too. One can find it at bandcamp.

Fascinating to see/hear Morrison speak about herself and her career

[richard-1787 · 8/10 · 10 January 2023]

This movie is composed of two - or three - parts of varying interest, at least to me.

The largest, and to me the most interesting, is composed of excerpts from various interviews with Morrison herself. It's not surprising that, master of language that she was, she chooses her words carefully and is a joy to listen to. She knows what she did well, and does not hesitate to say so. But she also has a wonderful sense of humor about herself. Very engaging.

The rest of this movie consists of other people talking about her and her work. When they are people who knew her, they often provide interesting context.

When some of them talked about her work, it sometimes got very exalted in a very abstract way. That I found much less interesting. The movie is 2 hours long, and if there were any cutting to be done, it would be there.

I have only a few very minor caveats.

1. There are a fair number of talking heads. We see some often, others just once or twice. But we only see their name and role the first time they appear. For the ones I knew already, like Oprah Winfrey and Angela Davis, that was not a problem. For the others, it was.

2. The editor, Johanna Giebelhaus, had obviously gone to the Ken Burns school of documentary editing, which teaches that no image can be allowed to remain still for more than a few seconds. That's not a problem with photos: she pans up or down them in the best Burns style. But she can't leave the talking heads alone either. Sometimes she switches from one perspective to another, which is fine. But most often, she jumps in or out, in quick jerky steps. Once or twice would have been alright for variety. But she does it over and over for two hours, and that annoyed me.

But, as I said, those are both very small caveats.

This movie is certainly worth seeing. I learned a lot from it.

awesome!

[ampof · 10/10 · 12 August 2019]

I went to see this just yesterday, a week after Toni Morrison passed away. I was moved to tears. What a wonderful tribute and how fortunate we are that this film was done before her death. It's a really well done look at her life and work. I found the interviews with other people quite moving and informative and the chance to hear her talk about her work was truly awesome. I can only imagine what a great professor she must have been. I already was planning to reread some or all of her work. This film definitely cemented that decision. If you have any interest at all in American Literature this film is a must see.

Fabulous!

[guyadiangold · 10/10 · 5 July 2019]

I loved this documentary! It left me feeling inspired and empowered. I have read a few of Ms. Morrison's books. They were complicated, yet I could not put them down. Her books are an insight to the inner workings of her mind: complicated, intense and most of all brilliant!

I was grateful for the opportunity to be given a personal look to the insight of this brilliant, and thoughtful scholar. It makes we want to go out and buy all of her books and reexamine them through a deeper lens.

...and I'm proud of it.

[wonderstone_entertainment · 10/10 · 21 November 2021]

This is the first review I've ever written, and likely will ever write, that is completely biased, holding a rating that is predicated solely on the level of admiration, love, and gratitude that I hold for the artist. I am thankful to those who documented the pieces of Toni Morrison so brilliantly. Regardless, my rating of 10 goes to Toni, because she was who she was, and I'm not ashamed of it.

The Redeemer of Humanity

[Dr_Coulardeau · 10/10 · 20 May 2020]

No one has to introduce anyone to Toni Morrison, The Nobel Prize winner in Literature. To say she was a black woman writer is to reduce her despite what many people have said, including herself. She recaptured in the USA in that very difficult period that was her lifetime (1931-2019) the true position of women in Homo Sapiens emerging a long, very long time ago out of Black Africa and migrating to the whole world and giving birth to the whole humanity. Women were those who gave life, guaranteed the survival of their communities and their species, working out the expansion of the species and their migrating to the whole world, starting with northern Africa, then Asia, then the Middle East and Europe and then finally, after the peak of the glaciation in the Magdalenian, the Middle East again, Europe again and the Indian subcontinent. And I did not forget the migrations to the southern Pacific and South America up to Mesoamerica probably sometime just after the Peak of the Ice Age, or maybe sometime before, and of course not from Siberia to Northern America in the same conditions probably some time just after the Peak of the Ice Age, or maybe sometime before. Women in Black Africa were then essential seers and speakers who could speak to the Spirits they could see beyond the surface of things, and they could speak to everyone on any occasion. They were not alone but probably the greater number of those who could do that. That was not the result of any segregation, but of a necessary and extremely gratifying division of labor that gave women this extremely central responsibility to generate the next generation of Homo Sapiens in a slightly greater number than the initial generation so that they could expand and migrate. They also had the great responsibility to avoid in-breeding and guarantee the openness of the genetic palette of Homo Sapiens. Toni Morrison is a direct descendent of this female responsibility from 300,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago. Then things changed with agriculture and herding.

The force of this heritage is enormous, unfathomable, unvanquishable. They probably had their own way of counting and transmitted it to the kids they were carrying in their wombs, breastfeeding, raising till they became autonomous around six or seven in order to prepare them and bring them to their fertility and their procreative age. Women taught human language to these kids, and they developed that human language from scratch, and this time with the help and collaboration of men who were busy hunting, making tools and weapons. Hunting was possible in the savannah by running after the fastest running animals and by relaying themselves along the way they managed to wear out these animals and then bring them back as food. Homo Sapiens had become long-distance fast bipedal runners, men and women alike and that started their genetic emergence. During that time, women were raising the next generations and doing some important work, like painting the caves and engraving a lot of things in and on stone and stones, on bones, and probably on wood and other media that were not very durable. Ivory, horns, bones, tusks, teeth, antlers were a lot more durable indeed.

Toni Morrison is still taking us to the very roots of Homo Sapiens civilization and as such brings up to us the direct heritage from Black Africa, the cradle of humanity. So to call her a Black woman writer is not false but in the mind of those who say so, it is a way to pretend she is not universal, she is not at the heart of humanity, she is not taking into account most of humanity that is not black. And these very savant learned intellectuals or just ignoramuses (ignorami if you want to make fun of their snobbish arrogance) don't seem to know we all came from Black Africa and women were the heart of this humanity for 285,000 years as opposed to 15,000 years after the agricultural reversal that made men dominant and invented slavery that did not exist before. Toni Morrison is thus representing the redemption of our humanity by bringing up out of oblivion the strongest and deepest dynamic that brought us where we are today. She is one voice that calls for the epiphanic apocalypse that will not destroy humanity but redeem it from our state of total perdition with wars, pandemics, pollution, and all kinds of segregation, racism, and genocide.

That's what you are going to feel and experience in this documentary and I hope you can and will enjoy it. Toni Morrison was the Redeemer. Not alone and I will disagree with the assertion that Ralph Ellison with his Invisible Man was still in the claws of white supremacy because his character was invisible to the whites. I am afraid she missed there an essential point: his character had been made invisible to himself by white supremacists and he is unable to get out of it and he locks himself up in a coal cellar with as much electric light as possible to try to make himself visible to himself with absolutely no other audience but himself. But that is PTSS dementia and Ralph Ellison is so much ahead of his time in 1947. This novel was the first black novel introduced in the English Literature syllabus at the University of California at Davis by myself in 1973. And that was my second choice. I would have preferred Ishmael Reed, but the paperback I wanted to teach, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was no longer in print. Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin are some of the novelists that are taking us back to the Black African Homo Sapiens heritage, along with Alice Cooper and Toni Morrison, and a few others, like Angela Davis I met in 1974 in Davis, California. I was the only white man in the room where she met the Black student activists

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

worth seeing

[medcolpa · 5/10 · 6 July 2019]

Why do you make a documentary about someone who writes fiction novels? Indeed this question could be broadened to: Why do you make a documentary about any artist? It is a common idea that the art that can and must "speak for itself"? This idea suggests that if you need to explain the art, the artist has failed. Further, should a work of imagination tell us something about the writer? Do we need know their biography to appreciate their creativity fully?

In this film about Toni Morrison we learn about her life history from birth till 2018. We are told in broad terms what was going on when she wrote each of her books. If you do not know these things, are the books less? The answer must be surely no, as Morrison is over 80, and her books already enjoyed all over the world.

Her life is a remarkable story of a girl who grew up in a poor, working class, black American family who won the Nobel Prize for literature. Born in a southern state in the USA, where segregation of coloreds and whites was legal. Where, in the C19th, it was illegal to teach a colored person to read if you were white. Morrison's award of the Nobel Prize for literature is a wonderful achievement. But there is not enough content in the film for a two-hour cinema documentary. Thus, the many historical interviews, and the contemporary ones made for the film, reprise the same point over and over. In this context, quoting a single review of a Morrison book or event in her life that is negative without attribution is unscholarly, and scientifically meaningless. This happens several times in the film, and does great disservice to the seriousness of any documentary.

Much is made of the fact that Morrison is a female winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. One interviewee says, "only 2 or 3 others have won". Not knowing that there are five before Morrison, including one American, is surprising.

Further, the lack of content is emphasized by images and music that have a general association with the subject, but one that is not direct. Thus, these seem like padding.

Oscar Wilde said: "The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."

So I would suggest it is nice to have such a tribute to an important writer. But surely, even more than the Nobel or a film, her works are the really important legacy.