Ernest Cole, the groundbreaking South African chronicler of apartheid, died in 1990 in Manhattan. He was 49 and had been in exile since 1966. A new documentary directed by Raoul Peck, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” revives interest in the photographer, who trained his gaze on fellow Black South Africans living with the daily outrages and violent outbursts of a system that controlled their movements but not their meaning.
In 2017, a trove of Cole’s work was found in a safe deposit box in Sweden. Amid that cache were the black-and-white images that were featured in his acclaimed photo book “House of Bondage.” First published in 1967, the book guaranteed the then-26-year-old’s banishment from his homeland.
Peck makes use of keen observations excerpted from Cole’s writings and moves fluidly between stills (compassionate toward their subjects, damning of the subjugators) as well as quietly captivating photos he took of street life in Harlem and rural life during a road trip to the South in the 1960s and ’70s. The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.
Like Peck’s James Baldwin film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” this documentary also mixes the subject’s words with the filmmaker’s musings. “The total man does not live one experience,” the actor LaKeith Stanfield says in voice-over, quoting Cole. With its aching recognition of Cole’s creative triumphs and travails (he was, for a while, homeless), Peck’s film stands as a requisite biography, but also a personal homage: The response of one politically conscious artist to the call of another.
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