Vague Visages’ Ernest Cole: Lost and Found review contains minor spoilers. Raoul Peck’s 2024 documentary features LaKeith Stanfield and the titular subject. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

The immediate relevance and timeliness of Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found influences what one may think about content over structure. The filmmaker’s documentaries are densely informed and instructive, leaving nearly no room for misinterpretation. In conjunction with narration and visual imagery, Peck makes the key details stand out. In Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, the titular subject — a famed South African photographer, whose monumental 1967 work House of Bondage brought to light the brutality of apartheid — states that “one day South Africa will be free,” a phrase that’s repeated multiple times in Peck’s documentary. It’s impossible to hear those words without thinking of history repeating itself through the current genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government and the accompanying phrase that many have associated with Palestinian liberation: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

The refreshing clarity of Peck’s style in Ernest Cole: Lost and Found often feels like a drawback in the way that it disrupts the emotional weight of voice and visual form. It turns what generally could be powerful cinematic juxtaposition into a sort of spoon-fed educational video. That’s not in and of itself bad, but in terms of evaluating film, it feels necessary to point out the obviousness that takes away from image and sound. One of the most curious elements is Peck’s narration decisions. LaKeith Stanfield narrates Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, but his voice is used for the words of multiple people. Other times, it’s an “interpretation” of what I can only guess is to be the subject’s “spirit,” because the film recounts, in first person, things that happened after the photographer’s death. This makes Ernest Cole: Lost and Found a bit muddled in its timeline, and turns its narration into a bit of a gimmick that undermines the opening assertion that the story is relayed in “Ernest Cole’s own words.”

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Photography is the clear highlight in Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) utilize their respective subjects’ own artwork to dictate a visual style. Likewise, in Peck’s 2024 documentary, the filmmaker reveals — through the lens of Cole’s camera — the incredibly distressing, incisive and revealing imagery of apartheid South Africa, New York City and the American South (many photos were locked in a vault in Sweden and forgotten for nearly 30 years). So, the subject’s photography becomes a visual timeline for the history of South African apartheid, as several people in the documentary — including Cole’s nephew Leslie Matlaisane — hint that there is a much darker reality as to why the photos were kept away from the world. “No records of who placed these photos here? For a bank in Sweden? No records? Something doesn’t add up,” Matlaisane pontificates after being called to open the vault of his uncle’s life work. The images spotlight racial disparity within urban contexts through side-by-side views, as well as Cole’s own words on how alike America was in relation to apartheid South Africa, despite there being major historic differences between the two countries. 

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 “In South Africa, I was afraid of being arrested. In the American South, I was afraid of being shot,” Cole states as Black families navigate rural shacks in Alabama. I often think of the ways that Americans instinctively try to distance themselves from foreign tragedies and the suffering of people in other countries by suggesting that corruption, oppression, racism and violence is always much greater “over there” than it is “over here.” There is a need to not relate rather than to allow oneself to consider that the society we live in is part and parcel to the same horrors. That’s why Cole’s photos of both nations and Peck’s decision to place them side-by-side mark the most impactful part of Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. They clearly define the gap between South Africa and the United States — a country that globally enforced the apartheid — as much smaller than anyone would wish to believe.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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