Over the course of this documentary, as in essays like The Fire Next Time (1962) and No Name in the Streets (1972), and subsequent works, he explored the radical connection of blackness to the central “American illusions American necessities” through television and performance. Indeed, Baldwin has been underappreciated as a theorist of blackness who worked rhizomatically, i.e., within and across multiple media, to illustrate the ways that antiblackness itself works at multiple scales of human experience and interaction. Baldwin’s use of a racist pejorative term is itself a significant departure from the polite, if impassioned, tone typically expected of the host of such a documentary, but especially when it is directed at the viewer. Moreover, given this documentary’s efforts to construct an intimate profile with a recognizable Black author who by that time had a comfortable position among the white literati, it is hard not to notice that this author whom Norman Mailer famously accused of being "incapable of saying 'Fuck you' to the reader" and whom many have said was without peer "at creating a sense of intimacy with the reader" ( Campbell 142) has not faced his viewing audience to perform the facilitating or mediating role often seen in such personal profile-type documentaries. Nonetheless, given the stylistic conceit for which cinema verité was beginning at that time to gain recognition-its employment of multiple techniques intended to emphasize the presence of the filmmaker in the crafting of the documentary, thereby refusing the mystification associated with Hollywood cinema and rendering the hand of the filmmaker as something visible, iterable, and subject to critique-the filmmaker has been remarkably absent. Baldwin has moved from standing at the construction sites of expensive new high-rise condominiums while discussing the displacement of Black residents that was both an effect and a condition of possibility of that construction to meditating on what he takes to be a central question, "exactly what a Negro means to a white man" (35:15).
By the end of the film, the viewer has seen Baldwin counseling a group of youths-many, if not all, of whom the film suggests are unemployed and living in poverty in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Bayview-Hunter's Point- to "realize that you can become a-you can become the president " (7:40). One purpose frames the film relatively early, when the rarely heard announcer, probably the film’s director, Richard Moore, says that Baldwin and he agreed to “explore the existence of… attitudes of.bitterness, demoralization, and despair in the city of San Francisco” ( WNET.ORG 1964) (1:30), suggesting to the viewer this will be a kind of intimate profile with Baldwin.
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