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The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and David Bowie are all superstars. There are artists of a certain celebrity like them who have earned superstar treatment: awards, breaking sales records and a moment during their careers or after their passing when they receive undisputed acknowledgement of their cultural impact. This slew of attention is granted unreservedly for few outside the entertainment industry. Perhaps the odd politician is, but very rarely, if ever, are writers shown such recognition. This time, Toni Morrison is getting the superstar treatment. 

 

The film follows the full life of Morrison from her childhood in Lorain, Ohio, through her Howard University years studying in Washington to her career as editor for Random House and writer. It works by pulling in context of history and how it impressed itself on the woman and her work. It manages a basic feat, but one which seems difficult to achieve, the ability to allow in external context to the narrative without pulling focus from the star. And it is clear that Toni Morrison is a star. 

 

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders cuts together a slew of interviews with Morrison, her friends, colleagues and cultural critics. Among others, Angela Davis and Oprah Winfrey lend their time and thoughts to discussing Morrison’s work and its impact on the American cultural landscape. Their testimonials seem emotional and intimate, not purely educational or at all sycophantic. They take a deep-dive into the history of America, discussing how groundbreaking, controversial and important Morrison’s novels were at the time of release without losing awareness for their worth and relevance today. 

 

Each time, the interviews balloon into something bigger than just the content of the novels. It showed how they reached out and affected the surrounding world by providing a mirror to normal society and a challenge to institutional social powers. A stirring section of the film is dedicated to the impact of her writing in the 60s and 70s during the activism of the Black Panthers. Morrison recounts how her books were banned due to their ‘potential’ of starting riots across the country; to this she boasts with gleeful pride: “now that is powerful.” This is the dominating theme of the film, the tough stand against bigotry and a creation of an alternative living experience away from and uninterested in the white gaze. 

 

The voices in the film, including Morrison’s own, build her up to be a champion: a woman who earned her place as one of the world’s greatest novelists. At a certain point in the film, Morrison describes her attitude to the labour of writing as something like a vocation and a guilty pleasure simultaneously. The audience has the impression that Morrison positions herself like a perfectly-aimed arrow destined for a bull’s eye. For her, there was no alternative but to write, and it just so happened she couldn’t help but to write brilliantly. 

 

Before the screening, I thought about the writer to an extent reached last when hearing of her death last year. Although the film was made before her passing, I’d wondered if a year later this film would play as a retrospective eulogy, her ghost hovering over the film reel. This wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I wondered how the viewing experience would be affected. It is not affected at all. Instead, the film buzzes with Morrison’s spirit and her life, not the self-conscious awareness of her death. When it looks back on her life, it does so with the perspective of the present time. How the human experiences change, and don’t change, and how all Morrison has written has remained true to life, in every way. That said, the film does not make Morrison out to be a deity, just an exceptionally good writer. As Morrison says herself in the film: “all I want to do is write truth… and share it.”

 

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2019) is a rare piece of film which should be rewatched. The brilliance of the film compels me to write an overused phrase: this film should be prescripted viewing. Watch it, please.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am opened at the IFI from March 6.