Global Black Cinema’s Personalized Archive

This article examines the concentric resonances among Peck’s recent documentary, Exterminate All the Brutes, and his other films. Exterminate All the Brutes is an effort to make visible and audible the forgotten and unspeakable about the West: that its basic, winning practices are white supremacy, colonialism, and genocidal extermination. Peck’s new opus is a critical interrogation of the West and the Western cinematic and image archive. The film functions as both rebuke and “counter testimony,” building out in vision of a global black film archive. Ultimately, Peck’s four-part documentary encourages viewers to think through cinema about the West critically and models the use of documentary filmmaking as a practice of freedom.