This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she has confronted throughout her literary career.This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she has confronted throughout her literary career.This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she has confronted throughout her literary career.
- Awards
- 8 wins & 9 nominations total
Photos
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaToni Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019, a month and a half after this film was released.
- Quotes
[first lines]
Toni Morrison: [Toni Morrison, in voiceover during opening credits, reading from her 1987 novel, "Beloved"] She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am? She gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know. When you got a woman who is a friend of your *mind*.
- Crazy creditsAccompanying the opening credits, film footage shows someone's hands creating a cumulative set of collages that are assembled from mixed-and-matched pieces of photos of the face of the documentary's subject, Toni Morrison. At the start of this sequence, Morrison is heard in voiceover saying, "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am? She gather them and give them back to me in all the right order". (These words are from her 1987 novel, "Beloved".) As the portrait pieces come and go, the representations of Morrison's face show her aging from young adulthood to the time the film was made, ending with pieces from a portrait taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the film's director.
- ConnectionsEdited into Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am - Deleted Scenes (2019)
The largest, and to me the most interesting, is composed of excerpts from various interviews with Morrison herself. It's not surprising that, master of language that she was, she chooses her words carefully and is a joy to listen to. She knows what she did well, and does not hesitate to say so. But she also has a wonderful sense of humor about herself. Very engaging.
The rest of this movie consists of other people talking about her and her work. When they are people who knew her, they often provide interesting context.
When some of them talked about her work, it sometimes got very exalted in a very abstract way. That I found much less interesting. The movie is 2 hours long, and if there were any cutting to be done, it would be there.
I have only a few very minor caveats.
1. There are a fair number of talking heads. We see some often, others just once or twice. But we only see their name and role the first time they appear. For the ones I knew already, like Oprah Winfrey and Angela Davis, that was not a problem. For the others, it was.
2. The editor, Johanna Giebelhaus, had obviously gone to the Ken Burns school of documentary editing, which teaches that no image can be allowed to remain still for more than a few seconds. That's not a problem with photos: she pans up or down them in the best Burns style. But she can't leave the talking heads alone either. Sometimes she switches from one perspective to another, which is fine. But most often, she jumps in or out, in quick jerky steps. Once or twice would have been alright for variety. But she does it over and over for two hours, and that annoyed me.
But, as I said, those are both very small caveats.
This movie is certainly worth seeing. I learned a lot from it.
- richard-1787
- Jan 9, 2023
- Permalink
Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Official site
- Language
- Also known as
- Det här är jag - Toni Morrison
- Filming locations
- Production company
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $903,018
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $48,050
- Jun 23, 2019
- Gross worldwide
- $927,495
- Runtime2 hours
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1