“The Foreigner’s Home” Film at CMA Explores Toni Morrison’s Vision & Art’s Ability to Break Down Barriers

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April 13, 2018
Image of a woman looking towards us in the middle of a crowd of people.

Novelist Toni Morrison in 2006 at the Louvre, where she guest-curated an exhibition on “The Foreigner’s Home.” Photo credit: Courtesy of Rian Brown-Orso and Geoff Pingree via Oberlin News

Karen R. Long, Manager, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards at The Cleveland Foundation

At 87, Toni Morrison is a direct woman. The Nobel Laureate in literature has long contemplated her legacy, and the larger meaning of art, society, and belonging.

A feature-length film, The Foreigner’s Home, is a moving piece of evidence for this, making its regional debut at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 35 miles east of Morrison’s childhood town of Lorain, Ohio. The film screens at 2:00 p.m. Saturday, April 14.

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Watch the trailer: The Foreigner’s Home

The documentary captures the magisterial Morrison mulling the limits of language in 2006 when she curated an exhibition at the Louvre, also called The Foreigner’s Home. Its centerpiece is Theodore Gericault’s massive 1819 oil painting The Raft of the Medusa, created just three years after an actual shipwreck off the coast of Senegal that doomed dozens of lower-class passengers.

Raft of the Medusa,1818–19. Théodore Géricault. oil on canvas, 193 x 282 inches, (Musée du Louvre, Paris) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris, Steven Zucker. Image courtesy Musée du Louvre

“My faith in the world of art is not irrational and it’s not naïve,” Morrison told a Parisian audience. “Art invites us to take a journey from date to information to knowledge to wisdom. Artists make language, images, sounds to bear witness, to shape beauty and to comprehend. . . . This conversation is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human.”

“Art invites us to take a journey from date to information to knowledge to wisdom. Artists make language, images, sounds to bear witness, to shape beauty and to comprehend. . . . This conversation is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human.” — Toni Morrison

The writer explained that the title has two meanings — the foreigner at home, and the foreigner is home, flinging the questions of displacement and belonging wide open. She noted that each individual finds oneself “being, fearing, or accommodating the stranger.” She put these notions and the Gericault painting before street poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, choreographers, and novelists who Morrison invited to the Louvre from around the corner — and around the globe.

Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian writer living in New York, lent her insights, and roughly ten years later traveled to Morrison’s home in the Hudson River Valley to update and enlarge the conversation for the film. (Both Morrison and Danticat are recipients of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, based in Cleveland.)

In 2006 Morrison’s son Ford, an architect, traveled to France with his mother and filmed parts of the Paris gathering, then tucked the footage away. Morrison mentioned her desire to have something done with the material to filmmaker Jonathan Demme, her neighbor and friend who had directed the cinematic version of her novel Beloved.

“She said, ‘Jonathan, I don’t want to deal with this, but do you know some nice, quiet folk who might want to deal with it?’” recalled Rian Brown-Orso, a co-director of the documentary and professor at Oberlin College.

Demme did. All three of his children attended Oberlin College, where he met cinema professors Brown-Orso, and Geoff Pingree. Demme helped the duo in their 2009 initiative to restore the Apollo Theatre in Oberlin.

From left, novelist Edwidge Danticat, Geoff Pingree, Toni Morrison, and Rian Brown-Orso. The image was taken at Morrison’s home in Upstate New York. Courtesy of Rian Brown-Orso and Geoff Pingree via Oberlin News

The director agreed to executive produce the Morrison film project. “He thought at the time he would either use HBO or he’d try us,” Pingree said. Brown-Orso created the hand-painted animation for The Foreigner’s Home and Pingree wrote the script.

But the task was complex and wound up taking five years. “Geoff and I spent two years logging and transcribing,” she said. “Some material was unusable; some had bad sound quality.”

The pair concluded they must ask Morrison to sit for the camera, violating one of her original conditions. Pingree wrote a passionate two-page letter in November 2014, making a case for a new interview. In their letter, the directors asked to build 20 minutes of archival materials into a film commensurate with the ideas Morrison explored. In the intervening years, questions around migration had become more urgent.

Demme and then Oberlin president Marvin Krislov, who had helped raise $350,000 for the project, predicted Morrison would decline. Instead, she agreed.

“We set the film up, and the first thing you hear is water,” Pingree said. “Then we hear [Morrison’s] voice. Then we see an animated boat with hand-drawn figures. They suggest anyone at sea, literally or figuratively offshore. So we begin asking, ‘Where will they land? Who’ll take them in? Where will they find anchor?’”

“We set the film up, and the first thing you hear is water,” Pingree said. “Then we hear [Morrison’s] voice. Then we see an animated boat with hand-drawn figures. They suggest anyone at sea, literally or figuratively offshore. So we begin asking, ‘Where will they land? Who’ll take them in? Where will they find anchor?’” — Geoff Pingree

When The Foreigner’s Home debuted in North America in March with a screening in Miami, Pingree said a viewer approached him. “This 67-year-old white guy came up to say he was riveted. He said, ‘If I could have gotten my 20-year-old self to watch it, it would have changed my entire life.’”

The man shook Pingree’s hand and melted back into the crowd.

For Brown-Orso, such a response indicates Morrison is sounding a warning, that her voice is prophetic: “Our task was to make a visual space to uphold the power of Ms. Morrison’s words.”

“The mission of art is the destruction of barriers and walls,” Morrison says, “the things that prevent people from connecting with their home or each other.”

“The mission of art is the destruction of barriers and walls,” Morrison says, “the things that prevent people from connecting with their home or each other.” — Toni Morrison

The film is dedicated to Demme, who died last year.

 

Following the film is a panel discussion with Edwidge Danticat, the filmmakers Brown-Orso and Pingree, and Charles Peterson and Meredith Gadsby, associate professors of Africana Studies at Oberlin College.

This program is presented in partnership with Oberlin College and the Toni Morrison Society.