In her straight-to-camera soliloquies and in earlier televised conversations (with Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose, among others) she is always serious, but also always having fun, delighting in the eddies that language makes in the currents of thought. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM. But if you’d prefer an argument for her importance and a sense of her presence, then you won’t be disappointed. Of all the arts, literature offers the least cinema-friendly action. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. With a knowing smile, she revisits her memories in one-on-one style interviews, looking directly at the camera—at us—to tell her story. Greenfield-Sanders, a documentarian known for working on the HBO anthology series like “The Latino List,” “The Out List” and “The Trans List,” is used to compiling different strands of stories into one greater tapestry. Her words are precious, perfectly placed in her melodic speech. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. She’s a literary icon whose accolades include a 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Financial analysis of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) including budget, domestic and international box office gross, DVD and Blu-ray sales reports, total earnings and profitability. But even as a child, she noticed the world around her differently. She realized that the pain the girl was in was caused by generations of racism. In "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am," she talks about being a working single mother, the disdainful attitude of critics toward her early works, and the joy of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. We see a few clips from Jonathan Demme’s 1998 screen version of “Beloved,” and 19th-century engravings that evoke the real-life incident that informed the book, but the difficulty of its narrative and the magic of its prose are left mainly outside the frame. She is candid, funny and sometimes guarded — Greenfield-Sanders and Morrison’s friends and colleagues are scrupulous about respecting her privacy — with the charisma of someone who knows what she’s talking about. We are republishing this piece on the homepage in allegiance with a critical American movement that upholds Black voices. Toni Morrison — ‘She is a friend of my mind. “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” shows that the multi-hyphenate is in many ways a reflection of so many black women, then and now. For the African American reader who has been glued to her books since 1970, starting with her poignant debut novel The Bluest Eye, this doc is an opportunity to see how the pieces of Morrison’s life … A chorus of scholars, critics and friends join her to sing praises for her work that she’s too modest to bring up herself. Of course, Morrison’s intellectual and linguistic gifts are most meaningfully encountered on the page, which is where they will live after she is gone. Almost immediately in the documentary, she addresses the white gaze and explains with the patience of a teacher why whiteness was assumed to be the norm and why her work was so threatening to those assumptions. “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” roughly traces her life from the arrival of her family in the small industrial city of Lorain, Ohio, to her eminent present. An informative, admiring documentary is brought alive by the charisma and brilliance of its subject. She has the air of both a person capable of great delight and one who doesn’t suffer fools. Throughout the documentary, its subjects explain the impossible barriers Morrison faced in her career, including the literary establishment who undervalued her abilities and the financial challenges as a single mother. Davis mentions how Morrison brought up other Black writers at Random House, where she worked as an editor, but her interview stops short of what it meant that not only did she succeed in this field but also opened doors for others. One issue with this approach is its stop-and-go nature of jumping from archival photos and television interviews to those taken in a present-day photo studio. At times, the chorus of praise from the assembled notables can make “The Pieces I Am” feel more like a banquet than a documentary. White critics lamented her insistence on centering the Black experience, like when the New York Times declared Morrison too talented a writer to “remain a recorder of black provincial life” in its review of her second book, Sula. Morrison’s legacy is more than just the titles on a reading list, and this documentary will likely help many viewers see just how monumental her accomplishments remain. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am Synopsis Favorite Movie Button Overview; Movie Times + Tickets; Movie Reviews; Trailers; More. I’m always interested in documentaries about writers, even though I also suspect that there’s no good reason for them to exist. Within minutes of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s new documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” it’s obvious that the distinguished author is a born storyteller. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. #BlackLivesMatter. Two major themes run through Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am — her deep love of language, and her determination to write from a black cultural perspective, without explaining her culture to … Literature. “The Pieces I Am” opens with Morrison’s voice reading from the novel “Beloved” as scraps of her photographs are disassembled and assembled into completion. For the African American reader who has been glued to her books since 1970, starting with her poignant debut novel The Bluest Eye, this documentary is an opportunity to see how the pieces of Toni Morrison… By The Charleston Chronicle | June 22, 2019 | 1. She talks about her parents, who came north as part of the Great Migration, and her childhood in Lorain, Ohio, a working-class town where African-Americans and white people, many of them immigrants, lived as neighbors. She’s a literary icon whose accolades include a 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. She has written about private pain and collective trauma as tenderly and ruthlessly as anyone, and therefore the most startling — and the most moving — thing about encountering her on screen is her buoyancy, the enjoyment she finds in being herself. Read critic reviews Writers don’t live only in their books, and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s film, produced under the auspices of PBS’s venerable “American Masters” series (and opening in Manhattan at Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center on Friday) offers a look at Morrison that can complement an acquaintance with her work and inspire new reading. The remarkable documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” does so many things so well that it’s often like watching several fine films at once. Among the voices of admirers are fans and friends Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, and Sonia Sanchez. She talks about attending Howard University, where she had a good time (“I was loose,” she says with a smile) and began to turn her lifelong love of reading into a vocation. Among other revelations in the book, her astute analysis of cultural manipulation that results in low self-esteem is enlightening. 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. It is her powerful voice that carries us through director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ sweeping and intimate documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am honors its acclaimed subject with a comprehensive, illuminating, and fittingly profound overview of her life and work. Simply click the “WATCH AT HOME” button, and enter the code “Morrisonat90” when prompted. Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work … “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” whose subtitle is drawn from a passage in “Beloved,” should not only inspire viewers to read or revisit Morrison’s novels but also motivate artists to strive for authenticity and autonomy in their work, tell unfamiliar stories and, perhaps most importantly, “love yourself first.” She thought it odd, but later, she would recognize that in his time, it was illegal for Black people to read, so his accomplishment was an act of subversion and instilled in her the feeling that the written word mattered. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am review – powerful portrait of a cultural giant. FILM REVIEW: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. June 20, ... her astute analysis of cultural manipulation that results in low self-esteem is enlightening. Of those, “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon” and of course “Beloved” receive the most attention. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am – Paean to a masterful storyteller Review: Appealing documentary of the Nobel Prize-winning author has fascinating details The people who talk about her include Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Sonia Sanchez and Robert Gottlieb, who was her colleague at Random House and became the editor of nearly all her novels. (The film is also available to view for free for subscribers to Hulu.) Toni Morrison. Review: ‘Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am’ Basks in the Presence of a Beloved Writer, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/movies/toni-morrison-the-pieces-i-am-review.html, Jonathan Demme’s 1998 screen version of “Beloved,”. Cinemapolis is proud to partner with the celebration by offering a FREE virtual presentation of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am from 2/15 – 2/20. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. She is beyond dispute. Morrison, 88, faces the camera and reflects on her career as a novelist and editor and on … Morrison, 88, faces the camera and reflects on her career as a novelist and editor and on the history that has informed her fiction. One source of inspiration for the book came from a jarring encounter with an African American friend. This intelligent and entertaining documentary covers the life, the work and the times of this giant of literature and of American culture. Reading her pieces on literature, one immediately recognizes that, for Morrison, literary criticism was also an art, the essay another vehicle for conveying her moral and political insights. Morrison is later shown batting away similarly ignorant questions about her work in older interviews. “She gather me, man. 24 Movie Guide Questions for the Documentary titled Toni Morrison: The pieces of me, written in ENGLISH and in chronological order that include pre-listening questions, questions to answer during the movie, and reflection/analysis questions that can also serve as discussion questions after the movie. With Toni Morrison, Hilton Als, Oprah Winfrey, Russell Banks. She talks about resisting the primacy of the white gaze, and about the challenge and reward of imagining black lives on their and her own terms. Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ wonderful documentary TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM is a comprehensive look at a true American treasure, Toni Morrison. And we get a better sense of the behind-the-scenes struggles Morrison won against pay inequality and discrimination. They just look like they’re writing. And besides, the time spent watching, say, “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” might be more profitably spent reading “Sula,” “Beloved” or “The Source of Self-Regard,” Morrison’s recent collection of essays on history, imagination and African-American life. For a growing resource list with information on where you can donate, connect with activists, learn more about the protests, and find anti-racism reading, click here. Modesty, though, is among its virtues. This is how the Harvard professor Davíd Carrasco describes Morrison in the new Magnolia Pictures documentary on her life and legacy, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. … By Dwight Brown. Today, we know Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winner, a staple on high school reading lists, and the occasional target of a book ban. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. She gather me, man. It can be illuminating to watch a painter wielding a brush or a musician at the piano — or, for that matter, a filmmaker on set — but any time you see a shot of a scribe bent over a laptop or a yellow pad, you’re not really witnessing anything at all. "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" is now streaming on Hulu, and available for rental at a discount price. Her reverence and awe at the power of the written word are as strong as ever. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am This artful and intimate meditation on the legendary storyteller examines her life, her works and the powerful themes she … We get an empowering impression of the woman behind those words. But one thing we learn about Morrison is that she loves a good party. In the documentary, she remembers her grandfather bragging about having read the Bible five times. The website's critical consensus reads, "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am honors its acclaimed subject with a comprehensive, illuminating, and fittingly profound overview of her life and work." But the film also, inevitably, holds them at a distance. Morrison is certainly a worthy documentary subject:. Within minutes of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders ’s new documentary “ Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” it’s obvious that the distinguished author is a born storyteller. : On the Many Faces of Frankenstein, Shadow and Bone Sets Itself Apart from the YA Pack with Welcome Restraint, Geena Davis and Wendy Guerrero Preview the 2021 Bentonville Film Festival, Running August 3-8. “The Pieces I Am” offers something else, as a dividend yielded by her achievements and her years on the earth: the profound pleasure of her company. Like a good magazine profile, “The Pieces I Am” is built around an extended interview. It’s an incredible array of testimonies, but I wish it went beyond unbridled platitudes. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am manifests excellence in how the film conceives its marketing strategy to attract reviewers and draw an audience. Like a good magazine profile, “The Pieces I Am” is built around an extended interview. “She is a friend of my mind,” says Morrison in the opening moments, reading from Beloved, her 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. critics consensus. The absence of live controversy doesn’t entirely work to the movie’s benefit. The pieces I am. She talks about working in publishing, in Syracuse and then in Manhattan, and about rising early, as the single mother of two young sons, to work on her first novel. It’s less a biography than an extended essay, which is entirely a good thing. Then things changed with agriculture and herding. Morrison is as … Even though this one has been thrown in her honor, she still manages to be the life of it and, somehow, the surprise guest, too. Those storms seem distant now; Morrison in the present looks like a figure who has risen above the vicissitudes of reputation. Still, the documentary has the power to introduce Toni Morrison to a new generation of readers and share new stories with longtime fans. Her words are precious, perfectly placed in her melodic speech. Toni Morrison is a direct descendent of this female responsibility from 300,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago. ‘Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am’ Review – The Living Literary Icon Gets A Meditative Documentary Of Her Own by Julia Teti Where there once stood the pillar of the white, male gaze in literature, Toni Morrison exchanged her chisel for a sledgehammer and there, knocked it down. There is not a word of criticism of Morrison’s work that isn’t meant to be scorned at for its shallow, racist conclusions, which gives the documentary a very positive tone but feels like an incomplete portrait of a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history and its present. Although she originally went to Boston University for biochemistry and molecular biology before landing in the sociology department, she went on to review films for The Boston Phoenix, WBUR, Dig Boston, The Boston Globe, and co-hosted the podcast “Cinema Fix.”, WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, Nomadland, I May Destroy You Take Top Honors at 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards, It's Alive! Even her childhood memories come off as tiny epics, revealing some part of her, and by extension, some part of us in the process. That isn’t to dismiss this generous and intelligent documentary in any way, just to note that it puts itself at a certain disadvantage. Interspersed throughout the interviews are examples of Black art that illustrate things mentioned in Morrison’s books or in others’ anecdotes. Morrison also recalled the childhood memory of a Black girl her age who prayed for blue eyes. Rated PG-13. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 74 reviews, with an average rating of 8.04/10. Monica Castillo is a freelance writer and University of Southern California Annenberg graduate film critic fellow. Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor.Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" is now streaming on Hulu, and available for rental at a discount price. Includes movie images to help scaffold for diverse learners. The mid-1980s dust-up that followed a petition signed by prominent black authors urging that Morrison be given a major literary prize is revisited, as are some of the grumpy responses that greeted her Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to ‘70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni leads an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition. That memory would become the basis for her first book, The Bluest Eye. For “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, director-writer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders includes a few spoken word passages — read by the author herself — but there is a tendency to talk a lot more about Toni Morrison than to let the audience experience Toni Morrison. A handful of tone-deaf reviews and polemics are mentioned, including a notice in this newspaper that found her emphasis on black lives “narrow” in its focus. These are deeply sharp women, and I know they have more to say about Morrison’s work, like Oprah, who not only championed her books on her TV show, she produced the film of Morrison’s unflinchingly raw novel “Beloved,” but these moments pass by quickly in the film. The force of this heritage is enormous, unfathomable, unvanquishable. We get a deeper appreciation of what it means for her to have published books and have them resonate with audiences. She touches on craft, her writing routine and how she writes about the Black experience for an audience that doesn’t need it spelled out for them. If you want a thorough documentation of everything Morrison has done and everyone she knows, there’s always Wikipedia. The collection is impressive and thoroughly researched, but the extra additions slow the rhythm of this story just enough to lose some momentum. #BlackLivesMatter. 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