Cannes Film Festival, DOC NYC, documentaries, Ernest Cole, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, film festivals, LaKeith Stanfield, Leslie Matlaisane, movies, Raoul Peck, reviews, TIFF, Toronto International Film Festival
December 8, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Raoul Peck
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” examines the life and work of South African photographer Ernest Cole, told mostly through archival footage and narration from American actor LaKeith Stanfield.
Culture Clash: Ernest Cole (who died of pancreatic cancer in 1990, when he was 49) became an exile in the United States because of his anti-apartheid work, and he fell on hard times while living in the U.S.
Culture Audience: “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about notable photographers and/or South African history.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is a meaningful tribute to South African photographer Ernest Cole. However, it would’ve been a better documentary if it investigated how 60,000 negatives of Cole’s photos were secretly hidden in a Swiss bank for decades. This intriguing mystery is a big unanswered question that the documentary doesn’t bother to answer, even though many of these previously unpublished photos are the basis for much of the documentary.
Directed by Raoul Peck, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where the movie won the L’Œil d’or prize for best documentary in a tie with “The Brink of Dreams,” directed by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir. “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” also made the rounds at other film festivals in 2024, including the Toronto International Film Festival and DOC NYC. It’s a documentary that wants viewers to feel immersed in Cole’s mind, even if many of Cole’s “thoughts” are speculation created for the movie.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is really a visual compilation of Cole’s work, with narration by American actor LaKeith Stanfield portraying Cole in words written by Cole and written by Peck. The documentary doesn’t have a clear distinction of which are Cole’s own words (mostly from his journals) and which were written by Peck for this documentary. However, there are moments when it’s obvious that the narration is not from Cole’s words because it talks about Cole’s death from pancreatic cancer in February 1990 (when he was 49) and things that happened after his death, such as the end of apartheid in South Africa in May 1990.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” begins with this caption: “In 1967, the South African photographer Ernest Cole published his iconic book ‘House of Bondage.’ It revealed to the world the horror of apartheid. Fifty years later, in 2017, 60,000 unknown negatives were found in a Swedish bank vault. This is the story of what happened between those dates, as told by Ernest Cole himself.”
Cole was born on March 21, 1940, in Eersterust, Pretoria, South Africa. “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” does not discuss his childhood or his personal life when he was an adult. There’s also no information in the documentary about what sparked his interest in photography and when he started taking photos. And don’t expect “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” to give details about what Cole (a bachelor who didn’t have children) liked to do in his free time and who were his greatest loves. Those details aren’t in the documentary either.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is mostly a compilation of Cole’s still photos with Stanfield’s emotionally stirring narration telling Cole’s real or imagined thoughts during his time period. There is some archival film footage too, including clips of an interview that Cole did for the 1969 documentary “Bilder för Miljoner,” directed by Rune Hassner. Cole’s specialty was photographing everyday people, mostly outdoors.
“House of Bondage,” a photo book that is mentioned frequently in the documentary, was groundbreaking for how it documented and showed the vile racism of apartheid. Cole was inspired to do this photo book after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo book “The People of Moscow.” The “House of Bondage” photos included the destruction caused by the South African apartheid government destroying homes in what the government called a “black spot”: an African township where black people lived and was “marked for obliteration if it occupies an area into which whites want to expand, ” says the documentary’s narration.
“House of Bondage” resulted in critical acclaim for Cole, but he became an enemy of the apartheid-controlled South African government. “House of Bondage” was banned in South Africa, and Cole went into exile in the United States, where he lived mostly in New York City. In the U.S., Cole also chronicled racism and racial inequality in his photos. But he also didn’t want to pigeonholed as a photographer who only documented “people’s misery.”
Cole traveled outside of New York, such as Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., to take many of the photos seen in the documentary. The narration says: “In the [U.S.] South, I was more scared than I was in South Africa.” The narration further explains that in South Africa, he was afraid of being arrested. In the U.S. South, he was afraid of being shot. It’s unclear in the documentary if Cole really wrote those narration words, or if those words were fabricated for the documentary.
Stanfield (as Cole) says in the narration about how “House of Bondage” affected Cole: “It made me famous … But why do I feel a sense of betrayal? The world didn’t want a book about just humans, about the human condition. It was more than a political pamphlet. It was not conceived as an anti-apartheid political crusade. It was about my life in South Africa and the lives of millions of others.”
The documentary also makes a point of blaming Cole’s career decline in the U.S. on racist gatekeepers being offended that Cole made comparisons to racism in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa. By the time Cole became a celebrated photographer in the late 1960s, racial segregation was illegal in the U.S., due to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But from Cole’s perspective, unofficial racial segregation still remained in many parts of the U.S., while racial inequalities and racial injustices were still rampant everywhere in the U.S.
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” also mentions Cole’s immigration problems and includes a 1968 letter that he wrote to the alien commissioner of the Norwegian government explaining his plight of not being able to get his passport renewed at the time but he might be able to get an emergency travel certificate. Cole had a few mentors early in his career—such as German-born South African photographer Jürgen Schadeberg and Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times—but his career opportunities dried up, and he eventually faded into obscurity.
It’s mentioned that there was a period in Cole’s life when he became so disillusioned with being a photographer, he didn’t take any photos for eight years. During much of his later years, Cole was homeless. The narration says that Cole’s relocation to New York City was a “descent into hell,” and he went from being a “world-famous photographer” to “being homeless at the 34th Street train station.” The documentary briefly mentions that Cole spent some time in Sweden before he returned to New York City, where he lived until his death.
The only person interviewed for “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is Leslie Matlaisane, who is Ernest Cole’s nephew and the head of the Ernest Cole Family Trust. There is 2017 footage of Matlaisane going through Cole’s photography files that were secretly hidden and locked away at SEB Bank in Switzerland. It’s mentioned in the documentary that it’s still a mystery how this secret stash got to the bank and who paid for this stash to be kept at the bank for more than 40 years.
The bank refuses to give that information or say why it chose to reveal this secret stash many decades after it was put in a bank vault and chose to return this stash to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. It’s a mystery that’s worth investigating, but the documentary doesn’t do that type of research and investigation. In the production notes for “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” Peck explains, “I was more curious to see those pictures than to learn how they were discovered.”
Peck also says of the 504 vintage prints of Cole photos that have a dispute over ownership: “Just recently (on May 7, 2024), the Hasselblad Foundation published a press release that says they will give back all the pictures, including the 504 vintage prints I mention at the film’s end in title cards. Those vintage prints are the other big scandal. I did not give too much detail about them in the film on purpose and I hope that the journalists will work on that. Ernest himself printed those pictures.” It’s another missed opportunity for the documentary to have more substance beyond being a retrospective tribute.
As for not interviewing anyone except Matlaisane for the documentary, Peck comments in the production notes: “I wasn’t going to tell this story through talking heads—that would have been a totally different story, like a biography. And I don’t do biography, I tell stories.”
Unfortunately, the interview with Matlaisane is fairly generic and doesn’t offer any fascinating information about Cole—unless you think it’s fascinating that Matlaisane says that Cole invited a young Matlaisane to visit Cole in the U.S., but Matlaisane declined the invitation because Matlaisane’s mother disapproved of Matlaisane taking this type of trip. “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is very watchable, despite some uneven film editing and pacing that occasionally drags. As it stands, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” serves as a interesting but incomplete overview of Cole’s life and his talented work, with his real and imagined thoughts as the narration.
Magnolia Pictures released “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” in New York City on November 22, 2024, and in Los Angeles on November 29, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cities in subsequent weeks.