Documentary re-enactment in Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes: countering the work of the imperial camera shutter

Framed by an understanding of Raoul Peck as a transnational filmmaker performing the role of a public intellectual, this article reads Exterminate All the Brutes, his self-referential and self-reflective documentary released on HBO in 2021, as an essay film that scrutinizes the role of image-making in the production of history to advance a form of counterhistory and a practice of ‘potential history.’ This reading of the structural hinge between visual apparatuses, imperialism, and white supremacy – the core story Peck aims to crack open ‘from the inside out’ in the essay film – engages with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s arguments, in Potential History, on how the camera shutter operates as the primary mechanism of imperialism. To demonstrate Peck’s deployment of scripted fictional scenes in Exterminate as a documentary strategy of creating a counterhistory and rehearsing ‘potential history,’ I consider two re-enactments: 1) the archival montage of wet-plate photographs (c. 1872–1873) of the Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his enslaved adopted child Ndugu M’hali (renamed Kalulu), and 2) the dramatization of Frederic W. Farrar’s lecture on the ‘Aptitude of Races’ delivered at the Ethnological Society of London in 1866.