It's fair to say James Baldwin wasn't a fan of The Exorcist. It has absolutely nothing going for it, he wrote in his 1976 memoir-meets-criticism collection The Devil Finds Work. Except Satan, who is certainly the star.
For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me, he went on. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.
Baldwin wasn't an opportunist critic bashing a big commercial hit he was an ardent cinephile whose obsession with film began as a young child in Harlem when a teacher called Orilla Bill Miller took him to see movies.
A new season at the Barbican in London hopes to put The Devil Finds Work into the conversation with the author's better-known nonfiction, such as the essay collections No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name, by showing a series of films that are connected thematically or more directly with Baldwin's work.
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