Chris Vognar April 7, 2021Updated: April 7, 2021, 6:57 pm
Caisa Ankarsparre stars in the HBO essay documentary “Exterminate All the Brutes.” Photo: Velvet Film / David Koskas , Velvet Film / David Koskas
The imperative “Exterminate all the brutes!” comes from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the ultimate novel about colonialism. The words were borrowed by Swedish author Sven Lindqvist for the title of his 1992 book about Europe’s dark history in Africa and, now, by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck for his daunting four-hour HBO documentary on colonialism and genocide.
Extremely ambitious, deftly acidic, Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” — available to stream 9 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, and Thursday, April 8, with two episodes each night — takes us from the Spanish Inquisition to the age of Trump, from the Native American genocide to the Holocaust, in examining the history of European and American subjugation of nonwhite people around the globe.