Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) was an exhilarating and popular documentary in large part because it took on the black experience in America through James Baldwin’s bracing rhetoric. Baldwin wrote and spoke with such raging beauty, it was somehow heartening to face up to our national history of intractable racism through his brilliance in excoriating it. That’s the power of art.

There’s no inspiring figure to lead us through Peck’s follow-up documentary, Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s a deliberately ugly and jarring presentation of sickening historical events charting the six-hundred-year development of the concept and system of white supremacy associated with colonialism, slavery, and genocide. And given the subject matter, maybe that’s the right approach — it’s unsparing, and provides no emotional shelter, no way of avoiding the worst feelings of despair. Peck acknowledges the difficulty of watching the series early on, in his moving, husky-voiced narration: “I know this is a painful history . . . ”

He also argues, in interviews about making the film, that he knew in planning such a complex, wide-ranging follow-up to his hugely successful, award-winning I Am Not Your Negro, that he would have to experiment with form. He’d long ago rejected the tidiest formal contrivances for films: