ISAAC JULIEN

LOST BOUNDARIES

SILENT IMAGES OUT OF FILM-TIME

For his work in the Fate of Alien Modes exhibition, Isaac Julien utilised his personal super-8mm film archive, which spans the years 1981–1987. During this period he made several films, usually shot on super-8mm film, in diarist’s form. Lost Boundaries was specially produced for the exhibition as a way of enigmatically portraying a forgotten and lost part of an experimental filmmaking practice that was specifically developed during the early eighties in what was known as the Independent Film Workshop Movement.

Lost Boundaries is comprised of footage shot by Julien on location, in England in the summer of 1985, during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective’s first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed with Maureen Blackwood, another member of the collective. In recapturing those moments, Lost Boundaries both deconstructs and foregrounds the means of 16mm film production while weaving together a fragile community of Black artists and actors who came to prominence at a time when debates in film theory—such as those of the Screen film journal and of “third cinema” discourses where cinema was intertwined within (Brechtian) filmmaking practices—were at the forefront of forging a new politics of artistic representation. A Black avantgarde.

The Passion of Remembrance fully explored the legacy of this unfinished dialogue of Black British intrapolitics and its discontents. In a press release (which reads more like a manifesto) for the film’s 1986 release in Britain, Sankofa explained: “The Passion of Remembrance is a film that gives a mosaic impression of the different generations of a Black experience, lived and imagined by a new generation of filmmakers in the UK. In its particularly eclectic style, the film poses some important questions within the drama: What emotions remain in the silences left by the unfinished business of the 60/70s—the continuing business of sex and gender…? What other forms of representation of young Black people are possible outside those traditionally constructed…? What happens when the dancing stops?”

The silent images of Lost Boundaries return us to those unanswered questions (the causes of gender/race identity wars which have been reconfigured in our global times as the politics of gender and racial intolerance). The images show us the in-between moments of filming and filmmaking—as in a home-newsreel of the film crew, the film equipment and its various apparatus, its actors and directors are filmed in an anonymous landscape (a sand quarry), waiting about and repeating various modes of non-performance and action—all revealing a certain intimacy. The two main actors in The Passion of Remembrance, Annie Domingo and Joseph Charles, ritualistically perform their lines, step in and out of fog-machine-produced mist, and between camera-takes wander as if lost until returning to their “real-life” character roles. The filming of this “film-time”, which often goes unrecorded (very few Black film collectives filmed their own activity), has revealed other moments that belong in a British film archive, but an archive that has never been constituted within the dominant regimes of the British national heritage. Nonetheless, this re-translation of materials into a gallery space constitutes a counter-history which could equally belong to a history of a (repressed) conceptual-visual/film arts movement in Europe. In Lost Boundaries, as the actors, directors and film crew are shown preparing to start filming, we witness the meeting of these artists for the first and the last time: for whenever one is filming, it is the non-time that exists between film-takes that is the alien experience of filming. For film-time is always a distilled time, a time of suspension that is abandoned when the capturing of that other-time, film-time, is caught on rolls of celluloid in what we call cinema proper.

The complexities of sharing certain destinies are intricately linked in Lost Boundaries, not only because these super-8 images capture this non-film time, but they can be seen to show the death of time itself. In this sense, the visualisation of this necrophilic act is itself a mourning of a Black archive that never was—and is now lost. But Julien’s making of the piece resurrects the spectre of a history of artistic practice that traverses the film/theory nexus of the seventies and eighties, and, although now long gone, it is perhaps waiting in time for a future generation to discover. How strange this film-memory has become, returned to us in our so-called new century through the space-time-travel of the exhibition space.

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON

Looking for Langston is an arrestingly beautiful homage to black gay poet Langston Hughes. The film conjures up the Harlem Renaissance as utopia of interracial homoeroticism. In this experimental narrative film, the director takes up the theme of the double outsider as he has done frequently in his work. When the film was screened at the 1989 New York Film Festival it became clear how challenging Isaac Julien’s repudiation of parochial definitions of black masculinity proved to be.

At the screenings and later, the sound was turned off when Langston Hughes read his poetry on camera because of uneasiness over a claim by the Hughes estate that the film breached the copyright law. Of course, this had nothing to do with copyright but with the fact that of Julien’s issues in this portrait of Langston Hughes was his homosexuality—a subject that is readily ignored and suppressed by the Hughes estate.

BAADASSSSS CINEMA

The Blaxploitation genre produced controversial, provocative and often hilarious culturally complex works whose influence can still be felt today in music and movies. Yet scholarly analyses of these films are few and overlooked and critical attention from the film and art world is scant.

From the release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and of Shaft (1972) black leaders and organizations campaigned to close production on films deemed exploitative, though audiences came out in droves. The fuss that raged around blaxploitation cinema created a rift between a kind of serious black filmmaking, which would eradicate stereotypes by ignoring them (or often by creating alternative positive ones); with more popular black cinema—the cinema of blaxploitation— that employed stereotypes for entertainment. There were people like Jesse Jackson, whose struggle to protect the dignity of black people set him against these films and actors who saw it as a kind of golden era of opportunity destroyed by interest groups sowing the seeds of censorship. Baadasssss Cinema looks at the way the films play with stereotypes, through strategies of camp, parody, exaggeration and laughter.

These films were often controversial and the use of black actors and black urban mythologies provoked a range of associations from slavery to civil rights to surface. Featuring several interviews with icons of the genre such as Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown), Pam Grier (Coffy, Foxy Brown, Jackie Brown), Fred Williamson (Black Ceasar, Hell up in Harlem, Original Gangstas), Gloria Hendry (Black Ceasar, Black Belt Jones), amongst others, this film will perform a critical and significant contribution to appreciating this neglected renaissance of subversive and symbolic black representation in film and art.