Yellow Post-its, storyboard drawings, scheduling charts, promotional posters (for the films Tongues Untied and Darker Side of Black) and eye-catching pictures cut out of popular magazines line the walls. There are towering stacks of neatly labeled folders strategically placed all over his desk.
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Tucked away on the fifth floor of a nondescript building on 14th Street, Julien's office at Testing the Limits, the production company of a four-part documentary series on the gay civil rights movement in America, is small and crowded but well organized. Erroll Morris, the director of the brilliant documentary Thin Blue Line, or Derek Jarman, the director of such films as Caravaggio and Edward II, would be a better match. The comparison is surely based on race alone while Lee's films fit easily within the Hollywood marketplace, Julien's films have been more experimental, pushing the formal boundaries of documentary and narrative filmmaking.
Īfter his first (and only, thus far) feature film Young Soul Rebels won the 1991 Prix de la Critique at Cannes, many critics compared Julien to Spike Lee. Little did they know the ensuing controversy would make Julien a cause célèbre. It was his rhapsodic homage to the Harlem Renaissance, Looking for Langston (1989), which brought him international attention when the Hughes estate refused to give Julien the rights to use any of Langston Hughes' writing in a film about homosexuality. Julien made his first films while studying painting at the St. The film contains interviews with rap musicians such as Ice Cube, Buju Banton, Brand Nubian, Shabba Ranks and Monie Love, and social critics Cornel West and Trisha Rose. "There's just been a big demand for it in festivals and such." Darker Side of Black has been screened at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival, the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the International Gay Film Festival in Turin, Italy, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Shot in London, Jamaica and New York, Darker Side of Black was produced for British television. On June 3, 1994, I met with Isaac Julien, director of such films as This is Not an AIDS Advert (1987), Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991), to talk about his latest film, Darker Side of Black(1993), which examines nihilism in black popular culture specifically, the homophobic and violent lyrics in hip-hop and Jamaican dance-hall music. Don't understand their ways and I ain't down with gays." Now consider the lyrics of "Punks Jump UP to Get Beat Down" by the rap group Brand Nubian: "Well, I can freak, fly, flow, fuck up a faggot. Send for the automatic and the Uzi instead / Shoot them now / Come let me shoot them." The song continues: "Girl bend way back / And accept the peg / And if it really hurt / You know she still no go fled / And some men still no want the panty red / Bare botty business them love. Refashioning the work of his precursors, I argue, Julien elucidates - and queers - what Stuart Hall identifies as “new ethnicities” and fashions himself as a cosmopolitan, diasporic, postimperial British subject.Ĭonsider the lyrics of "Boom Bye Bye," a dance-hall hit song by Buju Banton: "Two men necking / and a lay down in a bed / Hug up one another and a rub down leg / Send for the 'matic and the Uzi instead / Shoot them batty boy come let we shot them." Followed by the sound of a gun shot. Yet, rejecting confinement in restrictive notions of race, nationality, and sexuality, Julien represents not only African Americans such as Hughes, but also Robert Mapplethorpe, Quentin Tarantino, and the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, among others, as symbolic parents and surrogate selves. Throughout, I suggest, Julien finds in the lives and work of African American writers and artists a prefiguration of his own enterprise. Next, I examine the treatment in Baadassss Cinema and Baltimore of 1970s blaxploitation cinema as a genre that resists the sanctioned versions of African American history and culture canonized in the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and Baltimore's Great Blacks in Wax Museum, on the other. First, I discuss the representation of Langston Hughes and the recovery of the interracial queer eroticism of the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Focusing on the films Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance (1989) and Baadasssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70s Blaxploitation Films (2002) and the installation Baltimore (2003), I look at the ways that Julien's excavation of African American texts and traditions underwrites his eclectic auto/biographical - auto-ethnographic, auto-genealogical - project. This essay addresses the role of African American culture in the work of filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien.
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