Activity
9, 10, 11 and 12 January

Focus #3 Isaac Julien

in progress

Isaac Julien, "Hommage Noir (Looking For Langston Vintage Series)", 1989/2016

In its third edition, Focus turns to the cinematic work of Isaac Julien, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of his film Looking for Langston (1989). Julien played a leading role in the new wave of independent black cinema that appeared in the United Kingdom in the 1980s under the government of Margaret Thatcher, and which was strongly influenced by the debates around post-colonialism promoted by theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall.

From his first films, Julien’s work has been characterised by experimental ways of constructing narrative that result from the mixing of genres, as well as a careful formal resolution that restores political force to the beauty of the image. Briefly, one could say that Julien’s cinema addresses issues of race and representations of masculinity. But his films are also concerned with the construction of history, gender, capital and political struggle. Love, reverie and desire run through much of his productions and challenge – through their temporalities, narrative constructions and aesthetic forms – the conventions of white heterosexual cinema. From the recovery of foundational figures such as Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon and Derek Jarman, Julien pays tribute to key activists in the field of anti-racist and anti-AIDS struggles, and thereby claims a discourse in which the figure of the black queer is doubly marginalised: devoid of a history and, with it, its referents.

Julien’s biographical portraits, which are an essential part of this Focus, do not seek so much to make a reliable portrait of the character, as to reconstruct some of the period scenes that prize open the field of vision normally limited to characters addressed as historical exceptions, thus giving us access to worlds rarely portrayed in the cinema. Using basic resources such as the narrative or the aesthetic, Julien develops a cinema of opposition, putting into play a cinematographic practice that produces imaginary worlds and stories that can be defined as a space for political and social action.