Isaac Julien: Stylization and the ‘aesthetic of reparation’
Isaac Julien is a British filmmaker who has produced works in a variety of different styles, from feature films such as Looking For Langston (1989)and Young Soul Rebels (1991) to media installations, including 2010’s Ten Thousand Waves. Born in London’s East End in 1960, and educated at Central St Martin’s, he has used film to reflect on his own experience as a black, British, gay man. He finds himself more influenced by visual art and avant garde film than traditional Hollywood cinema. In more recent years he has worked on diverse projects such as 2014’s Playtime, a seven-screen meditation on the movement of money and capital throughout the world, and the documentary Derek (2008), about the artist Derek Jarmen.
Growing up in estate housing in the then-poor East End of London, Julien found his way to art through friendships with local punks in his teenage years. After attending Central St Martin’s, where he studied painting and filmmaking, he was a founding member of the Sanfoka group, a collective of black filmmakers. He first made his mark with 1989’s Looking For Langston.
Looking For Langston explored black gay desire through a dreamy, quasi-documentary style that explored the poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as cultural symbols. Although politically minded, Julien had strong ideas about the more militant documentary forms often associated with political filmmaking. In his memoir Riot, he wrote that “the working classes didn’t really respond to documentary…working-class people tend to be more intrigued by fantasy, by stories and narratives — by ways of talking about their experience that are not didactic and in which they are not seen as lacking agency.” This conviction led to the singular style of Looking For Langston. Although the film has a strong atmospheric quality, Julien rejects the idea that it is romanticized, writing “if you have a distant relationship to the questions posed, of course you are free to view them romantically…but in my own work I never just choose a topic or subject.” Julien works only with subject matter that is very close to him, ensuring that his work about identity and politics is also resonant on a personal level.
His following film, 1991’s Young Soul Rebels, also draws on his experience, as it uses the device of a murder mystery to explore a cross-section of 1980s London.
The film serves as an example of the Sanfoka group’s concept of the ‘aesthetic of reparation,’ a way of making films that emphasizes the creation of a visual space where different identities and cultures may fully express themselves. Julien writes that the concept is inspired by the question of “what the cinema would look like if there weren’t always a question of the underlit black subject, or the question of that black subject in the frame’s margin.”
The situation of the black subject is explored in Julien’s The Attendant (1993), in which an attendant at an art gallery fantasizes about a sadomasochistic sexual encounter with a visitor that plays with symbols of the Atlantic slave trade. The film, made near the height of the AIDS epidemic, is interspersed with references to other films and media such as opera and painting.
The film was controversial for its mixing of generational racial trauma and sexual desire. However, theorist Elizabeth Freeman writes that the film is remarkable for exploring “sadomasochism not as a means of revising the past but of meeting up with it in the first place.” According to Freeman, the film views sadomasochism as a means of existing on a different temporal pace than contemporary capitalism allows, where there is more opportunity to engage with questions of cultural identity — or, more specifically for a black British man, the legacy of slavery.
Following these works, Julien began working with multi-screen media installations, including 2003’s Baltimore, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the KunstFilmBiennale in the same year.
Baltimore is similar to several of Julien’s previous works with its interest in the space of the art gallery as a setting. It also draws on a previous work, his 2002 documentary BaadAsssss Cinema, which examines 1970s blaxploitation. Baltimore works with fiction, documentary and collage to follow a young woman and an old man as they wander through a wax museum, confronting historical black figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The film resists any narrative format, ending inconclusively as the man and woman spill back out onto the street.
Julien takes a similar approach in 2010’s Ten Thousand Waves, but with drastically different subject matter. The nine-screen installation is inspired by the tragic deaths of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay, off the coast of England. Caught unawares by a rapidly rising tide, the undocumented pickers were overcome by hypothermia and drowned. A phone call to emergency services was of no use due to their limited English.
The film weaves together myths and stories from throughout Chinese history, including a story of sixteenth-century fisherman lost at sea but led to safety by a sea goddess. Various artists, composers and actors collaborated on the work.
Julien again takes an international bent in 2014’s Playtime, a meditation of the role of money in the rhythms of global life that features the infamous actor and dabbler James Franco. Told on seven screens, the film flits from Dubai to London to Iceland, commenting on the impact of globalization as well as the strange evolution of the art market.
Throughout Julien’s work he has maintained an interest in what he describes as “desire and its conflicts.” His relationship to film draws heavily on other media to realize a depiction of these conflicts in contexts which, true to the ‘aesthetic of reparation,’ prioritize the centering of diverse identities.
Sources:
Julien, Isaac. “Mirror”, Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by David J Getsy. The MIT Press, 2016. pp 53–55.
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History.” Differences, Vol. 19, № 1. Brown University, 2008. pp. 32–70.
“The Pleasure of the Image: A Conversation with Isaac Julien”
Isaac Julien, artist — portrait of the artist
Isaac Julien: Ten Thousand Waves
Playtime: James Franco stars in a meditation on the power of money
