WWW.HAUSSITE.NET

 

>redirect

16 / 11 / 02 – 15 / 12 / 02
Exhibition / Films / Talks / Performance

Spaces of Translation:
Speaking one language, understanding another …

Isaac Julien in conversation with Constanze Ruhm.

Excerpt from an interview published in: CAMERA AUSTRIA 72/2002

See also
Black and White in Color

Part 1 (1992) 58 min.,Color. Engl. OV
Dir.: Isaac Julien (GB)

haus.0-Script section:
Frantz Fanon - Kritische Genealogien
(1999)
by Isaac Julien and Mark Nash

Deutsch

CR: Your background as a filmmaker is the British independent cinema as well as the workshop movement that developed in the Eighties…

IJ: One of the crucial things to remember from this period that was an entirely different film culture, is the fact that there was the beginning of Channel4 in 1981, and of a very strong independent film cultural movement. A number of film collectives emerged, like Sankofa, the collective I was a founding member of, or the Black Audio Film Collective, the Ceddo Workshop… We were trying to establish an independent Black British film culture. At this particular time a number of riots took place in mainland Britain, and slowly society realized that there were far too many voices excluded from the main bastions of British broadcast, and that there should be a space for a sort of politics of representation. This was the beginning of a different British film culture which was also part of a conversation with the visual arts – across practices, across disciplines. There were journals like Third Text, some of the debates taking place in photography at that time informed our film practice, there was 10/8 magazine which was very important, where you had people like Victor Burgin, Mita Tabrizian, also black photographers like Ingrid Lewis and people like David Lewis and Rotini Fani Kayode A film like Looking for Langston (1989) is very much in dialogue with black and white photography, and is influenced by photographers from New York like Van Der Zee in the Twenties, and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Eighties… There was a whole interest in imaging and self-imaging.

CR: It seems there was a whole mix of genres, practices and forms of representation, like film, photography, magazine-making, performance art, which raises the question of interdisciplinarity…

IJ: The question of interdisciplinarity was very much part of making one’s work. There were a number of different practices relating to one another – theory, visual arts, filmmaking, even theatre, performance. I think what happened at this time was that it was a beginning, but what we also witnessed was a last attempt at a more political or deconstructionist approach to film and photography. These sorts of interventions were taking place in an art world context but it was also the beginning of what would become this new movement, dubbed the YBA-movement, which would in a way become something that New Labour would celebrate. And this eclipsed what had been a deeper interrogation of thinking about images and representations, in dialogue with some parts of academia. Thus I think there is a whole generation that has been written off, and the successes of this latter group were used to proof that this earlier kind of formation got it wrong.

CR: Who funded and supported the workshops? There was a wide range of distinct groups: Black Audio Collective, Sankofa, Ceddo, Retake…

IJ: One of the things that workshops as a structure gave us was a certain autonomy in terms of thinking about the ways in which we wanted to bring together aesthetics and politics and their visualisation within the actual production of the films itself. But of course none of this was really possible without the support from a number of different progressive institutions and cultural bodies. So, the workshops were funded by the Greater London Council. At that time Ken Livingstone’s local labour government was in power, it was destroyed 1986 by Margaret Thatcher’s government. They were also funded by Channel4 Television, and by some local authorities. The workshop was a space that would not only be interested in making films but also in the politics of distribution and economies of production and different practices. I think it’s important to remember that our films were all commissioned by Channel4 – it was through these sort of initiatives from within the cultural industries at that time that this sort of mass movement began in the arts generally and in the Black arts specifically. But it would be very short-lived, the politics of Thatcherism knew too well they would have to cut off these local authorities and local government bodies.

CR: You made your first feature film Young Soul Rebels in 1991. From your very beginnings, you dealt with subjects that exercised a wide influence on the discussion of independent Black filmmaking in Britain, as well as on the formation of cultural studies…

IJ: When I was making films I always saw myself making films as an artist, and that’s why I went to art school. Not many people were able to survive the independent film movement of the Eighties, when there was this shutting down of the workshops. There was a whole enterprise around independent video and independent filmmaking that got completely destroyed. It got destroyed because of two things: first, because there wasn’t any more of the cultural capital to sustain these practices – even though there’s art screening of experimental films at the Tate Modern; and second, because through the museum there began to be this sort of development of moving image in that space, which was talking about “the death of cinema” and about creating a way of thinking about moving images in a different scenario. For me, that was a very interesting moment, because it superseded the impasse of what I would call cultural neglect around independent filmmaking, and for me, the gallery became a space that was born from the ashes or the debris of that independent film movement. The writing was on the wall long before that, there was a shift in cultural taste. So, after making Young Soul Rebels in 1991, I made The Attendantin 1993, and it’s from that moment on that I sensed this move – almost unconsciously – into the museum… The Attendant also was about the museum space…

CR: You can be seen as in between genres, auteur, documentary, feature film… always playing off conventions against each other, also through a specific construction of the visual aesthetics of your work…

IJ: … I am attempting to contaminate all those positions and genres… Trying to talk about the visual aesthetics of the work is a part where the notion of framing, the use of colour, the use of editing, montage, pacing and the use of the performative within a documentary film itself, or the use of verité in a fictional film comes into play. One of the things that I wanted to do in the film on Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Mask 1996), was to make beauty terrifying, to make it haunting in some sort of sense. And I think, oddly enough, PARADISE OMEROS (2002) achieved to realise that as a strategy far more successfully. You can make something that is very beautiful, but that is also disturbing perhaps, not disturbing in a kind of didactic sense, but that it has the residues of trauma, and so PARADISE OMEROS became an interesting piece to do in this respect, a work which was imbued with these aesthetic strategies.

CR: You have also been involved in ‘translating’ theory into a production practice. For example in your film on Frantz Fanon, there are a lot of aspects based on Fanon’s theories, on psychoanalytical theories, on postcolonial discourse…

IJ: I have been using a lot this hybrid approach, this contamination, the interdisciplinarity, the intertextuality – all those things. At the core of this is the question of creolisation: the creolisation of theory, the creolisation of a visual art practice… is a translation into these different modes. You could be making films, taking photographs, you could in a way be speaking one language, and could understand another language… I think, all those gaps and all those blanks, they are all part of how one works and produces – they are the most important things.

CR: So these spaces of translation are based on a contemporary notion of identity and migration, it reflects upon diasporic narratives and routes.

IJ: Yes, absolutely, one could say that in the age of globalisation we are all going to become those diasporic subjects.

CR: Narratives structure films, but also a society’s identity. There is certainly an interesting correspondence between cinematic and social structures… both reflecting each other… there resides a space of translation in between…

IJ: I think this is really interesting in terms of Hollywood cinema generally, there is this question of narrative in relation to this masculine triumphalism; it’s even more interesting where films kind of deal with a wounded subject, with this sort of wounded masculinity (Kaja Silverman). I think one of the interesting things about this is the quoting, from films, in my own work and also in other pieces; it is a conscious attempt to unravel and play with those systems of identification, but to reduce the difference to the subject. I am very interested in producing new subject positions for people to identify with. But this can only be done suggestively.

CR: In relation to identification processes, I want to mention the difference between the politics of representation within Black culture in the UK and in the US…

IJ: Well, if I turn to a film like The Darker Side of Black (1994), I think that was – apart from my new film Baadasssss Cinema (2001) – a film coming from that Black political British cultural studies perspective. The Darker Side of Black is very critical about some of the limits of Black popular cultures and as they get produced in their various locales, Dancehall in Jamaica, Hip-Hop in New York or Los Angeles. So there is an attempt to analyse what these musics are doing in the public sphere in the very making of those films. And I would say, perhaps Spike Lee is right in Bamboozled, when he says that, in a sense, Black musical performance is really what Black Minstrelsy was. So one sees that the question of radicality is no longer in these spaces, it’s commodified, it is part of American capitalism. The problem with that then is the demonization of the popular, which becomes quite problematic, because then the only space that can be ‘undemonized’ is the high culture space. That’s where in my own practice I’ve always tried to hold on to both things. I think that, on the whole, promises of Black popular culture in the latter part of the 20th century are kind of emptied at the moment. There’s not that sense of hope or utopian possibilities or renewal. I don’t feel nostalgic about Black popular culture, and I never have been, but I think that comes out of being in a position of being queer, and not fitting in, in a way, that people like those things stand in place for a sort of promise of radicality. I see them as the spaces of pleasure which are important…

CR: What does it mean, the notion of ‘queer’ in your practice as film maker?

IJ: I think you could have something like the ‘queer uncanny’, something that’s alive and well in blaxploitation cinema …

CR: You addressed that subject very clearly in The Darker Side of Black, which is precisely on this homophobic segment within the Black Community.

IJ: My experience with this was in a way split, because you like the music but you don’t like what it says ideologically. It’s not ready-made, it’s not a prêt-à-porter thing, maybe popular culture wouldn’t be interested in it if it was prêt-à-porter and ready-made. It is about the contradictory aspect that perhaps makes it interesting and sickening at the same time. But one doesn’t want to be too moralistic about it, because it seems to me that’s been one of the problems that those spaces suffered from. And nonetheless, a triumphalism of certain attitudes involved in the promotion of that is something which is really limiting. It’s obvious that in this music, love and sex have replaced any notion of political transcendence... and sexual acts themselves seem like a transference.

CR: Baadasssss Cinema is one of your most recent productions, a documentary on the genre of blaxploitation which has always been a controversial subject…

IJ: A film like Baadasssss Cinema is very connected to The Long Road to Mazatlan (1999) for me, and I would say that Vagabondia (2000) is quite connected to PARADISE OMEROS. In all these pieces I was looking at American popular culture… at White Latino American identity, and at American Black popular cultural artefacts. Not really any kind of substantial work was done looking at this arena of blaxploitation. I see it as a sort of genre that’s been so repressed, and so not taken into any sort of critical attention – so Baadasssss Cinema is about the history of Hollywood’s ambivalence to race, it is looking at the lives and experiences of actors and producers and directors. It is also worth talking about Hollywood’s relationship to race in a more contemporary way as well. At the same time, it is a sort of examination of these popular idioms and specifically the use of stereotypes and trying to look at the possibility of agency within these stereotypical representations (Judith Butler). So, in other words, how these representations live on in the unconscious aspects of Black popular culture... those kinds of representations are in videos, in Hip-Hop, they’re alive and well. It’s also about history and the use of memory…


back