If the career of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien is at first glance highly discursive, it might help to remember the context in which he emerged. His film work, on display at the Museum of Modern Art in a short program running February 7 through 11, must be viewed (if only later so we can discard it) through the lens of what has come to be known as Black British Cinema.
The movement materialized out of a moment: In April 1981, after intense and unnecessary police intervention in Brixton, a poor and uncared for district of South London, residents began flooding the streets. Violence erupted between authorities and civilians. The riots, quelled after two days, would ignite a flame — similar acts of resistance would happen all across Britain that summer.
In its wake, a response was activated by artists, often from the underprivileged neighborhoods under attack and working collectively. This was a younger generation on the rise, directly affected by the violence surrounding them and engaged in dismantling Thatcherism and everything it wrought. Their mode of expression was film (and video), with a panoply of influences — punk rock, cultural studies, soul boys, and experimental film, to name the most prominent.
Julien began his career as a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, created two years after the riots with support from the Greater London Council (which would be gone before the decade had closed) and the newly created Channel 4. Along with other collaborative groups — most notably the Black Audio Film Collective, which produced a staggering body of work parallel to Julien — Sankofa helped usher in a film style that incorporated essay, documentary, fiction, and experimental forms (in “Riot,” a book created for the MoMA series, Julien credits Chris Marker as an early inspiration). Julien’s earliest films, “Who Killed Colin Roach?” (1983) and “Territories” (1984), are rough-edged activist pieces that explore narratives of the subjugated. Using multiple voices and perspectives, these early works look forward to the later stages of Julien’s career.
“Looking for Langston” (1989), a reexamination of the Harlem Renaissance that uses the figure of Langston Hughes to open the door to question the construction of black male identity, is a leap forward in many directions. Archival footage and beautifully photographed fiction sequences (some clearly influenced by the work of Robert Mapplethorpe) are joined by a dense web of narration that weaves throughout the film like lines from a jazz quartet. Those voices — Stuart Hall, Toni Morrison, and more reading the work of James Baldwin, Hilton Als, and Essex Hemphill, among others — offer ruminations that run parallel to the images, the two working in hushed conversation. Julien would do something similar in two film portraits made later in his career, “Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask” (1996) and “Derek” (2008), which explore very different figures — anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon and film director Derek Jarmen— through a variety of different forms and voices.
“Langston” is also a deeply personal film, evident in Julien’s comic inclusion of himself as Hughes in his funeral casket (“We look for Langston,” the writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote, “but we discover Isaac”). “Young Soul Rebels” (1991) is in some ways an extension of “Langston.” Moving up in history, Julien explores his own upbringing in London of the late 1970s, as the former solid distinctions — punk/soul, black/white, gay/straight — were blurring and transforming. Looked at now, the film suffers under its tacked on genre constraints (a murder subplot links together the various stories of the film) and muddled focus, but remains a crucial document of the period as well as a marker for the end of one part of Julien’s career.
“Young Soul Rebels” would prove to be the final film the Sankofa Film Collective would work on together. Julien would branch off, his artistic output more focused on the gallery than the movie theater. He has continued to make films sporadically, but multi-channel installation work seems to be his main focus. One such work is currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s main atrium. Titled “Ten Thousand Waves,” the piece is a nine-channel video installation hanging from the ceiling that absorbs the viewer in a fractured narrative concerning contemporary Chinese culture and its distant, fading myths. His preferred form of expression may have shifted from that of his early days, but the themes remain consistent. Julien as an artist — on a larger scale, in different setting — is still preoccupied with the same idea: how we are affected by the collision of the past and the present.
