The single-screen film version of Julien’s triple screen-installation of the same name, ‘The Long Road to Mazatlan’ continues the filmmaker’s desire to integrate dance and choreography into his work, here collaborating with choreographer Javier de Frutos. Shot on location in San Antonio, Texas and influenced by Julien’s time teaching a film course on black representation at Harvard University, ‘Mazatlan’ employs saturated 16mm colour and sepia images, along with treated sound and a variety of musical textures, to explore white representation through the image of the Cowboy from Hollywood Westerns, via a homoerotic nod and wink to the ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ scene from Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’.
Made when Julien was a member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, ‘Looking for Langston’ is introduced as being ‘a meditation on Langston Hughes…
The eponymous ‘attendant’ of Julien’s short film is a middle-aged black man who finds his homoerotic fantasies taking over the museum he supervises when a…