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 and the Harlem Renaissance’. Fusing poetry – Hughes’s own, as well as poems by Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent – with an archival exploration of the period in the 1920s when black artists and writers were ‘in vogue’ with the Harlem taste-makers of the day, ‘Looking for Langston’ is more a dreamscape in black and white than it is a documentary on the period. With style and lyricism, Julien organises his images to music and poetry and meditates on beauty, particularly the ‘forbidden’ beauty of black gay culture in a society where black homosexuality was seen as a ‘sin against the race [which] had to be kept secret’.
Also in this combined programme
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The Attendant
The eponymous ‘attendant’ of Julien’s short film is a middle-aged black man who finds his homoerotic fantasies taking over the mu
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Long Road to Mazatlan
The single-screen film version of Julien’s triple screen-installation of the same name, ‘The Long Road to Mazatlan’ continues the
Film details
- Country of production
- UK
- Year
- 1989
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2004
- Length
- 40"
- Medium/Format
- 16mm
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