Looking for Langston

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'.