The big black dialectics of Isaac Julien.
Scale remains the irreducible, expressive element. Because Julien's images are bigger than you are, they stimulate a more imaginative response than a typical art-gallery video. Watching a large-screen movie becomes a vicarious and visceral experience. This event puts us in the shoes of Melvin Van Peebles, the protagonist of Baltimore, whose legacy as the father of politically grounded movies about black Americans influences the way Julien now makes art. Following Van Peebles through the city's blasted urban streets and into several of its art museums, Julien implicitly gives Van Peebles' iconoclastic movie heritage the status of high art. But Van Peebles doesn't simply represent erudition like Phillippe De Montebello taking Charlie Rose through the Met. Wearing a rakish fedora, sporting a stogie between his lips and with a twinkle in his blue eyes, Van Peebles is a cultural mack daddy: always observant, always street-savvy and nobody's fool. In short, an inspiration.
Like Van Peebles when he financed and produced the 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song outside the Hollywood institution, Julien intends to make movies his own way. His most daring gesture was shooting Baltimore on 16mm film, against the vogue for digital video. This is partly artisanal?every image on the three screens is in clear focus and impressively composed as both single shots and component shots that can be sutured together in the mind's eye. But his preference for film is also a challenge to the contemporary viewer's visual appreciation; Julien emphasizes the sharpness of celluloid resolution to make seeing a privilege?not commonplace. Stretches of highway that slash through Baltimore beckon, then connect. Doubled images of street corners come across as reflections and then as contemplations of time-shifting?and of Van Peebles' sojourn shared by someone else such as a stylish black woman sprouting a bouquet-like Afro reminiscent of Tamara Dobson, the actress who portrayed 70s icon Cleopatra Jones.
It's bold to put these images, these ideas, in a gallery like Metro Pictures in Chelsea (where Baltimore shows until November 29). The gallery world needs to be revived (and more inclusive) just as much as movie culture (and its pretense of inclusion) needs to be shaken up.
Size matters to Julien as a cultural principle. Having made Baltimore after Baadasss Cinema, his documentary on black American film culture, Julien is especially aware of the creative imperative that has been lost since the 70s (apolitical Tarantino has replaced Van Peebles as a cultural luminary); indie filmmakers are gravitating toward undemanding video technology that enables them to make movies without giving thought to esthetics. The result has been something minuscule?tv culture, not cinema. (Despite Robert Richardson's splendid lighting, Kill Bill plays more like a VH-1 mishmash of pop genres than a new wave movie.)
Proof of our film culture's esthetic shrinkage came when I attended a press screening of The Matrix Revolutions at the Loew's IMAX. Although the presentation was gargantuan and the sound booming, the actual content and momentum were no different than that of an Xbox game playing on a television monitor. Even the narrative was similarly both superficial and convoluted. The Wachowski brothers took their original dramatic idea and extended it to its logical commercial conclusion?the world's most elaborate video game. They turned The Matrix Revolutions into its own tie-in product. Oracular? No, just a capitalist Moebius strip.
Julien comments on the Matrix phenomenon in Baltimore when Van Peebles' perambulations cross paths with the stylish Sister's. In a bit of sci-fi whimsy, the Sister is able to make Van Peebles materialize out of the ether; later, she levitates in one of the museums that feature paintings by Piero della Francesca. Julien's caprice asserts the power of black imagination within the European institution. He doesn't merely use black figures to market an old genre the way black performers, including professor Cornel West, are used in the Matrix movies. Julien's sense of pop history and political necessity emboldens him to assert their presence, their art, as legitimate. (Perhaps the most splendid f/x in any movie this year is a blue plume that mysteriously streaks across all three screens; it's like an acrylic aerosol spray of graffiti?rude and beautiful ingenuity?made against Baltimore's concrete-and-clay cityscape.)
And it's not too much of a leap?in fact it's very witty?when Van Peebles visits Baltimore's actual Great Blacks in Wax Museum. This respite allows Julien to further explicate his cultural declaration. It's in that funkily named museum that Van Peebles comes upon a Tussaud-like simulacrum of his dapper self. (Who needs Neo's, Morpheus' and Trinity's cyber reflections?) Confronting his own likeness in art history, he, and we, are reminded of Van Peebles' significance in movie history. The museum sequences of Baltimore deliberately invoke the Perspectival revolution in classical art (the way the eye judges distance, the way we see our world, the way we look to us all). But for Julien, Perspective is also a political revolution. The wax Van Peebles stands shoulder-to-shoulder with waxwork W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Billie Holiday and others?figures who addressed the world with as much conviction as artists. It's a clever way for Julien to bring his abstract concept down to brass tacks. The value of his thesis comes from smoothly relating the film experience to historical social exigencies.
Baltimore does not evidence Julien's awareness of the late Nina Simone's social and cultural importance. Simone's 1978 recording of the song "Baltimore" (in which she lamented "Man, it's hard just to live") was an early, worthy instance of using that city as a symbol justifying black American social protest. Still, British-born Julien has shown himself to be artistically and politically conscious in the same tradition. After beginning his career in the 80s as part of London's Sankofa Black Audio/Film Collective, Julien sought ways of entering film culture and changing it for the better. His one feature-length drama, Young Soul Rebels (1991) was admirable but lost its thunder to the boys-in-the-hood movies made stateside. Hollywood tradition seemed beyond Julien. Now, the excitement of Baltimore comes from his finding a genuine alternative.
It is customarily thought that the sign of an art form's obsolescence is when it is preserved in a museum-state. But Julien's image-making reminds one of the most vivid aspects of cinema?the kinetic thrill that will never be dull. (Note how the editing on each screen is as dialectical?and rousing?as in Eisenstein's silent movie formulations. Take that, Michael Bay!) Just when the movies The Matrix Revolutions, Lost in Translation, In This World and Mystic River sound the death-knell for cinema, Julien has discovered his metier. Baltimore and Paradise Omeros revive cinema outside of cinema. Movies may have a future after all.