Remembrance, Looking for Langston
KORTFILMSPAKET:
Sylwan, Salad Hilowle, 2021, 15 min, Sverige
Acclaimed artist Salad Hilowle reimagines the life of George Sylvan a.k.a. Joe Sylvain, the first Black actor in Swedish cinema who, among other things, played Starke Adolf in a film version of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking) and was the partner of Ester “Miss Arona” Nygren – the “strongest lady in Europe.” Swedish premiere!
America, Garrett Bradley, 2019, 27 min, USA
Garrett Bradley’s “America” reveals and reinterpets a lost history in African-American cinema. Inspired by the earliest surviving feature film with an all-black cast and through a series of vignettes rooted in New Orleans, “America” challenges the idea of Black cinema as a wave or “movement in time,” proposing instead a continuous thread of achievement.
Remembrance: A Portrait Study, Edward Owens, 1967, 6 min, USA
“Remembrance: A Portrait Study” is an experimental short film from Edward Owens (1949–2009), a queer African-American filmmaker who was involved with the New American Cinema of the 1960s. Owens himself on the film:
"The music is by Marilyn Monroe singing Running Wild from Some Like It Hot, because it’s a film portrait of Nettie Thomas. She did floors in white women’s homes, like black women did to support their families in the olden days. My mother is sitting in a wicker chair with an ostrich feather boa, a grey worsted wool skirt, a silk belt. For her portrait, I used All Cried Out by Dusty Springfield…”
Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien, 1989, 60 min, USA
Shot in sumptuous monochrome Looking for Langston is a lyrical exploration - and recreation - of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. Directed by Julien while he was a member of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and assisted by the film critic and curator Mark Nash, who worked on the original archival and film research, the 1989 film is a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire and the reciprocity of the gaze, and would become the hallmark of what B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema.