Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston

Did you have much connection at that stage with artists like Glenn Ligon? He was also drawing in historical figures through texts in his work. There was a growing community of young, Black, queer artists who were trying to identify and also to complicate a history that, as you said, had not been available to them.

I met Glenn in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center. At the same time, in the early ’90s, I also met Bill T. Jones. This was incredibly exciting, because there was a sort of intertextual conversation taking place. With my collaborator Kobena Mercer I wrote a text called “True Confessions,” about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. And I think Glenn had read that. So there was this exciting, evolving dialogue beginning among artists and theorists at that time, which we were able to galvanize into our work.

The Mapplethorpe controversy is often recalled as a matter of “pornographic” images without acknowledging the complex racial dynamics of the work. A number of important projects in art and criticism were being made at the time—including “True Confessions” and Ligon’s Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93)—that analyzed what was problematic about Mapplethorpe’s work and his legacy.

We felt that trying to deconstruct Mapplethorpe’s work was interesting in terms of one’s practice, and at the same time the challenge was trying to find one’s own position within that. I do think it was productive.

There is an interesting trajectory in your work. From the early collective work with Sankofa, you made Looking for Langston and helped establish the beginnings of the New Queer Cinema, and then moved to multiple screen video installation. I wonder if you could talk about the climate in which you made Looking for Langston. How difficult was it to make such an ambitious film at that moment?

It just so happened, through serendipity, that Channel 4 television was the beacon for independent film in the world. And so everybody came to London, because the city became a center for independent cinema. It was a place where, through numerous struggles, there was a space where innovation was being championed. So working in a workshop movement, of which Sankofa was a part, allowed for an artisanal approach to making works which would be funded by Channel 4 and other entities, a process that gave us space for a different approach.

When Channel 4 started, the whole idea was that there should be a larger space for oppositional voices. There were lots of excluded voices, and Channel 4 had to include them when it originally started. So a film like Looking for Langston came about because through this declaration we could be supported over a longer period and could make research time a priority. And that atmosphere enabled the possibility of trying to discover, through innovative ways, an approach to making a different kind of work, a different form of filmmaking.

Can you talk about the filmmaker Derek Jarman and how he also impacted this film, in particular the visual language you were developing in tandem with an activist impulse?

Derek was a model, and quite iconic, in the sense that he was one of the most outspoken people living with AIDS, and at the forefront of making work about AIDS. And at the same time, he was the most important independent filmmaker. The combination of these things made him a figure that one could rally around. I also think that his filmic language offered a possibility for developing one’s own language. And Derek was important as an activist in how he married his filmmaking and activism, which made the development of queer cinema possible, and provided the vocabulary for a work like Looking for Langston.

How was the film received at the time?

Looking for Langston arrived in New York, and in the United States, with a certain excitement. It was a work that was being made with a community in mind; there were simply not many films being made about these experiences.

In the film I was using Langston Hughes in a metaphorical manner, and his estate did not like the film, which was questioning the heteronormative aspect of how the estate had created Langston. This was something that was always contested within Black communities. And I do think the Hughes estate used copyright as a form of censorship. But when I was making the film, I was aware that I would have an encounter like that. That’s where the activist part comes into play—pushing against the ways in which certain historical characters were constructed.