"Baltimore" and "True North" deal with struggles for
honor in the face of history, even referencing
"history painting" and a celebration of a grand heroic mission.
There is a historical painting aspect to films like Baltimore,
Paradise Omeros, and True North. These are the big questions.
Some people probably deem art in the age of globalization to be unable to
attend to those big questions. I am very interested in trying to relocate
some of these questions for new audiences. In that sense, we don’t see
Matthew Henson in the film; what we see is a black woman retracing
Henson’s steps. This is a meditation and a contemporization of questions
that could be seen as historical. I’m interested in the slave-sublime,
which is an idea developed by the sociologist
Paul Gilroy in his book
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness around the
notion of modernity and terror connected to the legacy of the sublime
suppressing its colonial legacy.
Baltimore Series (Deja-vu), 2003, Filmstil
©Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Gallery
It goes back to that paradox between violence and desolation. In "Baltimore",
the voice-over says: "there’s a world of misunderstanding." At the same
time, the actress,
Vanessa Myrie, looks like
Diana Rigg in the 60s TV series
The Avengers or someone from the
Mod Squad by way of Ang Lee’s
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
.
Those references are from Blaxploitation
films used in this context as a metaphoric discourse to talk about a
post-September 11th world. All those characters have references to the
cyborg and acrobatics of Kung Fu
cinema from the 70s fused with special effects, where technology and
choreography are twinned and reproduced through digital technologies.
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I think about
Pam Grier and Cleopatra
Jones, larger-than-life black femme fatale characters. I think about
Diana Rigg. It’s a brutal beauty.
Baltimore Series (Martin/Still Life), 2003, Filmstil
©Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Gallery
At one point, in "Baltimore", the director Melvin van Peebles runs into his
wax double. It’s quite funny, incidental as it is.
It’s also about necrophilia and the question of its deathly presence in a
museum context.
It’s an odd kind of visual index.
Just like in art history. I’m always working between those registers, taking
an artifact or stereotype and trying to re-articulate its usage. At the
same time, there’s a miming that takes place. And it’s precisely in the
miming of those codes that you’re trying to rearticulate identification or
dis-identification. In True North, when we’re talking about his
identification with the arctic landscape, Matthew Henson says "my soul
won’t rest until it’s mine." There’s a twisting of the heroic.
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