Isaac Julien’s films prowl the margins of mainstream cinema. A Londoner whose parents emigrated to England from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Julien, 51, first attracted attention with “Looking for Langston,’’ a black-and-white meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance that won a Teddy at the 1989 Berlin Film Festival. Julien has since gone on to treat subjects as varied as the 18th-century architect Sir John Soane, the blaxploitation genre of the 1970s, and British director Derek Jarman. But he’s also an artist - he graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design - and his nine-screen, China-themed video installation, “Ten Thousand Waves,’’ is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Today the ICA will complement that installation with an afternoon retrospective of his films, in three separate 90-minute programs.
Isaac Julien’s painterly approach probes the edges of cinema
Julien may be a documentarian in his subject matter, but he’s an artist and a poet in his approach. “Looking for Langston’’ melds archival footage and photographs of Hughes - whom Julien wants to reclaim as a black gay icon - with fantasy re-creations. The painterly images, often unfolding through vertical pans and long, slow tracking shots, riff on the nude photo work of Robert Mapplethorpe and George Platt Lynes; the soundtrack ranges from Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade’’ to George Hannah’s “Freakish Man Blues.’’ The facts of Hughes’s life are subsumed into Julien’s perception of the truth.
“Derek’’ (2008), which shares the second program with “Looking for Langston,’’ is anchored by a frank, informative interview with Jarman from 1990 (he died of AIDS in 1994) and by recollections by one of his muses, Tilda Swinton, from Prospect Cottage, his home on the coast of Kent. Jarman talks about hanging out with David Hockney and Andy Warhol and Ken Russell, and there’s footage of his 1976 Queer Cinema landmark “Sebastiane,’’ and his 1978 punk classic, “Jubilee,’’ and later, better-known films such as “Caravaggio,’’ “Edward II,’’ and “Blue.’’ Like “Looking for Langston,’’ “Derek’’ is a piece of cinematic art. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell where Jarman’s fantasies leave off and Julien’s begin.