Passing Through Film Staff

Editorial Board Alessandra Raengo Lauren M. Cramer Kristin Juarez Cameron Kunzelman Michele Prettyman-Beverly Social Media Lauren M. Cramer Managing Editor Richard Moye Visual Design and Layout Samantha Bowersock Chris Hunt Cover Image Chris Hunt Cameron Kunzelman Issue Staff Daren Fowler Jenny Gunn Joss Wakamo (Layout) Consultant Angelo Restivo Passing Through Film: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble

volume 2, issue 5 SEPTEMBER 2015

Contents OVERVIEW 05 Contents 08 Introduction 28 Essays Alessandra Raengo 100 Contributors 102 Acknowledgements 08 Introduction: Passing Through Film / Passing Through Jazz

Angelo Restivo

28 The Sound of Color / The Color of Sound: The Aesthetics of Passing Through

Lauren M. Cramer

40 Passing Through: A Methodology for Close Analysis Ayanna Dozier

52 Affect and the “Fluidity” of the Black Gendered Body in Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification and Cycles Nicholas forster

66 (Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below: Curtis Mayfield, Cinematic Sounding, and Cultural Memory James Tobias

86 Three Lines for Passing Through: The Sound, Image, and Haptics of Radical Insight from the Undercommons

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 5 o pen i n g cr edits , pa s si n g th ro u g h (di r ec ted by l ar ry cl ar k , 1977), fr am e g r ab . This publication is part of an experimental project of collective Introduction: research inspired by the encounter with Larry Clark’s film Passing Passing Through Film/ Through (1977), a cult film that by many accounts has successfully transposed the compositional Passing Through Jazz principles of jazz improvisation into filmmaking and thus reached a powerful synergy between free jazz and film form. The encounter with both the film and the filmmaker occurred during the “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema Tour” that liquid blackness and the Department of Communication at Georgia State ALESSANDRA RAENGO University co-sponsored with Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies in the Fall 2013.1 My first reaction, as I walked to the stage at the end of the screening to lead a Q&A with the filmmaker, in awe of what I had just seen, was to describe

8 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five the film as sublime; partly because (and the (political) possibilities) of shooting of a black family driving of the jarringly complex movement artistic experimentation, the desire through a riot zone in Cleveland, engendered by the propulsive force to share it with one’s community, among others—to images of African of its musical score and partly for as well as the attempt to heal revolutionary leaders; spaces of its rejection of narrative and formal a masculinity wounded by the addiction—a flashback that shows a closure.2 The film’s free form, an experience of confinement, brutality, band member overdosing—to spaces expression of its ‘passage through’ and the constant reminder of the of healing—the sudden appearance jazz, is utilized in order to usher worthlessness of black lives. of the musicians’ mentor who in elements of the radical political blows an African horn and brings imagination elaborated by black Through its “liquid” aesthetics the the band member back to life.3 artistic avant-gardes of its time. film displays the ability to pass through a variety of seemingly These transitions—these “passages”— The plot of Passing Through incongruous or remote spaces. constitute the ways in which the follows a jazz musician’s struggle It connects spaces of artistic film is both deeply rooted in its against the recording industry improvisation, such as jam sessions, locality, while it also participates while in search of a sound that to spaces of systemic oppression—a in and engenders transnational would reconcile his personal reconstruction of the 1971 Attica streams of radical politics. The film artistic vision with the sensibility prison revolt interwoven with archival was made by leveraging existing of his community and the political newsreel footage of the revolt’s artists communities, in particular the urgencies of his highly repressive repression (a sequence Lauren Central Avenue musicians—a vital historical moment. The protagonist’s Cramer discusses in this issue), portion of “all the musicians known attempt to record independently for instance—in the U.S. national and unknown,” to whom the film is from the white-controlled record scene—including the now iconic dedicated—and the community of industry is profoundly imbricated footage of the fire hoses and police actors and film crew from UCLA, with his search for the meaning dogs in Birmingham, AL, the police PASLA, the Performance Art Society

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of Los Angeles (some of whom Clark directly trained), who worked on the film. Passing Through features Horace Tapscott and the Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra, jazz musicians who were already deliberately experimenting with alternative forms of collective political action through their community presence and through their musical practice. For example, they had decided not to abide by the demands of the record industry and instead bring their music, live, to their community.4 Both Passing Through’s main character Warmack, played by Nathaniel Taylor, and his mentor Poppa Harris, played by veteran actor Clarence Muse, are modeled after Tapscott.

(right) figure 1: Clarence Muse with Dorian Gibb (who plays the young Warmack) at Brockman Art Gallery preparing for the scene. Courtesy of Brockman Gallery.

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“the film explores in the same breath both the confinement and the expansiveness of black artistic and political radicalism.”

Rooted in a vibrant post-Watts Passing Through premiered from the other is one of the film’s artistic community, comprising at FILMEX, the Los Angeles most powerful and enduring traits. also assemblage and “junk” art, International Film Festival alongside Even though more contemporary poetry, and the very experimental David Lynch’s Eraserhead and descriptions of the film have often cinema created by the filmmakers Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, and used a rhetoric of immersion, of the L.A. Rebellion, the film is then circulated in international seduction, and “emotional spasm”— part of what Daniel Widener has film festivals—Locarno, Edinburgh, thus posing, at least for me, the identified as a concerted effort to Milan, Amiens, Douarnenez, Berlin, question of what might be the proper develop non-representational and London, Amsterdam, Moscow, affect of radical politics —the film’s free-form modes of art practice, and was shown also in Martinique, political vision, as many international and ultimately improvisations of Mozambique, Senegal, Algeria, audiences of the time recognized, subjectivity articulated through a Ghana, among others—as both an is biting and defiantly affirmative.7 strong Third Worldist perspective.5 art and a political film.6 The absolute conviction that one is not separable

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liquid blackness was immediately around the jazz ensemble. In this drawn to the aesthetic fluidity respect, the film is about “black of Passing Through for how it study” in the sense elaborated by renders the multiple ways in which Stefano Harney and Fred Moten “that the blackness exists in space and time, in The Undercommons: Fugitive simultaneously indexing rootedness Planning & Black Study.8 And it is and displacement, originarity and around this idea of “study” that ensemble alienation. By presenting as adjacent our guiding research questions incongruous aspects of human life— finally emerged: what does it mean works is the the seemingly unbound creativity to take the jazz ensemble as a of the musicians on the one hand, model for the relationship between proof of the and the worthlessness of their lives artistic experimentation and radical within oppressive labor conditions, politics, the individual and the viability of on the other; the conditions of Los Angeles black artists’ communities its visionary and the pervasive domestic and international anti-black violence— (right) figure 2: the film explores in the same The film’s concern with mediatization elements.” breath both the confinement extends to the visual recording of and the expansiveness of black revolutionary struggles. Here we see artistic and political radicalism. the act of photographing superimposed to archival footage from Guinea More specifically, Passing Through Bissau. Passing Through (Directed reflects on forms of sociality and by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab. political action that coalesce

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collective, theory and praxis? Is the potential of the 1970s exhausted and inaccessible? Or does the notion of “passing through” present us with a concept of space that links to contemporary struggles in everyday life, especially at this moment of continued endangerment of black youths in public spaces? What kind of artistic vision does politics “pass through” in the digital age to produce spaces of communal vision and praxis? These are some of the questions that prompted the object-oriented mode of inquiry liquid blackness has been pursuing, an approach that lets the object dictate the terms of engagement. The jazz ensemble is a space of political praxis because it offers an immediate “translation of vision into act,” especially when free- form aesthetics do not guarantee a predictable outcome and there

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is always a chance that this the struggle for a renewed political of improvisation initiates, as if within alternative mode of sociality will identity,” and concerning itself with the logic of its own cellular structure, implode into chaos.9 Yet, in the jazz “the mediatization of Black music’s a movement which necessarily bears ensemble, praxis is the vehicle for capacities for transforming memory.”11 the piece further and further away conceptualization: that the ensemble from that theme.”13 Improvisation, works is the proof of the viability Passing Through renders Moten further claims, is a kind of of its visionary elements. I want to the inextricability of artistic “foreshadowing, if not prophetic, claim the same for Clark’s film: in experimentation and radical political description” because, “[t]hat which Passing Through, as James Tobias praxis unambiguously. It does so is without foresight is nothing argues, jazz is not “an industrial by enshrining the jazz ensemble as other than foresight.”14 This is an product or musical genre” but “a the aesthetic and political unit of important reason why, as Benston complex streaming of heterogeneous, the black radical tradition where further argues “the artist-hero in historical modalities of action;” more expansive forms of potentially modern African-American writing is, one that keeps the history of jazz contagious collectivity could be 12 typically, a musician … for it is only recording in tension with the history both imagined and practiced. in music that renovated aesthetic of improvised historical struggle.10 Central to this expansion is the conventions can touch upon both And in fact, in his additional practice of improvisation. As the pure energy and improvisational reflections on the film contained in a site of experimentation with wit deemed necessary for survival this issue, Tobias continues to explore intellectual and spatial mobility and in the black diaspora.”15 ways in which Passing Through invention, improvisation, argues pursues its multiple commitments Kimberly Benston, thrives on the Clark never sought a theatrical to local, national and international tension between “deformation and release for his film and claims that struggles by approaching “the reformation,” assemblage, bricolage, this choice was inspired by Sekou historical struggle for a renewed taking off and taking leave. Indeed Toure’s views about art: the idea music in a larger homology with the “process requires that the ‘topic’ that “art has to be demanded,” that

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“for it is only in music that renovated aesthetic conventions can touch upon both the pure energy and improvisational wit deemed necessary for survival in the black diaspora.”

“the people have to ask for it.”16 jealously guarded DVD transfers) Several research questions and The important point here is that reproduces some of the same challenges quickly emerge from the this restricted circulation –Passing collective conditions of production very fact of studying a deliberately Through has only been available and fruition of the jazz ensemble. withdrawing object, which sides with exclusively on film until its recent That is, Passing Through demands the ephemeral over the permanent, digital transfer curated by the UCLA a collectivity both at the point of and the performative and contingent Film and Television Archive—has production and of reception. And over the institutional or the scripted: historically demanded a collective for this reason liquid blackness a fugitive film, with fugitive sounds, audience. Furthermore, the fact only screened the film collectively and a fugitive imagination.17 How that the film only exists in 16mm in so as to honor the way that the to reconcile the demands of close a handful of archives around the film has historically performed analysis—i.e. repeated viewing, world (with the exception of a few its critical and political work. segmentation, stillness… (captivity?)—

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with the film’s understanding of itself as an unbound flow? If the “passages” are the most powerful sites of the film’s political work, what are the implications of stilling this film for analysis? From its opening sequence, the most celebrated in the film, Passing Through reflects on the stakes of fixing and recording (both the visual and the sonic) and attempts to confer to the image the malleability of sound, the intensity of a live performance and the complex dynamics of group creation and interaction. The opening sequence is the first existing recording of a

(right) figure 3: Opening sequence, Passing Through (Directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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“How to reconcile the demands of close analysis— i.e. repeated viewing, segmentation, stillness... (captivity?)—with the film’s understanding of itself as an unbound flow?”

performance of Herbert Baker’s asynchronous meeting point of the malleability of reverse FUJI “Flight 71” arranged by Tapscott.18 musicians and audiences’ gestures.19 film, at a time when it was not yet Emerging from a deep black imported in the U.S., and had it background, Tapscott’s hands on the This sequence speaks also directly shipped directly from Japan.20 The piano move like brush strokes across to the film’s intervention against film’s commitment to the moving and the frame. After a solo prelude, one the limitations of sensitometry that yet lingering image is reminiscent by one, images of the ensemble’s had limited the visibility of the black of jazz photography—such as the various musical instruments are body on film. Before beginning to uncannily resonant Hart Leroy Bibbs’ overlaid onto one another according shoot, Clark had conducted secret Manifesto Optksorption, which strives to an aesthetics inspired by jazz screen tests to identify the type of to capture a sense of the living album covers, that are in themselves film that would best record black skin gesture of performing musicians— a form of passage, as Tobias argues, against a deep black background. but it is also an expression of a way of “holding” music, and the He was eventually satisfied with Clark’s understanding of filmmaking

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“reverberation reconfigure[s] temporality insofar as the ripple-like, partially folding/ partially accumulating repetition of the recording of improvised music might claim some stakes on the future.”

as a form of painterly layering some of its most radical conclusions. such as a line of women advancing according to an aesthetics he has And this is precisely the point: how and retreating in a dance-like described as “soft cubism.”21 far can the ensemble’s practical manner while snapping their fingers. imagination go? And how dangerous This choreography of resistance It is the porosity and fugitive nature might that territory be? A jam is reminiscent of the moving line of its transitions that ultimately session (beginning with Horace of women featured at the end of allow the film to mobilize the idea of Tapscott at the piano) transitions Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of “passing through.” Sequences where into historical footage of a KKK Algiers (1966), which dramatizes the music itself propels and sustains march in Washington, to the dogs the formation of the avant-garde as a desire to surrender to its energizing and fire hoses in Birmingham, but individual women alternate taking and adventurous improvisatory logic also to creative forms of resistance leave from the group to push ahead follow this same logic through to

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and then retreating to be absorbed action.”22 Lingering in the break released from prison, practices and to back up the group itself. Then, also requires a type of temporality his saxophone under a pier in the in the same breath, the sequence that moves in two directions: attempt to re-synchronize himself transitions back again into diegetic forward, since foreshadowing and his sound not only with the time where it initiates a flashback is what improvisation does, and specific locality of his band but also to a band member’s overdose and backwards, as jazz phrasing only with the transnational reverberations near death, until the musicians’ becomes comprehensible to the of his everyday struggle with larger mentor, Poppa Harris, who visits listener through a different analytics decolonization struggles across the him in the hospital room, blows an that retroactively perceives it as world. Clark combined different African horn, in yet another place indeed possessing its own type of shots taken at different piers in the and time not clearly identified within dangerous, daring, and sometimes Los Angeles area so that he could this heterogeneous filmic stream, barely perceptible form.23 It also create the effect of an indefinite and brings the musician back to life. introduces the importance of space. When Clark mixed the sound Through this layering the film creates reverberation, as connected to in postproduction, the various a number of virtual spaces—spaces the way in which technologies of soundtracks began to reverberate nested within the irreducible tensions sound reproduction both recalibrate with one another as if they had between creation and oppression— localities but also reconfigure occurred in actual space, as if the that can be seized for action. temporality insofar as the ripple- locality—in this case, the specific like, partially folding/partially spatial/architectonical configuration And it is Moten that connects accumulating repetition of the of the (composite) pier itself—was sound more directly to the question recording of improvised music might reasserting itself by producing of political action, especially claim some stake on the future.24 the echoing sounds. In this new as he claims the ability for the virtual space created by sound black avant-garde to linger in the Shortly after Passing Through’s reverberation, the spatial property break, “as a necessary preface to opening sequence, Warmack, just of the particular location comes

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to join the indefinite quality of the improvisation of a transnational University students and alumni in “whatever” space the filmmaker subjectivity at work in liberation occasion of Larry Clark’s campus was trying to produce, offering an struggles across the world. visit and the screening of Passing unplanned but effective way to Through in Atlanta in April 2015.28 convey the multiplicity of spaces in This reverberation is both a powerful Bringing together painters and which the jazz artist as a potential formal matrix in the film and also a musicians, Drawing Through unfolded political agent finds himself.25 But it way in which we can see our own as a study in group meditation, also crystalizes what can be accessed collective processes—the way our sound visualization, and improvised through the generative practice of own academic research builds on creation. The LP record produced free-jazz: the possibility to multiply each other’s work, for example— 27 from this event captures the one’s time and space, to expand somewhat mirrored in the film. uniquely layered experience of the across them, simultaneously inhabit Moving from the observations just creative interaction between media the here and the elsewhere, and to outlined, we have conceived of practices—visual arts, music, and synchronize oneself, for example, with this fifth issue of liquid blackness film—and will be released during an the praxis outlined in the preacher’s as an opportunity to pursue a event at the Mammal Gallery that sermon that opens Ralph Ellison’s larger reflection on some of the will conclude the September 18-19 Invisible Man: to think, as Benston questions posed by the film as symposium on “The Arts and Politics summarizes it, about blackness well as to continue to “improvise” of the Jazz Ensemble,” that liquid not as “an inevitable object, but the configuration within which blackness has organized as part of rather a motivated, constructed, the film’s study might occur. this study. The event will also feature corrosive, and productive process;” One exciting spinoff of our research artwork from a range of media blackness itself as practice.26 And has been Drawing Through, a project including live meditations and musical by extension, to think about jazz as designed by painting, drawing performances inspired by the film. a praxis of sociality, foreshadowing and printmaking professor Craig This issue features a variety of sonic resistance, and ultimately Dongoski, with Georgia State

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compelling essays that are further testimony to the collective and experimental modes that have inspired this research project. James Tobias’s return to Passing Through, a film he has already written about, is testimony to its continued relevance and in fact, to the way its transnational breadth as well as its commitment to the mediatization of cultural memory and its haptic communicability continue to be relevant in the present moment. Angelo Restivo has discovered the film through the liquid blackness research and his formal approach is sensitive to

(right) figure 4: Pursuing forms of liquidity in the sound/ image relation. Passing Through (Directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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“what can be accessed through the generative practice of free-jazz: the possibility to multiply one’s time and space, to expand across them, simultaneously inhabit the here and the elsewhere.”

the way the use of color in the film Nicholas Forster pursue, likewise, bodies existing in time. They thus connects, in a utopian way, to Walter some of this sensibility in the reading rescued these same bodies from Benjamin’s idea of the outmoded. of other objects. Dozier focuses on the default association with filth and As Restivo argues, the film’s pursuit Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual abjection and, at the same time, of the “mathematical sublime”— #1: A Urban Rite of Purification and upset the way the cinematic image particularly the musical potentiality a Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles. Both wraps itself too tightly around the of color—acts as a form of “profane filmmakers from the L.A. Rebellion black female body. Forster’s essay on illumination” that, among other pursued the radical gesture of Curtis Mayfield’s powerful cinematic things, functions as a way to explore framing women’s bodily fluids (urine presence in 1970s films advances the the possibility of the production in the former and menstruation in the idea that Mayfield was instrumental in and emergence of “the new.” latter) as acts of bodily expansion creating a soul counterpublic, which and as forms of assertion of living articulated political and economic Essays by Ayanna Dozier and

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aspirations even though it had to unavoidably rely on the existing structure of the record industry. Appearing in some of the films for which he provided the soundtrack, Mayfield’s presence commanded a shift from compliance to resistance that was understandable to the soul community.29 Forster’s close analysis of a pivotal scene in Robert M. Young’s 1977 prison film, Short Eyes bears this out and effectively contributes to the understanding of the radical power of fabulation in 1970s music.

(left) figure 5: Sound reverberates under the pier. Passing Through (directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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1 For an account of how the organization of the L.A. Rebellion Tour coincided with the coming together of liquid blackness as a research group see Alessandra Raengo, “Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness reflects on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion films,” in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Stewart (University of California Press, forthcoming, November 2015). 2 At least this is was my reaction at a first viewing—a sense that the film (paradoxically) loses cohesion as its narrative line takes hold. Upon closer study of the film, one becomes aware that a reason for this reaction is the very fact that the jazz ensemble and its music are by far the most powerful cohesive forces in the film. 3 In thinking about the political commitment of the film, it is important to know that Clark purchased the Attica and the Cleveland footage with the very first funds he was able to raise for the film. 4 See Steven Isoardi, Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) and Steven Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 5 Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7. 6 I owe this observation to Kristin Juarez who first consulted Larry Clark’s papers at UCLA in the Spring 2014 and noticed the double life of the film. See a map of the film’s exhibition history here: http://bit.ly/16upXPv. 7 See for instance, Gary Giddins, “Boiling Point,” Film Comment, 44, no. 4 (2008): 20-21. 8 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). 9 Kimberly Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 116. 10 James Tobias, Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 154. 11 James Tobias, “Three Lines for Passing Through: The Sound, Image, and Haptics of Radical Insight from the Undercommons,” in this issue. 12 Fred Moten advances the idea of the jazz ensemble as the aesthetic unit of the black radical tradition in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 13 Benston, Performing Blackness, 126. 14 Fred Moten, In the Break, 63. 15 Benston, Performing Blackness, 119. 16 Larry Clark, Interview for “Dossier on Passing Through” by Alessandra Raengo, San Francisco State University March 19, 2014, available at https://vimeo.com/ liquidblackness/videos/sort:alphabetical/format:thumbnail/.

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17 My use of the term “fugitive” is inspired both by Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, but also by Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 18 As Tobias discusses in this issue, this is an important memorializing act toward a young composer killed in a car crash in 1970 at age seventeen. 19 Tobias, Sync, 162. See the liquid blackness dossier for some of the album covers that have inspired Clark’s aesthetics, http://passingthroughdossier.tumblr.com/. 20 Larry Clark, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart and Christopher Horak, June 2, 2010, and Julie Dash, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, June 8, 2010, both unpublished L.A. Rebellion oral history Project, UCLA Film & Television Archive. See also the liquid blackness “Dossier on Passing Through,” curated by Kristin Juarez, for production stills and contact sheets that suggest Clark’s research on sensitometry. In particular, see the close up of Clarence Muse with the handwritten note, “match this contrast.” http://passingthroughdossier.tumblr.com/. 21 Hart Leroy Bibbs, Manifesto Optksorption (Framingham, Mass: Wooley the Newt Productions, Ltd., 1980). A painter before he became a filmmaker, Clark said his paintings were very layered and thick. Only after he started film school did he realize that he had been trying to make a film all along. Clark, oral history interview. 22 Moten, In the Break, 85. 23 Ibid, 81. 24 For the idea of sound recording as a form of recalibration of locality see Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), 20-30. 25 The sequence concludes with a shot of magnificent waves that were actually outtakes from Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) that Clark acquired from a warehouse in L.A., another instance of proximity between experimental filmmaking and assemblage art. 26 Benston, Performing Blackness, 9. 27 The presentation of this work in progress at the CURVE (an interactive media facility at Georgia State University), for example, highlighted this type of collaboration. It featured presentations by Lauren Cramer, Kristin Juarez, myself and showcased, among other things, Nedda Ahmed’s work on the film’s exhibition map. 28 With Kristin Juarez acting as liaison between the liquid blackness research and Professor Dongoski. 29 For the idea of how soul constructs, demands, and constantly addresses its community, see Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012).

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 25 n eo n advertising i n pas si n g th rou g h (di r ec ted by l ar ry cl ar k , 1977), fr am e g r ab . How does the new emerge in the world? This question has, of course, a formidable philosophical pedigree: The Sound of Color / but it has perhaps been an especially urgent question for scholars of cultural production, as the mass The Color of Sound: industrial arts of the 20th century have rather suddenly morphed into The Aesthetics of the frenzied image production—the “digital delirium”—of the 21st. For a time, in the 1970s—incidentally the Passing Through decade which saw the production of Larry Clark’s Passing Through— film theory took as its major project the analysis of the ways in which this cultural production served as a means for the social reproduction of Angelo Restivo capitalism; the question of “political cinema,” then, was constructed in a “reactive” way, so that the radical work was characterized precisely in relation to the dominant codes which it was violating. The problem with all this was that what ended up

28 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five getting ignored was the aesthetic not simply as its nominal subject but artistic production of black men, question; aesthetics here taken as its formal model—is very much which leads him to attempt—in one to be that which brings to our centered on this close attention of the film’s few narrative lines—to perception the indeterminate, the to the new in emergence. It goes start an independent record label. indiscernible, the virtual. To recast without saying that “free jazz” Within this system, heroin becomes the question of political cinema as a tries to distance itself from pre- the perfect metaphor (however real question fundamentally connected to given progressions that anchor the its presence in the music industry): aesthetics, then, is to assert that we improvisation of the more traditional for it points at the profound psychic can’t possibly know in advance when, jazz ensemble. And in several early risks that accompany the constant where, or how a new sensibility or a rehearsal sequences, we see the main pressure to move into new and new engagement with the world will character, saxophonist Warmack, uncharted terrain, which then can be emerge: we can only “attend” to it, in as he searches for the right sound, exploited by the white drug dealers all the senses the Romance languages having just returned to Los Angeles who form part of the infrastructure give to this word. Depending on from a stint in Attica prison. But of the entertainment industry. the variant of critical theory you more than this: Warmack (and his subscribe to, you can call this girlfriend Maya) search for new paths But the fact that Maya is a step moment an encounter with the Real, out of the neocolonial economic ahead of Warmack in her decision to an instance of counter-actualization, structures of South Central. In this, break with these structures points or a speculative engagement with Maya takes the lead by quitting her to yet another way in which the the foreign, but in any case, we job as photographer for a glossy film engages with the new, insofar must see these as fundamentally black magazine owned and run by as it attempts to understand new connected to aesthetic experience.1 whites. Warmack, too, understands modes of relationality between black how the white music industry men and black women. An entire Clark’s Passing Through—like the appropriates for its own profit the section of the film—woven together jazz ensemble which the film takes by a seemingly incessant rain that

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 29 Sound of Color

joins the sequences together— explores the slow development, with all its vicissitudes, of the relationship between Warmack and Maya, as Warmack confronts his insecurities in the face of an accomplished and independent woman, whose political awareness extends beyond the local and links the African-American struggle to anti-colonialist movements across the globe. In this way, the film— though never invoking it explicitly— brings to mind the charged sexual politics of the radical black left in its attempt to reconcile women’s rights and equality with the need to nourish a black masculinity made precarious by centuries of slavery and racism. One thinks, for example,

(right) figure 1: Flashing neon sign outside Warmack’s apartment window in Passing Through (Directed by Larry Clack, 1977), frame grab.

30 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five Sound of Color

“history inhabits every frame, every space, of the film, as the urgent raw material from which the new must be fashioned.”

of the ways in which, in the decade All of this, I want to argue, is linked those spaces whose cracked and preceding this film, this very issue formally to the film’s extensive use textured plaster walls give a vague in the Black Panther Party led to of the color red. Certainly, one can’t suggestion of “the outmoded,” in the development of the “Womanist” help but notice the way that most of contrast to the glassy smoothness position; or of the ways in which the the film’s interiors—with exceptions of the corporate office (Figure 3). sexual violence recounted in Eldridge like the offices of Maya’s magazine, For Walter Benjamin, the value of Cleaver’s collected prison writings, the corporate headquarters of the the outmoded, its “revolutionary Soul on Ice, created a firestorm of record company executive, and potential,” lay precisely in the way it controversy in the national (white) Attica prison—are lit with lighting makes capitalist production visible press, even as Cleaver acknowledged instruments gelled red. This is per se: the novelty that renders an the misguidedness of his earlier especially prominent in Warmack’s object outmoded has nothing to acts. Indeed, history inhabits every apartment (Figure 1); but it is do with the really new, but rather frame, every space, of the film, noticeable in almost every instance illustrates how, despite appearances, as the urgent raw material from of what I would call the “spaces of everything remains the same.2 which the new must be fashioned. resistance” in the film (Figure 2),

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Larry Clark, in talking about the (and given recent events regarding “The technical overall chromatic design of his film the policing of black communities (and not specifically, I should add, today, suggests that the state of and aesthetic addressing the use of red gels) has emergency is far from over); but also said that he was lighting for black states of emergence: of new modes skin. In other words, by-the-book of relationality, new distributions of problem Clark lighting of the kind that one might the sensible, a politics “to come.” learn in film school is going to tell faced thus you how to light skin that is by For Walter Benjamin, color was a default white skin. The technical and privileged means through which opens up to a aesthetic problem Clark faced thus our experience might open up to opens up to a utopian aspiration: new potentialities, insofar as color utopian to see black skin “in a new light,” is able to move across boundaries literally and figuratively. Whether or and expresses itself as an intensity not pushing tungsten light toward rather than a fixed property of a aspiration: to the red part of the spectrum was thing. These ideas are beautifully done toward this end or some compressed into what has become see black skin other one, I would like to argue that a rather well-known entry in the this utopian aspiration produces, Arcades Project: where Benjamin ‘in a new light,’ almost as if a byproduct, the red writes, “What, in the end, makes glows that pulsate through the advertisement so superior to various spaces of the film. That criticism? Not what the moving red literally and neon sign says—but the fiery red pool light suggests at once the state 3 of emergency that characterized reflecting it in the asphalt.” Benjamin, figuratively.” black urban experience in 1977 too, is talking about a redness as

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a kind of byproduct: in this case, one produced by capital itself. The red glow on the pavement, like the outmoded object or space, is one of those “unintended consequences” that have the potential to expose, in a “profane illumination,” the irrationality of what we normally take to be the common sense of everyday life. Significantly, Benjamin gave this entry a title, “This Space for Rent,” suggesting that underlying the capitalist exchange of spaces for rents, there is the potential for a “montage” to emerge which would disrupt this circuit of exchange.4

(right) figure 2: Spaces of resistance: the jazz club in Passing Through (directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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The reds of Passing Through are certain thresholds. And affectively, correspond sonically to how the not the same as Benjamin’s reds: this is the sense that we get from film is handling color in the image. they are not the reflected glows of the reds in the film: feelings of The waves, that is to say, produce the phantasmagoria of capital, but linkages across distances, of rising constantly shifting rhythmic patterns, as I indicated earlier, instead come and falling intensities. (In fact, the and constantly varying levels of about as the result of a utopian film’s opening sequence makes intensity, from a vast number of aspiration. Indeed, the only red an explicit connection between “micro-movements.” In this way “advertising” signs we see are the music and color: against a deep they are akin to free jazz, insofar block-lettered names of the string black background, colored lights as in both the rhythmic structures of motels lined up one after another become associated with particular are in constant variation. But in in a strip mall (image on page 27); instruments, and as the instruments a larger sense, the waves of the and the only neon is a partially interact with one another, the ocean present us with a case of the visible flashing sign which is outside colors begin to occupy various “mathematical sublime”: the reference Warmack’s apartment window, put zones of the processed image.) point for measurement is constantly there, according to Clark, because in flux. And finally, the ocean creates he needed to give the impression When Warmack returns to L.A. from a metaphor, as it alludes to the the apartment was above ground the prison stint, there is an amazing traumatic histories of diaspora that level in order to link continuity with monochromatic sequence in which make up the black musical tradition. the exterior sequences outside the Warmack takes his saxophone to apartment (Figure 1). But in a sense, a pier on the Pacific Ocean and Given the details of Benjamin’s what Benjamin was getting at in improvises, with the sound of entry, “This Space for Rent,” it treating color as expressive intensity the ocean waves present in the might be instructive to look briefly was to bring out its musical qualities: background. These sounds of waves at a film made around the same like music, color can overrun fixed return periodically at key moments time as Passing Through, one in boundaries, can pass through through the film, and formally they which the red is directly linked, as

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“the ocean creates a metaphor, as it alludes to the traumatic histories of diaspora that make up the black musical tradition.”

Benjamin describes, to the capitalist of collapse. We must then ask, the candidate: “We are the people” phantasmagoria: Martin Scorsese’s what “profane illumination” will instead of (the correct) “We are 1976 Taxi Driver. In fact, Scorsese’s arise from all the fragmented the people.” We can see here the film so exactly reproduces the signs? Unfortunately, the film’s way the first slogan gives us the images Benjamin evokes that one formal system encloses all of this formula for fascism; while the second might think Scorsese was deliberately mise-en-scène in a kind of circular gives us the formula for identity referring to it! The film’s noir-inspired movement that is nothing if not the politics, as the protest of those hosed-down streets, the windshield formal manifestation of a repetition excluded from the emphasized and mirrors of the taxi, the glass compulsion; the only available politics “we.” But what is most evident in storefronts, all of these reflective is the missed encounter between a Taxi Driver is that in the emergent surfaces take up and redistribute venal presidential candidate and a regime of neoliberalism (which in the glowing red neon signs, with borderline vigilante. In a humorous hindsight was what all the “creative signifiers like “FASCINATION,” but telling detail of the film, a destruction” was preparing the strewn across the urban landscape political button manufacturer has ground for), “the people are missing.” of the city seemingly on the verge misprinted the campaign slogan of

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In The Time-Image, Deleuze takes this quote of Paul Klee and develops it into a theory of Third Cinema. In particular, he argues that what the formal devices deployed in Third Cinema attempt to do is to “invent a people” via the powers of fabulation.5 In other words, this is the way the new comes to appearance in Third Cinema. And this is indeed where all the formal resonances and affective relays—of sound and color—lead us in Passing Through. Toward the end, the film presents us with a series of fabulations. In one of these—the killing of the murderous record company executive who is

(right) figure 3: Red accent marks in the corporate office in Passing Through (directed by Larry Clark, 1977) frame grab.

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trying to prevent the group from Tarot reading which fabulates the well to an as-yet-unrealized futurity. forming a new label—the popular is future not only for Warmack, but— And while this genealogy might invoked via a send-up of the genre because of its abstractions, such seem to invoke the “African tree” of Blaxploitation. After the death as “you must slay the dragon”—for and an “arborescent” structure, of Clarence Muse, i.e. Poppa Harris, a potential people to come. Muse the violent history of the diaspora the old man who serves as mentor leaves Warmack a cryptic poem makes this really a “rhizome,” where to Warmack, a clairvoyant friend of which, when deciphered, reveals to inventions of the new leap from Muse presents Warmack with gifts Warmack that the legacy of the jazz one place to another, in all manner from his mentor, while also doing a greats who preceded him point as of improbable connections.6

1 In this essay, we must leave to the side the relatively recent “accelerationist” position: in this view, capitalism has achieved “full subsumption,” the aesthetic event has become fully accounted for and even “monetized,” and so the only strategy left is to plunge fully into the production of simulacra, to the point where some vaguely conceived implosion (maybe? hopefully?) occurs. See Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 2 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” Collected Writings v. 2 part 1 (1927-1930), trans. R. Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 216-218. 3 Quoted in Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (University of California Press, 2012), 154; for a quick outline of Benjamin’s “philosophy of color” more generally, see her footnote to this quote, 329 n78. 4 “Montage” insofar as from the point of view of exchange, every successive rental is independent of the others; but to the extent that the space holds within it inscriptions from the past elements of this series, it acquires a density of potential if improbable linkages. Imagine, for example, that “this space for rent” is a billboard: with each economic exchange, the new image is supposed to obliterate the one underneath. But if the space of the billboard loses its value for some reason and falls into disuse, then the tolls taken by weather and aging might bring separated layers to the surface. 5 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson, R. Galeta, (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 214. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari begin A Thousand Plateaus with an extended discussion of the binary opposition arborescent / rhizomatic. The arborescent stands for structures that are tree-like and hierarchical (whether social formations or philosophical systems); whereas the rhizomatic stands for formations that are characterized by multiple points of entry, multiple ways of negotiating pathways, etc. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), plateau 1.

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As Alessandra Raengo explains in her Introduction to this issue of liquid blackness, studying Larry Clark’s Passing Through: Passing Through has presented both practical and theoretical challenges. Collectively, we found the solution to A Methodology those obstacles was to fully embrace the possibilities of film study, by for Close Analysis adopting methodologies that compliment the shape of the film. For example, Kristin Juarez’s archival research featured in the “Dossier on Passing Through,” which is connected to this publication, produces a historical network and visual ecology that has as many spatial, political, and aesthetic linkages as the film Lauren Cramer itself.1 Considering film study as its own form means being explicit about research as a process of making. Therefore, when I wanted to initiate a close reading of the film, I was confronted with the fact that I did not want to make pieces of Passing

40 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five Through. As the title suggests, this depressing motel sign outside of his The completion of Warmack’s journey film is about movement, connectivity, window. Yet, when Warmack picks is significant in light of his previous and scale—there must be room to up his saxophone and plays, it is state of restriction, which we see pass through, and this passing should clear that he is not bounded to this throughout the film. In the film not be interrupted. The tools of ‘close’ space. Like his grandfather, Poppa sequence shown in Figure 1, Womack reading (cropped screen-captures Harris, Warmack is not defined by is reminded of a painful memory, a or enlarged frames) clearly produce his particular position at any time violent attack on a member of his a completely different construction (prison, a record contract, etc.); jazz ensemble and his subsequent of the cinematic space. While these instead, Warmack is the possibility of incarceration at Attica Correctional challenges remain, this piece and the connecting to any moment in space Facility—which is represented by entire issue feature stills from the and time. Contrary to the notion of actual footage of the infamous Attica film; foregrounding these concerns blackness as a kind of confinement, prison rebellion. While the use of may help us better understand what the collectivity of the jazz ensemble archival footage helps to enrich our passes through in this film, and how allows Warmack to become the main character’s backstory, it also movement might shape black cinema. embodiment of dynamism. My provides a moment to consider the aim is to adopt a reading strategy ‘landmarks’ of black visual culture, The trajectory of Warmack, the main that can account for this reversal. moments of overwhelming familiarity, character in Passing Through, is I choose to view the film in a linear that black cinema must also pass not unlike a classic hero on a quest fashion, to produce images that through. Within the film Warmack for self-actualization in the face of have the potential to move forward is trapped by governmentality, the forces attempting to restrain him. and backward, and to pay particular historical moment, and an exploitative But at the end of the film, he does attention to the moments Clark music industry. Similarly, the well- not ride into the sunset. Instead, he calls “accent marks,” that initiate known “burden of representation” remains in the same dark apartment movement across time and space.2 confines black cinema within flooded in neon light from the

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FIGURE 1: The Ensemble

particular categories of genre, film genres (film noir, Blaxploitation), ways to see the film stage the narrative, and style. Passing Through and expressions of culture (religious sometimes difficult movement of a is a complex film precisely because ritual, ancestral lineages, folklore) black body through space and time. it does not want to be paused. so that no one of these individual Passing Through comfortably moves tropes of black expressive culture can The Ensemble (Figure 1) through multiple artistic traditions define the film. For that reason, in While this sequence focuses primarily (photography, jazz, drawing, poetry), the following exercise, I will identify on Warmack’s experience at the

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FIGURE 2: The Break

center of the Attica prison rebellion, the music that “makes you think work of the ensemble allows us to I suggest it begins with the jazz and makes you reflect.”3 In other pass through and connect these ensemble. Embedded within this words, this moment of practice, as characters to a black radical tradition. group is a political formation that has a double for the forward playing the ability to record, preserve, and or screening of the film, facilitates The Break (Figure 2) perform a racial black politics. As a reflective moment of looking At the beginning of the rehearsal, Clark explains, this group performs backward. Thus, the improvisational Warmack struggles to reconnect

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with his bandmates, but the use of the ensemble that allows Warmack a particular kind of racial image is eyeline matches and establishing to be both ‘here’ and ‘there.’ deployed. Immediately, the image shots clearly make the spatial of Warmack’s violent aggression relationship between the group clear. The Attack or “The Sound becomes another familiar image However, when one member reminds Before the Fury of Those of imprisonment. The inevitability everyone of a racist encounter Oppressed” (Figure 3) of this moment is reinforced by that left a musician blinded, the After the transition from the band the care in which the fictional and group is incapable of maintaining rehearsal into the past, we see documentary footage are combined, their rhythm. Clark refers to these Skeeter, a member of the ensemble, particularly in the color processing. moments that signal a stylistic being attacked. Enraged, Warmack The War - Attica Correctional change as “accent marks.” Clark comes to Skeeter’s defense and Facility, 1971 (Figure 4) argues these moments do not require repeatedly punches the attacker. It explanation, they simply work in the is meaningful that the film visualizes By utilizing archival footage in the moment of improvisation or not.4 The violence against black bodies, a Attica scenes, Passing Through characters register their emotional kind of violence that often remained necessarily considers this historical discomfort silently, but it is clear that off screen. However, Warmack’s moment through the lens of media. this is an improvisational fail. The subsequent attack and the image of During the Attica prison rebellion, ensemble cannot recover without violent black masculinity are all too prisoners tried to bring human activating and working through the familiar. This is yet another “accent rights violations that were occurring painful memory. In other words, they mark.” However, instead of initiating behind bars to light. Thus, it is fitting cannot move forward without looking contemplation like the previous that the combination of footage in back. By superimposing the first shot segment, Warmack is shuttled Passing Through visualizes the sides of the flashback over Warmack’s forward in time to his inevitable of the rebellion as a conflict of image face, the transition visualizes an incarceration. The film is making production. In between a visual impossible space/time evoked by literal the fixity that emerges when exchange between prisoners making

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FIGURE 3: The Attack or “The Sound Before the Fury of Those Oppressed”

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FIGURE 4: The War - Attica Correctional Facility, 1971

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demands and white onlookers, the fixed or caught within an anti-black and stillness by ending with a still film inserts more explicitly militaristic visual economy, this last part of the photograph of naked prisoners being imagery. For example, prisoners sequence offers a possibility for arranged by guards that slowly fades dig trenches in one shot while liberating the black image. In the to red. This ending defies traditional correctional officers arrive in tanks wake of the violence at Attica, the filmmaking in the unconventional and helicopters in another. Similarly, details of many prisoner deaths were use of color and the more obvious the leaders of the warring sides shrouded in mystery and the prison pausing of the moving image. Again, (Russell G. Oswald, Chief of New denied involvement. Therefore, it this allows the film to do work that York State’s Penal System and prison is significant that the last major the prisoners cannot by making spokesperson, Elliot Barkley) look movements in this sequence are the images of their abuse visible on. It is undeniable that the prisoners fictional images of black bodies in and, notably, moving outside of it. were trapped within the prison walls; pain. In close ups, we see prisoners however, the film makes this issue of succumb to gunshot wounds and, confinement a problem of visuality. in a moment of solidarity, two prisoners rush an injured body toward the camera. The film does The Black Body in Pain (Figure 5) something that would have been impossible for the real prisoners If the previous segment of the film by filling an absence in the archive. argues black radical politics are This final accent provides the most a response to black bodies being explicit contemplation of movement

1 liquid blackness “Dossier on Passing Through.” Curated by Kristin Juarez, available at http://passingthroughdossier.tumblr.com. 2 Larry Clark, Interview for “Dossier on Passing Through” by Alessandra Raengo, San Francisco State University, March 19, 2014, available at https://vimeo.com/ liquidblackness/videos/sort:alphabetical/format:thumbnail/. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

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FIGURE 5: The Black Body in Pain

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cyc les (di r ec ted by zei nab u i r en e davis , 1989), fr am e g r ab . “Give me a body then … The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it Affect and the “Fluidity” has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, of the Black Gendered in order to reach the unthought, that is life.”—Gilles Deleuze1 Body in Water Ritual #1: “My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a centre of action; it cannot give birth to a An Urban Rite of representation.”—Henri Bergson2 The use of menstruation and Purification and Cycles urination in the films Cycles (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989) and Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979) affectively engages with the cinematic image of the black Ayanna Dozier gendered body to produce a body that moves beyond the appearance of blackness. I derive my use of affect from Kara Keeling’s conceptualization

52 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five of the same in The Witch’s Flight: to view the black body as a lived the creation of the black body. This The Cinematic, the Black Femme, body, because we see it as a body second body, an abstracted and and the Image of Common Sense: in time. As Gilles Deleuze elaborates imagined figure, shadows or doubles in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “It the real one.”5 This is the same black Affect … is a form of labor that is through the body that cinema body that Frantz Fanon waited for is intrinsic to the body’s self- forms its alliance with the spirit, in trepidation while viewing Tarzan constitution. While one’s perception with thought. ‘Give me a body then’ (W.S. Van Dyke and Richard Thorpe, measures the possible or virtual is first to mount the camera on an 1932) in an Antillean theater.6 It action of a thing on one’s body, everyday body.” Further, Deleuze is this body that stands in for the affection can be understood initially states that “the daily attitude is what lived black body and gives, in its as the moment in which one’s puts the before and after into the stead, a shadow that devalues black perception ceases to measure body, time into the body.”4 Thus, humanity. For Fanon this was the an object’s potential action upon Zeinabu irene Davis and Barbara experience of viewing the “savage” one’s body and begins to sketch 3 McCullough use bodily fluids to blacks in Tarzan that “represented” out the object’s actual action. transgress the representation of his body. As Kara Keeling clarifies, To engage with bodily fluids on phenomenal blackness, by making the “social reality” of the black body the level of affect illuminates the visible the “fluidity” that is the lived is one partly produced by cinematic ways in which these fluids sketch “daily” experience of black bodies. processes so much so that “each out a temporal existence of bodily appearance of a black image to Harvey Young defines phenomenal an eye is an appearance of every materiality. Through affect, these blackness, in Embodying Black bodily fluids offer a perspective of black insofar as ‘black identity’ is a Experience, as: “When popular historical project predicated upon a the lived experience of the black connotations of blackness are gendered body; they extend the substitution that implies an aporia.”7 mapped across or internalized It is an aporia insofar as each black body’s spatio-temporal within black people, the result is existence and allow for the possibility

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their cinematic body. Both films The Uncontained Body in “Vidato’s body cleverly address this temporal gap Cycles and Water Ritual #1 by using ritual as a way to conjure the historical, non-cinematic, Released a decade apart, Water sows the earth black lived experience alongside Ritual #1 and Cycles both deal the present one. It is important with aspects of ritual, cleansing, through prayer to note here that, as a concept, and the black female body as a blackness does not necessarily refer site for psychological healing. The and physical to negative images of blacks or filmmakers, McCullough and Davis, black culture. Rather, it describes a were part of the L.A. Rebellion, a labor.” quality mapped onto the lived black movement of black experimental film body because of its phenomenal art that was created by graduate appearance. Both films use bodily students of UCLA’s School of Theater, appearance of a black image always Film and Television from the 1970s fluids as a way to extend the black 8 refers back to a previous appearance body’s (and the black image’s) to the early 1990s. Water Ritual #1, of similarly “black” images. spatio-temporal reach beyond the shot on 16mm black-and-white film limited possibilities that phenomenal then colored to the appearance of Thus, before the reel of Cycles and blackness might otherwise make infrared color film stock, features Water Ritual #1 even begin, the available. In so doing, Davis and artist Yolanda Vidato roaming black bodies within the screen exist McCullough are able to situate the through the urban abandonment of in a temporal gap, between prior black cinematic body in the present the I-105 freeway construction site historical images of blacks and their to form new meanings beyond the in Watts, California. During this brief impending cinematic appearance. appearance of blackness. While but intense six-minute film, Vidato’s Similarly, the bodies moving onscreen both films manage to accomplish body sows the earth through prayer interact with past appearances of this, they do so in different ways. and physical labor. Vidato uses a

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mortar and pestle to grind herbs for the earth. She proceeds to repeatedly blow the herbs in the air, before “To engage with bodily stripping bare and squatting down to replenish the barren earth with her fluids on the level of affect urine. The infrared colored painting of the black-and-white film that McCullough used abstracts Vidato’s illuminates the ways in body as does the camera’s shot as it pans down to spotlight her act which these fluids sketch of urination. The camera abstracts Vidato’s body through a continuous out a temporal existence tight shot that moves along her skin, rendering specific zones of her of bodily materiality.” body indiscernible at times. Hence, its abstraction contributes to the removal of a sexual gaze once the

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“Color and bodily matter seep from her, suggesting that the audience view Vidato’s body not as a site for consumption, but rather as one of percolation.”

camera pans to Vidato’s genitalia. body is the land. Color and bodily time by cleaning both the house and Vidato’s body further loses its shape matter seep from her, suggesting her body as a “ritual” to purify the and stability as a fixed entity when that the audience view Vidato’s self. Also shot on black-and-white the outline of her body blurs with body not as a site for consumption, 16mm film, Cycles deploys the use the desert background–an effect but rather as one of percolation. of stop motion technique in some that is heightened through the scenes, quite similar to La Jetée hypnotic coloring of the film stock. If color was used to extend Vidato’s (Chris Marker, 1962), to propel the Through the use of color, which spatio-temporal reach, then the film’s narrative. In addition, the use shifts between cool and warm tones use of shadow in Cycles achieves a of natural light illuminates Ingram’s and is present throughout, Vidato’s similar effect. In Cycles, Stephanie domestic setting and pierces partially body extends its boundaries to Ingram’s body is a body in and out closed rooms where Ingram’s blend with the environment as a of stasis as she awaits the arrival of shadows trace her movements. The body. The land is the body and the her menstrual period; Ingram, now shadows and stop motion technique two weeks late, anxiously bides her

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animate Ingram’s body as she cleans Ingram awaking from her roaming work on abjection has illustrated. multiple locations within her home dream with menstrual blood staining In Powers of Horror: An Essay on including the kitchen, the bedroom, her white sheets. Unlike Water Ritual Abjection, Kristeva argues that and the bathroom where she #1, Cycles uses the stain to mark defilement is attached to excrement prepares her body for a deep cleanse the appearance of bodily fluids. and menstruation much more (Figure 3). While the domestic In a discussion on the ethics of so than other bodily fluids: setting certainly implies a ceremonial dirty work and the body, Sheena J. aspect to Ingram’s cleanse, it Vachhani notes the distinction of While they always relate to corporeal is crucial to note the ritualistic the stain as a visible mark of bodily orifices as to so many landmarks elements of the kitchen, bathroom, difference; the stain makes the parceling-constituting the body’s and bedroom as rooms where hidden perceptible on the body while territory, polluting objects fall Ingram eats, defecates, and fucks. the materiality of the body also stains schematically, into two types: its spatio-temporal environment: excremental and menstrual. Neither Ingram’s body exercises itself firmly tears nor sperm, for instance, within the confines of the domestic The stain presents a way by which to although they belong to borders of setting of the home before taking demarcate and draw different zones the body, have any polluting value.11 a nap to sleep away her anxious of corporeality given the ‘horror’ or state. The film then cuts to a dream intense discomfort felt in response to Kristeva’s work on abjection sets sequence, during which multiple the leaking, permeable and absorptive the foundation for interpreting the women including Ingram can be seen feminine body, in which boundaries social and hierarchical relationship roaming the city chanting, clapping, between inside and outside and self of affective responses attached running, hugging; the black female and Other are constantly blurred.10 to particular bodily fluids; arousal body is thus presented as a force with sperm, sympathy with tears, of action in both environments. The Bodily fluids are socially inscribed and disgust with excrement and seventeen-minute film ends with with deeply gendered meanings, menstruation. Kristeva is quick to as Julia Kristeva’s groundbreaking address how abjection is socially

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inscribed upon menstruation, which signifies reproduction, to give it the same “polluting” value as excrement, which is human waste. Kristeva says little else about how these reactions differ in relation to race. In most scholarly work concerning bodily fluids, finding the connections between the reaction to bodily fluids and race is all but absent. For example, Elizabeth Grosz’s exploration of bodily fluids in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism argues for a feminism that thinks through female corporeality and places an emphasis on biological determinism over culture, racial,

(left) figure 2: Yolanda Vidato performs the water ritual for the earth in Water Ritual #1 (Directed by Barbara McCullough, 1979), frame grab.

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and gender differences. This that do not seek to contain fluids neglects to account for the ways but rather to expel them. This “the black in which social inscriptions on perspective is a critical response materials such as bodily fluids or to the more common engagement female body the body itself in society might with the female body as receptacle— intertwine with our understanding something to be penetrated. I argue is presented of a body in the first place. Or, that with regard to the cinematic more simply put, how cultural, image of blackness, the fluidity of the as a force racial, and gender differences female bodies in these films does not might take into consideration the contribute to the dated metaphor of lived experience of the body and the “uncontrollable female body.”12 of action” the biological factors that induce Rather, the agency granted to the bodily fluids as a productive female protagonists of Water Ritual social cinematic experience. #1 and Cycles in the act of releasing Bodily fluids have symbolic their urine and menstruation Through the use of ritual (watering significance and can be said to respectively illustrates the productive mediate the realm between the the earth for Water Ritual #1 and potential of theorizing the body as cleaning the body for Cycles) and sacred and the profane … Bodily liquidity.13 This is to say that, in Water fluids become present, visible the focus on the black female Ritual #1 and Cycles, the black female body in both films, the audience and matter out of place. Blood body becomes something that is and sweat in particular accord a perceives bodily fluids as forms both fluid and unfixed, blurring the of expansiveness that result in a significance that marks the identity demarcation of its boundaries while and viscerality of the [body].14 more liquid conception of the body. proclaiming its vitality with equal The audience sees the performers’ assertion. As Vachhani states: bodies exert themselves as forces

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“the audience perceives bodily fluids as forms of expansiveness that result in a more liquid conception of the body.”

Similarly, in her work on photographic two places at the same time.”16 For the way her phenomenal blackness representation of blackness, Water Ritual #1 the viewer encounters has been understood historically. This Alessandra Raengo argues that visual the fluidity of the body’s materiality is the problem with the mere face elements associated with the black at the point of materialization. And value of representation: it cannot body might become extensions of while Cycles lacks the shot of liquid show us the lived experience of the body in the photograph, “the expulsion present in Water Ritual the body beyond its appearance. shadow is the trace of a body’s #1, the film’s high contrast lighting The fluidity of Vidato and Ingram’s extension beyond itself by means of and its emphasis on the passage of bodies, however, offer a way light. The body is not in the shadow, time animate Ingram’s anxiety as of engaging with the cinematic in its projection, and yet the shadow she waits on the uncertain arrival of image of gendered blackness that doubles the body, extending its her menstruation, and anticipates works through bodily affect as its reach.”15 Likewise, the bodily fluids the reassurance of its stain. basis for engagement. The use of seeping from Ingram and Vidato blur fluids in an attempt to represent the distinction of the boundary line Conclusion blackness draws attention to the of the body, extending its spatio- The cinematic image of a black ways in which phenomenal surface temporal reach, “and locating it in woman bears the social markings of appearances and reactions fall short

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of a more nuanced engagement. What is more present than the body leaking its own materiality? The bodies of Ingram and Vidato in Cycles and Water Ritual #1, respectively, transcend the cinematic body. Having their bodies bleed into their environments through the use of shadow and color enables their narratives to continue outside of the body of the film. These uncanny bodies are everyday bodies, and their actions are never arrested in time.

(left) figure 3: Stephanie Ingram turns her back to the audience as she waits for her period. The shadows cast against her back animate her body to visualize the stillness implied in this waiting in Cycles (Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989), frame grab.

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As fluid entities, bodies constantly “embodied encounter that begins emit a changing materiality. Water to understand morality, or moral Ritual #1 and Cycles ask audience taint, in more expansive terms.”18 members to relate to the films, to Indeed, the films’ experimental experience them, as fluid bodies nature encourages an interpretation “What is more themselves. Rosalyn Disprose of these bodies that moves beyond defines this potential relationally binary categories of unclean/clean, present than as a corporeal generosity: an good/bad, internal/external, pure/ ethics of generosity that can see un-pure, etc. Both Vidato and a body as lived experience: Ingram complete their purification the body rituals before these fluids seep Generosity is most effective at out; thus, they are already clean, leaking its a carnal level, rather than as a with Vidato cleansing the earth practice directed by thought or will, and Ingram cleansing the home. own but the injustice that inflects its Diprose’s claim for a corporeal operation is governed by the way generosity then echoes Fanon’s oft materiality?” social norms and values determine quoted declaration at the end of which bodies are recognized as Black Skin, White Masks, “Why not possessing property that can be simply try to touch the other, feel given and which bodies are devoid the other, discover the other?”19 of property and so can only benefit 17 The use of bodily fluids opens a from the generosity of others. dialogue to the lived experience of This affective response to bodily the body through their affective fluids highlights the distinction of an use of corporeality. While our initial reaction might seemingly be to

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recoil, a closer examination proves (cinematic) bodies, thus creating new that the assertion of bodily fluids meaning and opening up a dialogue in Water Ritual #1’s and Cycles is concerning identity, the black body, far beyond surface representation. gender, and the cinematic image. These fluids are extensions of their

1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189. Cinema, ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Stewart (University of California Press, forthcoming, November 2015). 2 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Eastford; CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011), 5. 3 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 13. 4 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 189. 5 Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 7. 6 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 131. 7 Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 43. 8 See Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds., L.A. Rebellion: Creating New Black Cinema (Berkley: University of California Press, 2015). 9 Sheena J. Vachhani, “Stains, Staining and the Ethics of Dirty Work,” in Dirty Work: Concepts and Identity, ed. Ruth Simpson, Natasha Slutskaya, Patricia Lewis, and Heather Höpfl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 35. 10 Ibid. 43-4. 11 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 71. 12 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1994), 203. 13 Zoe Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15. 2 (2000): 181-201. 14 Vachhani, “Stains, Staining and the Ethics of Dirty Work,” 38. 15 Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 29. 16 Ibid. 17 Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 9. 18 Vachhani, “Stains, Staining and the Ethics of Dirty Work,” 46. 19 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 63 short e y es (di r ec ted by ro b ert m . yo u n g , 1972 , har ris/fox pro d u c tio n , cu rto m fi lm s), fr am e g r ab . In 1977, readers of Billboard magazine were extended an invitation by Curtom Records. An independent (Don’t Worry) If record label founded by soul artist Curtis Mayfield, Curtom urged readers to “Let Curtis take you There’s a Hell Below: to the movies!” The one-page advertisement was fairly sparse, Curtis Mayfield, with little text beyond that emphatic solicitation, which leveraged the power of a star’s celebrity to Cinematic Sounding, mediate the space between a soundtrack, a magazine reader, and the movie theater. Against a solid and Cultural Memory red background, the ad featured an image of Mayfield’s recently released LP, Short Eyes, accompanied by two yellow movie tickets on the verge of falling out of an envelope. With the title “SHORT EYES” stamped on Nicholas Forster each ticket to the Warner Theater, it was clear that Mayfield was to be a tour guide for a trip to the movies: to buy the album was to take a ticket

66 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five and gain access into a community of earlier, he had written the wildly to hear and see Curtis himself. The viewers/listeners. The advertisement popular title song for the comedy ticket, the album, and the film each implied that the community was Let’s Do It Again (Sidney Poitier, relied on the multiple personas of housed in a theater named for one 1975). As Ebony would write, Mayfield. Seeing Mayfield was also of the major motion picture studios Mayfield was “as at home in front hearing Mayfield. This doubleness, of the classical era (Warner Bros.) of a 72-piece film orchestra as he shuddering between Mayfield as Left with more than a stub, viewers/ [was] with a six-piece jazz combo.” character and Mayfield as guide- listeners would hear the music of However, the bridge between the performer, was part of a broader the film and encounter a multiply- revolutionary Mayfield and the series of cultural productions, which, authored conjuring of the past as the capital-driven, multi-national film and though imbricated in the industrial needle glided in the grooves of the music industries was complicated. systems of record labels and movie record. The music was a part of the studios, also spoke against such cinema, and the cinematic form was Short Eyes (Robert M. Young, 1977) corporate formations. The direct foundational to the music. No mere was Mayfield’s latest film score, but address of the advertisement marrying of sound track and film, it was also the second feature film is one of many utterances this was an event to participate in: in which he made an appearance constituting a counterpublic the advertisement implored readers as a facsimile of himself. In Superfly of soul that Mayfield had been to “[g]et in line now for one of the Mayfield appeared for mere moments contributing to for over a decade. most exceptional performances of a in a club, playing along with the movie music career” (my emphasis). film’s soundtrack. In Short Eyes he First coined by Nancy Fraser and Short Eyes, the LP, was Mayfield’s was embedded in the story. Not perhaps most famously elaborated sixth soundtrack in a decade filled only, as the magazine suggested, by Michael Warner, the notion of with cinematic work, including the would Curtis take readers to the a counterpublic points to those soundtrack for Superfly (Gordon movies, but the reader-turned- discursive spaces in which a Parks, Jr., 1972). Only two years listener/viewer would be brought collectivity is formed primarily

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through modes of sociality and grounds for agitational activities shared rhetoric that would otherwise directed toward wider publics.”3 be excluded from what is considered public space. The concept of a It may seem odd or strange to counterpublic puts pressure on the suggest that an advertisement supposed divisions between private in a trade publication meant for and public spheres, as these divisions those in the music industry signals are often frayed if not altogether a counterpublic organized around dissolved for people who exist within soul. In the 1960s, at its most a state of surveillance and exclusion, visible but rarely seen. As Fraser writes in an oft-quoted overview, counterpublics have a two-fold “The music was structure: “on the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and a part of the regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training cinema, and

(left) figure 1: the cinematic Curtom Records inviting the readers to be accompanied form was by Curtis Mayfield on a trip to the movies. Billboard, October 22, 1977, 59. Courtesy of Rhino foundational Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group Company. to the music.”

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politically resonant and commercially the basis for remaking a rhetoric of personal/impersonal address successful, soul was, as Nathan L. revolution. It is the very circulation and expansive estrangement of Grant claims,“the raw material for a of non-private experience (even if public speech as conditions of new cultural revolution.”4 As a mode delivered by privatized corporations) of music or a mode of being, soul that structures the formation and emphasizes collective possibility subsistence of a counterpublic. (above) figure 2: through a singularly empowered Curtis Mayfield performing in a staged Michael Warner emphasizes the voice that shapes a shared intimacy concert meant for both the viewers importance of the strange, and between many. Such intimacy may of the film and the characters in be the foundation of agitational of the stranger, in his theorization Superfly (Directed by Gordon Parks, activity; such collectivity may be of counterpublics, writing, Jr., 1972, Warner Bros.), frame grab. “counterpublics incorporate the

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their common world.”5 Warner and stranger sociability.”6 Eschewing asked Cooke to hum eight bars of continues, insisting that “even the empirical fastening and authority what soul represented. For almost the counterpublics that challenge that pollsters claim for data, Warner fifteen seconds, Cooke, without modernity’s social hierarchy of is quick to highlight that publics are hesitation, melodiously hummed. faculties do so by projecting the not based solely on co-presence, space of discursive circulation personal identity, or the shared The shared symbolic grammar among strangers as a social entity experience of an event. Historically of soul was part of a religiously- and in doing so fashion their contingent and difficult to explicate, inflected musical discourse that not own subjectivities around the the development and reflexive use only elongated and re-membered requirements of public circulation of a specific discourse remains at the word (one of the foundations the foundation of the formation of that shared grammar) but called of a (counter)public. Mayfield’s for economic, political, cultural, audience is part of the counterpublic and perhaps even ontological shifts “For almost announced by soul, a counterpublic in America. Soul had existed long that overlaps with but is not before Mayfield, yet the nexus of fifteen seconds, necessarily a black counterpublic.7 media and revolutionary politics The mobilization of rhetoric and emblematized in the advertisement Cooke, without the twining of the word are critical for Short Eyes mark an especially components of that counterpublic. provocative point to think about Perhaps soul’s sculpting of the word sociality and the transmedial hesitation, is best heard in a question posed to beckoning of a counterpublic. Sam Cooke by the radio DJ Nathanael Mayfield’s voice and his reliance on melodiously “Magnificent” Montague in 1963. the falsetto, a technique often used After explaining his own difficulties in in soul, sound an armored fragility hummed.” describing soul with words, Montague and provide the illusion of intimacy

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“soul was part of a religiously inflected musical discourse that … called for economic, political, cultural and perhaps even ontological shifts in America.” between individualized interlocutors the flexible, malleable space shaped In some ways this discursive who hear his songs—whether live by Mayfield’s music and by his visible exchange among strangers was in a stadium with all the echoic presence on film. Here rhetoric is integral to the much-lauded possibilities of acoustic architecture, reduced and exploded. One can soundtrack for Superfly, which through the crackles of a record, or only suggest. Mayfield is emblematic according to Mayfield, was written in the world of a film. As Nathaniel of how black performance bends “to be a commentary as though Mackey’s character N. hints, “I’m and is bent in the latter half of someone was speaking as the suggesting, the falsetto explores twentieth-century America to create movie was going.”10 It was this a redemptive, unworded realm—a what Richard Iton calls (referring commentary that, for critics like Greil meta-word, if you will—where the to Superfly’s score) a “certain and Marcus, challenged the film’s visual implied critique or the momentary inevitable contrapuntal effect.”9 construction and its celebration of a eclipse of the word curiously recuses, The grammar of the advertisement New York City shaped by drugs.11 To restores and renews it: new word, and of the film industry is answered accompany Mayfield to the movies, new world.”8 This instability mirrors by the hums and calls of soul. then, was both to participate in the

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“The grammar of the advertisement and of the film industry is answered by the hums and calls of soul.”

cadences of capitalism and to aurally Pinero during his time in Sing Sing, forces a rethinking of the sonic engage in a critique of that very only heightens the strangeness ecology of black cinema and a structure which produced cinema as of the relationship between wrestling with the importance of a space of stranger sociability. That Billboard readers, Curtis Mayfield, counterpublics to film studies. Short Eyes was an adaptation of a and the cinematic apparatus. The Thinking of the film’s audience as play about the arrival of a convicted advertisement seemed to suggest shaping this counterpublic reframes white pedophile at a prison with that Mayfield was a friendly and builds on a Bakhtinian focus on predominantly black and Latino chaperone who would bring readers discourse and dialogism that has inmates, and was written by Miguel along to enjoy the spectacle of been critical to the development of a cinematic jail where moments black film studies.12 Discourse and embalmed by the camera could be vocality are of particular interest in ogled, appropriated, and heard. understanding Mayfield’s output. Of

(left) figure 3: course, that output consisted not The relationship between Mayfield merely of Mayfield’s music, but also The opening credits of Short Eyes: the only visual and the listener, like that between of advertisements, which shaped his moment outside of the The Tombs. Short Eyes film and viewer, is characteristic persona in the press and his presence (Directed by Robert M. Young, 1972, Harris/ of the chain of circulation that across media. Warner writes that “in Fox Production, Curtom Films), frame grab. channeled Mayfield’s work, and publics, a double movement is always

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at work. … Quite commonly the result Eyes. Looking at the presence of Only a year earlier, in the pages of can be a double-voiced hybrid.”13 At Mayfield on screen and hearing his Rolling Stone, he reflected on both one level, the shared language creaks recorded voice throughout the 1970s the controversy surrounding the below the surface for those not reveals a fluid archive of language glorification of drugs in Superfly and already part of the counterpublic. At that is constantly in animation, on his own interest in filmmaking. At another, it challenges the contracts, orally, sonically, and symbolically. first joking that he would become an rules, and regulations of a public actor, Mayfield eventually explained, language. Clyde Taylor gestures to Although it was a decade that began “Listen, I’ll tell you what I’d really this double-voicedness in his call with Superfly, Short Eyes was the like to do … I don’t want to be a for black film scholars and artists culmination of Mayfield’s engagement film star like Ron O’Neal or Richard to turn away from aesthetics and with visual media. Discourse around Roundtree. I’m interested in making toward “a more promising grammar his interest in cinema reached pictures. What I’d like to be is one of action, even though [it remains] such a height that when Mayfield of the Warner Brothers.”17 Mayfield compromised by its incubation within released his album Sweet Exorcist in had established his own record label the palace” of Western discourse.14 the summer of 1974, he was called in the 1960s, and he regarded the The network of relations that help to respond to the “widespread studios as a space of authorship, just form the counterpublic of listeners discussion as to the significance of as cinema was a place of discourse. and viewers enables such a grammar the title,” since many thought the Still, the tickets in the Billboard of action. Thinking with Mayfield’s album was a reference to the William ad—an image intended to promote own revolutionary politics and lyrics Friedkin horror film The Exorcist 15 Curtom Records and Short Eyes— as a composer throughout the 1970s (1973). Such a discussion was not read “WARNER,” not “MAYFIELD.” amplifies the functioning of such a unfounded: in a 1973 cover story for network. This is precisely why it is Jet magazine, Mayfield was reported With this extensive engagement helpful to examine the circulatory to be “say[ing] he will expand into in the cinematic soundscape of 16 framework of soul surrounding Short movie- making in a few months.” the 1970s, Mayfield’s presence in

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Young became attached to the required to gain entry into the “Curtis was the project, following the rejection of fortress of film production, but they the previous director by Pinero also point to the extended tendrils of tour guide, but and the cast, one of the producers circulation that characterized much continued to try to fit the film into of Mayfield’s career in cinema. Only there was more the mold of earlier successful prison a few years earlier, Mayfield’s status features. Despite the fact that had been used in the branding of to see and hear Young had previously worked as a Let’s Do It Again. Richard Wesley, the documentary filmmaker and had screenwriter of that film, explained: been a writer and cinematographer “we hoped that [Mayfield’s] song than just him.” on the much-praised Nothing But would help sell the movie. But when a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964), I finally heard the song I didn’t think securing funds remained a difficulty. that the lyrics had anything to do the production of Short Eyes was Citing the importance of Mayfield’s with the plot.”19 Despite its lack of no mere accident. Written and soundtrack to the film’s genesis, explicitly plot-driven lyrics, “Let’s Do first performed in 1974, Pinero’s Young emphasized that “the film It Again” would become a number play featured some moments of came together in order, really, to one single on the Billboard Hot 100, musical performance, but Mayfield’s be a record deal and sell music … and the film was one of the most character, Pappy, had been entirely [Afterwards we thought,] let’s see financially successful releases of absent. When production on the how we can integrate [Mayfield] 1975. Listeners of Mayfield’s music film began, the adaptation was into the movie … [because he was were part of a “social imaginary” conceived of as an exploitation the reason] we got the money.”18 that remained coherent even while feature with the hopes that Mayfield’s continuously developing across score could replicate the success Young’s comments may seem different media.20 Though Mayfield of Superfly. Even when Robert to reflect the cynical bargaining was certainly a transmedia figure,

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film, and his camera weaves in and … say if you think you bad!” These “This is a space through prison bars, constructing a first lines refer, in part, to a section location of captivity that is defined (“Street Smarts”) of H. Rap Brown’s of surveillance both spatially and socially.21 Cells autobiography, a sort of poem that mark individual sites that are never Henry Louis Gates, Jr. singles out but also a site entirely separated from one another as representative of “signifyin’.”22 and are within earshot of the Brown was the chairman of SNCC of sociality.” dayroom where inmates eat, listen to following Stokely Carmichael’s exit, music, and socialize. This is a space of and Pappy’s invocation of Brown surveillance but also a site of sociality. signals a collective outside of the film that audiences may (or may the specific addresses of soul and It is in the dayroom that Mayfield’s not) have registered.23 Delivered as the conditions of his appearance character, Pappy, performs the single a short series of statements, Pappy’s show a network of consumers rather “Do Do Wap is Strong in Here,” rapping here sounds less like a than a dominating figure who would after coming to the assistance of threat of an impending fight than a define a discourse. Curtis was the an unnamed character when he is rhetorical unraveling of performance tour guide, but there was more assaulted by another inmate, Go- to see and hear than just him. Go (Miguel Pinero). When Go-Go threatens Pappy, he responds, “Ain’t Mayfield’s presence in Short Eyes nobody willing to give up nothing gestures outside the frame and but hard times and bubble gum, (right) figure 4: towards the movie’s production and you know they don’t allow Pappy thinking as he plays the dozens with history. Robert Young lived in and chewing gum in the joint … I’m as Go-Go (offscreen). Short Eyes (Directed filmed the Men’s House of Detention serious as terminal cancer and by Robert M. Young, 1972, Harris/Fox in Lower Manhattan (known as The Production, Curtom Films), frame grab. that is the final stage, brotherman Tombs) during the production of the

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that refers indirectly to Mayfield’s guards, the various inmates return own status as a musical celebrity. to the dayroom where a haunting “Ain’t nothing silence, made from remnants of a When prison guards interrupt possible fight, floats through the air. but a little the encounter, Pappy shrugs his From solemn to sonorous, Go-Go shoulders, announcing, “Ain’t nothing slowly sashays into the dayroom, but a little doo-wop.” With this doo-wop.” eventually looking at various inmates coda, the term “doo-wop” summarily grouped around tables. As the registers the verbal exchange camera cuts between a series of the lack of acknowledgment from between Pappy and Go-Go. Named P.O.V. and reaction shots, Go-Go other prisoners. When Go-Go walks in the 1960s, but emerging earlier as finds no sympathy. Crossing his away, Cupcakes (Tito Goya), a Puerto one of the ancestors of soul, doo- arms and smirking, he calls out, Rican inmate who is also berated wop is a mode primarily reliant on “You motherfuckers don’t want by Go-Go, puffs out his chest and the polyphonic structures of both me here, bail me the fuck out! Get extends his arms to his sides in a harmony and collective sociality. your commissary slips together.” pose of victorious masculinity as Although the term often refers to As this address fails and Go-Go is he climbs to the top of a table and a consonant collection of sounds, only answered by silence, he makes calls out, “Every night is Latin night the harmony here is dissonant and one final command: “Yo fuck y’all.” here at the house of detention.” linguistic, rather than tonal. Still, at There is a double-voicedness in this Performing the role of emcee, its foundation remains this shared moment. Mayfield’s character is Cupcakes reconfigures the place of condition of incarceration. Pappy’s suggested as a site of identification the dayroom as a kind of club space. rapping re-makes the possibilities (he was to accompany viewers to within the carceral framework of With Cupcakes’s initiation of a the movie), and yet the camera the prison, and within language celebratory rite, the musician Freddy aligns briefly with Go-Go, only to itself. Commanded by the prison Fender begins to sing as the film find this identification ruptured by

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cuts back and forth between the preacher, this scene is not quite an Mayfield’s reference to Brown, aurally Latino inmates using the table as a emphasized moment of spectacular points to a space outside of the drum and dancing on one half the blackness. The film is not utopic prison. (The film never visually leaves room, and black inmates on the in its vision of sociality as Go-Go the interior of The Tombs.) Entirely other looking on, playing dominos, uses this moment to plant a shiv absent from the play, and entirely and nodding heads. When Fender in Pappy’s cell, which will later be present as an intervallic moment of finishes and is given daps by Pappy, discovered by the guards. Unlike sociality in the film, Mayfield’s song one of the inmates turns on a radio the choreographed sequences of opens up the relationship between and calls out, “you can do better than plantation musicals, which emerged screen and viewer. Mayfield’s the cat on the radio man!” Pappy/ with the development of sound in character is called to top the “cat Mayfield responds by singing with/ cinema and framed sites of captivity on the radio” who is in fact Mayfield over his own song “Do Do Wap Is as settings for jubilant spectacle, this himself. Of course, listeners would Strong in Here.” Marked by a series truncated performance turns away have heard the cat on the radio of close-ups of Mayfield’s face, his from an emphasis on representing outside of the theater. This kind of performance is, at first, one of self- the space of a prison. The scene aural mirroring sets the stage for concealment, even preservation. With briefly becomes one of withdrawal. what I call recollective theater, a his head tilted down and his face in process in which viewers engage shadow for most of the first minute This withdrawal exists in a space with a past experience and memory of the song, Mayfield seemingly of connectivity. Though stitching of hearing the tune. Mayfield’s denies the viewer the pleasure of the film world together and performance, then, becomes a self- proximity that a close-up promises. keeping diegetic continuity, the reflexive moment that archives the While Pappy eventually does begin use of the radio also allegorizes production of the film and also the to move around and emote with his the film’s own production history, sociality of what theater director body, raising his hands occasionally which necessitated a recording Marvin Felix Camillo calls the “society in praise as though he were a from Mayfield. Thus the radio, like within a society” of Pinero’s play.24

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Neither entirely removed from and describe life within the essential social death.”28 Those implications the public, nor a static space of structure of global anti-blackness: “I remain shards of the constitutive an isolated-in-time culture, Short plan to stay a black motherfucker/ possibilities of the counterpublic Eyes frames The Tombs as a site Steeped in the depth of the same that Mayfield’s presence engenders of multiple registers. The scene of living hell/so I ain’t too proud to die but does not exhaust. The word— performance becomes part of the here as well/Do do wap is strong in that supposedly discrete semantic broader rhetoric of a counterpublic here.” Fracturing the filmic world unit—like Mayfield’s falsetto remains in its layered reflexivity. Mayfield of The Tombs, the public airwaves thin and contingent in this space. is not just singing with a radio: of the radio echo throughout the his song refers to the history of dayroom. Yet, the very inclusion of Released in the same year as black music and its engagement these lines in the film suggests not Short Eyes, Saturday Night Fever in the precarious condition of a radio version (public censorship (John Badham, 1977) mobilized its what Orlando Patterson and Afro- would not permit Mayfield’s use soundtrack within a narrative as well. Pessimist critics have called “social of an expletive) but the very vinyl Originating as a story in New York death.”26 Mayfield’s lyrics constitute soundtrack that Curtom Records Magazine, the rights for the film the discourse of a counterpublic had released, and was advertised were purchased by the Australian in the pages of Billboard, and later recording manager Robert Stigwood. Jet.27 Citing Mayfield’s “plan to stay Stigwood viewed the film as a vehicle a black motherfucker,” Fred Moten for artists he managed, including the (left) figure 5: 29 suggests “exhaustion as a mode or Bee Gees. Though its roots were Denying the intimacy of proximity, form or way of life, which is to say planted in the world of journalistic Pappy begins to sing “Do Do reporting, it was the film’s star, John Wap is Strong Here.” Short Eyes sociality, thereby marking a relation whose implications constitute, in Travolta, who became the draw for (Directed by Robert M. Young, youth audiences. The film’s depiction 1972, Harris/Fox Production, my view, a fundamental theoretical of disco relied on a distortion of Curtom Films), frame grab. reason not to believe, as it were, in

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what was then a subculture. Saturday granting as it did center stage to a What, then, does it mean to Night Fever was a case of cultural racist, misogynist, and homophobic think of Mayfield accompanying tourism and cooptation as it provided antihero.”30 As was so often the case cinemagoers throughout the 1970s? a blueprint for white, heterosexual with American film in the 1970s, His career suggests not only a way men to embezzle disco and erase its Saturday Night Fever trafficked in of interpreting the relationship black, Latino, and gay origins. Trading the language of crossovers that between cinema, soundtracks, accompaniment for appropriation, attempted to swallow counterpublics and counterpublics but also of the violent erasure of race and through a dispersal of politics. Less understanding how, in Kobena sexuality undergirded the film as it about harmony, the film presented a Mercer’s terms, interruption is attempted to make itself relatable univocal voice. There is little grammar critical to an aesthetic attempt at to white audiences as a document of action in the image of Travolta’s sociality. As Mercer writes, “[t]o the of the contemporary moment. As angular body cutting up the floor and extent that what is at issue is not Tavia N’yongo writes, “Saturday though there may be an invitation a struggle between one persona Night Fever encapsulated for many to dance with the film, there was and another but between different the drawbacks of the crossover, little revolutionary accompaniment. ways of thinking and talking about

1 Billboard, October 22, 1977, 59 2 Lynn Norment and Bill Berry, “Unknown Millionaires of the Music World,” Ebony, April 1980, 138. 3 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 124. 4 Nathan L. Grant, “The Frustrated Project of Soul in the Drama of Ed Bullins,” in Language, Rhythm, & Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 95. 5 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 121. 6 Ibid. 7 For some important thoughts on a black counterpublic see Michael C. Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994), 195–223. 8 Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (New York,: New Directions, 2010), 51. 9 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115. 10 Curtis Mayfield quoted in Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 114. 11 See Griel Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York: Plume, 1997). 12 For example, see Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); and Paula Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003). 13 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 108. 14 Clyde Taylor, “The Ironies of Palace-Subaltern Discourse” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge 1993), 178. 15 When asked, Mayfield denied any specific relation to the film but left open the possibility of influence, claiming, “Oh, no, Sweet Exorcist has nothing to do with the movie. As a matter of fact, I refused to go see the film until I had finished the album.” See Clarence Brown, “People Are Talking About … ,” Jet, May 23, 1974, 55.

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black filmmaking, a more useful and and the appearance of different instead to describing a fragment viable criterion for criticism comes performances. The funding for Short from the history of a counterpublic from the concept of ‘interruption.’”31 Eyes relied on an understanding of of soul. That trajectory may best be Mayfield’s voice, body, song, and the public’s interest in cinema as a understood through the possibilities performance provide moments specific audiovisual medium and yet of interruption. Short Eyes and the of what might be understood as the film animated a counterpublic advertisement in Billboard both interruption, and his role in Short through a transmedia figure. played as a part in the industry and Eyes signals the political stakes. A Narrating the trajectory of Mayfield’s also point to a space of sociality sort of counterpublic of soul, like the relationship to cinema and Short excluded by that industry. Mayfield’s archive forming around Blaxploitation Eyes helps suggest a path that presence and soundtrack signal a cinema, is one that is constantly in avoids framing discourse in terms specific moment in which the aural the process of formation, a process like crossover success or margin and filmic are co-constitutive not only that is persistently interrupted and center (a hermeneutic that of a counterpublic, but of each other. by the production of new works still haunts scholarship) and moves

16 William E Berry, “Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly’ Music Makes $20 Million,” Jet, May 31, 1973, 56. 17 Stu Werbin, “Curtis Mayfield’s Biggest Score,” Rolling Stone, November, 23, 1972, 10. 18 Robert Young, “Commentary,” Short Eyes (Directed by Robert M. Young 1977, Fox Lorber Home Video, 2003), DVD. 19 Richard Wesley quoted in Michael A. Gonzales, “The Legend of Soul: Long Live Curtis Mayfield!,” in Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure, ed. Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 233. 20 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 12. 21 Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 178. 22 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 72–74. 23 This reference to Brown extends in multiple directions, even within the filmic world of black cinema of the 1970s, as much of Brown’s poem is recited in the film Five on the Black Hand Side (Oscar Williams, 1973). 24 Marvin Felix Camillo, “Introduction,” in Miguel Pinero, Short Eyes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), xiii. 25 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Frank B. Wilderson, Red White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 26 Curtis Mayfield, Short Eyes, directed by Robert M. Young (1977; New York: Fox Lorber Home Video, 2003), DVD. 27 For this other advertisement, see Jet, November 10, 1977, 63. 28 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 738. 29 Paula Massood, “1977: Movies and a Nation in Transformation,” in American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations, ed. Lester Friedman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 196. 30 Tavia Nyong’o, “I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents,” Criticism 50, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 102. 31 Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain,” Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 52.

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 83 fi g u r e 1: ed di e war mack i n pa s si n g th ro u g h (di r ec ted by l ar ry cl ar k , 1977), fr am e g r ab . I. Matter, Memory, and Futurity in Passing Through: Larry Three Lines for Clark’s Classic Film as Study of a Musical Undercommons Passing Through: Watch closely as you listen: in the final moments of Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1976), Eddie The Sound, Image, Warmack (Nathaniel Taylor) improvises a saxophone solo backed by a wavering drone in lower and Haptics of sonic registers. As a medium shot holds on his profile, a wash of light Radical Insight from delineates the planes of his gently moving face (Figure 1). The effect is to superimpose a glowing lightning the Undercommons bolt over his profile, before a close- up shows a single eye suddenly opening—Warmack “waking up,” at the center of a circle within the frame. After Warmack has this flash of insight, a prior scene from the film appears in the same circular frame. James Tobias We see a flashback of Warmack’s grandfather and mentor, Poppa,

86 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five teaching him a lesson, the meaning different terms than those in which cultural forms like the blues, Davis of which has been deferred until this it has often been advertised: rather argues, “transformed collective sequence. Next, we see a montage of than simply as the musical output memories of slavery as it worked portraits of historical figures crucial allotted to a select few individual with a new social construction of to various moments of resistance geniuses, we see the historical love and sexuality.”2 In Passing and liberation politics (including struggle for a renewed music in a Through, a gendered transformation Kwame Nkrumah and other leaders larger homology with the struggle of historical memory plays out in of Africa’s de-colonization struggle). for a renewed political identity, Warmack and Maya’s relationship, he The musician’s awakening here one not only national but global. in search of a new sound to be made makes explicit what had only been of historical memory, for the future an implicit argument of the film to Warmack’s struggle for both the of the music, she in search of a new this point: the soundtrack of Passing memory and future of jazz as a site of image similarly historically grounded Through has provided the guiding radical political theory and practice and similarly holding futural potential frame for the film’s comparison of traces, in the cinematic medium, the (Figure 2). Through each character, the radical musician and the political kinds of material transformations distinct strands of Africana and radical to prove their common of consciousness and collectivity Afro-diasporic struggle intersect: cause.1 In other words, in Passing that Angela Davis sees at work while Warmack works through Through, the historical development in early twentieth century Blues traumatic memories associated with of free jazz in the post-war U.S. women’s song and performance. largely national sites of struggle, is placed alongside the political “Through the blues,” Davis argues, Maya offers a historical and visual transformations of Africa’s liberation “Black women were autonomously link to pan-African struggle. struggles. Attending to this blaze able to work out—as audiences and of insight and the memory work performers—a working class model Maya’s role as both advertising it illuminates means that we may of womanhood.” This gendered artist and social photographer remember the meanings of jazz in consciousness, mediated in modern also suggests a qualification with

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“we see the historical struggle for a renewed music in a larger homology with the struggle for a renewed political identity, one not only national but global.”

regards to Davis’ observations about with moving images. More than re- of musical insight is this: not only blues as memory. An important performing and renovating historical does it set a feature-length film to part of this film’s achievement is memory is at stake here: also at a groundbreaking jazz soundtrack its audiovisual depiction of free stake is the mediatization of Black but more importantly it aligns the jazz evoking a politics of de- music’s capacities for transforming musical metamorphoses with larger colonization that is subnational, memory. Beyond the political import political transformations, all while national, and transnational, and of how Black music has helped to breaking with the stereotypical that thus counters the industrial transform and renovate historical conventions of jazz depiction in politics of the Hollywood sensorium’s memory, Passing Through also asks audiovisual media. Passing Through global reach. So Passing Through’s us to consider the inscription of subjects audiovisual composition visual style, its remarkable narrative memory in a cinematic form (that and reception to the imperatives of and the affective powers of its is, as media memory) which also Black memory and futurity in ways soundtrack all re-frame the way the requires radicalization. The film’s similar to those Davis argues animate cinema synchronizes jazz sound double achievement in its depiction Blues songwriting and listening.

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Davis’ discussion of blues memory, then, informs my understanding of Passing Through, as a study of the ways in which the indexicalities, virtualities, and haptics of audiovisual media may be instrumentalized in the interest of elucidating the classical problem of putting intellection, affect, and memory—here specifically related as “insight”—on screen and speaker. The film mediates historical memories of both bondage and autonomy, as Davis observes of Blues songs, but it also studies and radicalizes the mediatization of such memories as they have been expropriated by industrial cinemas.

(left) figure 2: Maya (Pamela Jones) unknowingly photographs the killing of one of the band members in Passing Through (Directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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on the West African cultural stand with, struggle for, even act as continuum Davis argues is the an audiovisual synecdoche of the “at stake is the appropriate cultural, historical site communicability of radical Black at which to situate Blues lyric. Yet politics in both locally situated mediatization when oracle Oshun tells Warmack and transnational modalities. As that he is to “slay the dragon,” a study of critical insight joining of Black music’s Warmack’s quest also reinscribes radical intellection with radical the Black searcher into cinema affection so as to renew memory, capacities for history’s spectacular dragon-slaying Passing Through worries through adventurisms, defiantly breaking an additional register of history: those conventions.3 The “dragon” that of media memory in addition transforming Warmack must slay is media industry to personal or cultural memory. control of cultural expression and memory.” memory, rather than a visual symbol As a study of insight, Passing of the individual’s sublimation Through anticipates major problems to a dominating social order. in contemporary thought. For example, the film’s relation of insight Perhaps the film’s multi-perspectival, Passing Through’s counter- to liberatory experience arguably antiphonic, back-and-forth mediatization of historical and media supersedes the determination of exchanges—between ensemble memory plays out significantly in thought as requiring differentiation and soloist, between Warmack and the character Maya, the rebelling from action in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Maya, between Poppa’s memory or visual artist who prompts Warmack’s probing of the nature of liberatory Oshun’s vision, between autonomous closing insight. For Black music to experience.4 Depicting critical insight musical ensemble and Hollywood become autonomous, vital, creative, as necessary for historicizing and media bondage —can be located and properly historical, it must memorializing musical labor, on one

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“The ‘dragon’ Warmack must slay is media industry control of cultural expression and memory.” hand, and for cultural innovation As a musical study of the cinematic and Stefano Harney propose, may and political transformation, on the exposition of a mode of insight give rise to “an improvisation that other, the film also demonstrates whose critical power enfolds proceeds from somewhere on the how a Black instrumental voice, historical memory with political other side of an unasked question.”6 as well as the Black singing voice, futurity, Passing Through is a signal can, as Lindon Barrett has shown, instance of freeing liberation histories II. Warmack’s Sound interrupt the value regimes that from industrial or academic sites The auditory, visual, and haptic diminish, marginalize, or destroy of containment and reduction. insight that opens Warmack’s eyes Black thought and action.5 Insight Even now, its play of ensemble- to the larger meanings of his music here crosses aesthetic sense and belonging and solo-innovation follows from the film’s opening political materiality; sonic disruption devote audiovisual resources dedication: to “Herbert Baker” and historical memory are convoked towards articulating a complex and Black musicians everywhere. in stylistic transformation as politics of memory often refused That dedication memorializes thought and action proceed in representational relevance. In that, unknown “local” figures as part of some shared, indeterminate ratio it models how a “refusal of what projecting Black music and Black before finally fading to black. has been refused,” as Fred Moten cinema as properly historical and

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“Passing Through worries through an additional register of history: that of media memory in addition to personal or cultural memory.”

global projects, recasting the innovation in terms homologous to and bandleader killed in 1970, radical, local musical ensemble political revolution requires placing continues with the use of a Baker as capable of registering world the tensions between the musical composition on the soundtrack. In historical transformation. At ensemble and the soloist within the so doing, the film echoes a prior the same time, precarious local specific context of the theory and dedication: Horace Tapscott’s 1972 musical production, by virtue of the practice of Black Arts movements. course at the University of California, primacy of the film’s soundtrack, is Riverside that celebrated the recently recorded so that it won’t soon be Recent biographical research allows deceased Baker: “[O]ur emphasis is forgotten. The film’s dedication to us to see the film’s conceptual on the unknowns, and we’d like for Herbert Baker and to other “Black relation of contemporary to non- them to become known at least to musicians known and unknown,” contemporary Afro-diasporic cultural the people that are close to them. and the film’s central concern production in terms of specific And Herbert Baker was definitely with Warmack’s nomadic mentor local actions, sites, and events. For one of the greatest unknowns ever Poppa, make clear that the film’s instance, the film’s initial homage to known.”7 Known or unknown, local larger concern in positing musical Herbert Baker, a pianist, composer, or globally celebrated, the musical

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ensemble as site of memory and Roland Rahsaan Kirk’s working in futurity means that it is also a fugitive terms of haptic communicability: “the site, a kind of “undercommons” for “Rahsaan would walk around and political work in the guise of musical throughout the band touching the communicability work. In this way, Passing Through bell of his horn to each player, and presents a close study of the musical as he did the players would begin to of the instrumentalization of insight so shake and tremble from the vibration that its narrative may operate of his playing.”9 In Passing Through, undercommons thought and feeling through both this haptic dimension of musical local and global material cultures. communicability throws Warmack out of balance as he tries to regain may be haptic.” As Moten and Harney’s discussion a place in the ensemble that he is of the “undercommons” makes clear, not quite ready for yet. Repeatedly, the question of memory and futurity as Warmack tries to find his musical is not simply one of making audible voice, we hear something like a to recall forgotten memories or to or visible; the communicability of bring him an asubjective, futural 8 droning vibration that throws him off the undercommons may be haptic. from the work of the ensemble, a kind knowledge of events happening Here, too, the film conceptualizes the of haptic disturbance that doesn’t so elsewhere, including, most crucially, haptic in ways that recalls specific, much place him within the present Poppa’s death. During scenes local practices. Michael Wilcots, tense of the ensemble but pushes him of these fugue states, while we remembering a 1971 Riverside out of it. This vibrating wave of sound revisit the Attica prison uprising, Community College performance overcomes him and carries Warmack or see Poppa’s funeral attended by with Tapscott and members of the away from his immediate environs bickering relatives concerned more UGMAA (Union of God’s Musicians in musical fugue states that break with material inheritance than cultural and Artists of Ascension), describes with linear time, prompting Warmack legacy or renewal, Warmack begins

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to understand what the music of the ensemble must do. (And not only Warmack; in another, similar narrative flight, a musician shares his own near-death experience from drug addiction, and of being reborn to the sound of Poppa’s horn.) In the film’s musical flights, then, sonic disruption traces and materializes, by turns, traumatic memory and prophetic anagogy, which coincide and commingle in the final sequence in which an undercommons renovating and re-inscribing musical memory also becomes a site for reproducing the meanings of political transformation.

(left) figure 3: Eldridge Cleaver’s DIG vinyl release: detail from a page of advertisements of “revolutionary literature,” Black Panther Party Newspaper, July 7, 1970, 22

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III. Maya’s Vision Enter Maya (Pamela Jones), can be aligned with larger political Warmack’s romantic interest and his projects. Through Maya’s artistic In modeling critical insight in the counterpart as cultural worker, but or documentary vision, Passing way that it does, Passing Through in the visual rather than the sonic Through insists on local, national, is very much of its time, and the domain. While Warmack attempts and transnational dimensions of historical materials it deploys are to regroup with his ensemble and its study of critical Black insight, key to understanding its lessons. For renew his musical virtuosity, Maya while the film’s Los Angeles setting example, the closing images picturing takes photographs, designs album specifically invokes the Watts Warmack or Poppa at the center of a art and advertising. In her virtuosity Rebellion of 1965, its repetitions, record label also occupied by political with visual materials, Maya artfully and its aftershocks and afterlives. revolutionaries specifically recalls renders visual aspects of the musical DIG, the Eldridge Cleaver recording undercommons, helping to piece Maya’s observations, photographs, that similarly placed Cleaver’s image together its histories, practices, and and drawings not only provide the at the center of the label, an image theoretical and affective implications. images that will help Warmack that was used in advertisements Maya’s role emphasizes, too, that instrumentalize his musical voice, of the record as “revolutionary a social-cultural memory and but also orient the narrative towards literature” (Figure 3). But these visuality adequate to radical sound a specific set of historical materials images in the film are the result of and listening are as important in and media intertexts that broaden the insight Warmack has gained in transforming jazz aesthetics and the film’s materials and resources woodshedding not simply his music production as a political project as is from those limited to Southern but also his life and memory. Since the sound of the ensemble itself. To California cultural activism or Black Poppa has in fact gone missing, understand that radical music can be Panther demands. Maya’s biography the crucial visual material that will made radically political, sound and evokes, in some ways, the historical support Warmack’s musical insight image must be viewed as historical biography of Maya Angelou. In the must come from someone else. projects in their own right that film, Maya’s deceased husband is

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(left) figure 4: Warmack and Maya discuss their different outlooks in Passing Through (Directed by Larry Clark, 1977), frame grab.

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described as a documentarian of research, she would later revisit search is for a transformed style African decolonization struggles. Watts, demystifying the rebellion, of belonging and of individuation A musician, dancer, writer, poet, countering its stereotypical reporting apposite to new political demands for Angelou also worked as an editor of in the news media, and holding forth autonomy being made subnationally, the radical African Review in Egypt on the lessons she felt the upheavals nationally, and transnationally, from 1961-62, and lived with exiled in Watts, Newark and Detroit in 1965 Maya’s reflects feminist concerns Pan-African Congress member continued to hold for the future with the ethical capacities to be Vusumzi Make of South Africa before in her 1968 KQED television series engaged through mass-mediation moving to Ghana to take a university Blacks, Blues, Black!, even as she of those demands. When we see teaching position. Just as Maya was recovering from, and reflected the photos of figures like Ghana’s quits her advertising job, Angelou on, the April 1968 assassination Nkrumah in the closing montage, we had worked in Watts doing door- of Martin Luther King, Jr. can understand that this montage to-door “Random Research” tasked sequence relays, in part, feminist to ask southern L.A. housewives If Maya introduces to Passing insight crucial to the transformed about “dishwashing Dove and Bold Through the larger political character of Black aesthetics and and Crisco” but finding instead dimension of the decolonization politics otherwise heard through “hardworking women and hard- struggle contemporaneous with Warmack’s recovered sound. thinking men.”10 A few weeks into the rise of free jazz music to the this market research position, in otherwise largely sub- and counter- While Passing Through thus relates August 1965, Watts rebelled; Angelou national Black history traced by in an important way to the revised drove down to witness this historic Warmack in his quest to recover interest in post-Civil Rights era event, narrowly escaping arrest on his sound, then the power of her narrative “sites of slavery”—and the first occasion, more calmly and challenge to Warmack mirrors the its music, thematics, and materials achievements of Black feminists suggest a depiction of the musical critically observing on the second. 11 Having quit her temp job in market like Angelou. That is, if Warmack’s ensemble as a potential site for

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re-conceptualizing the demos—its of belonging founded in (and Perhaps that is why Passing Through concern with subnational, national, transforming) alternatives to national seems at once so fresh and yet so and transnational registers really and nationalist citizenship formation, familiar today. If we fail to see the asks us to think about modes of and specifically countering the U.S. way the Passing Through makes a radical belonging across these liberal notions of citizenship that co- study not only of transformations of registers.12 As Kevin Gaines observes, opt the radical insights and political historical memory but also of modes what was, in retrospect, at stake projects associated with the broader in which we mediatize historical in the African-American ex-patriot concepts and critiques of historical memory, perhaps that is because the community’s residency in Ghana was and futural belonging traced in work this film did in its own moment the emergence, under the influence Passing Through. Today the tensions is exactly the kind of work we are of both Civil Rights struggles and of such potentially radical modes of pressed into doing—and yet may Ghanaian Pan-Africanism, of new belonging and individuation, along become distracted from achieving—in conceptions of African American with the power of historicization re-thinking and re-enacting the work belonging whereby demands for adequate to its articulation, seem of radical belonging at the global national citizenship would be re-cast largely to have been occupied by interface of the local digital screen. in terms like “transnational” notions the pseudo-democratization of the of citizenship.13 These are modalities Internet, web, and social media.

1 James Tobias, Music, Image, Gesture: The Graphical Score and the Visual Representation of Music in Cinema and Digital Media (Ph.D. Thesis), University of Southern California, 2001; David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2005): 322-325; James Tobias, Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). I have read this image as evocatively suggesting a record label: Warmack’s sound not simply as newly found, but newly inscribed in material, musical history. In conversation with Alessandra Raengo, Larry Clark has said that his intent was not to portray a vinyl recording in this scene; still, reflexively, Warmack’s sound here is recorded: the soundtrack recording so important to the film itself. In making the claim that the film’s narrative speaks as much to history as to cinema’s mediation of history, I am interested in reading the film for its considerable critical and conceptual affordances to generate critical readings of the political valences of Black music. 2 Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Random House, 1998), 47.

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3 Going back to Fritz Lang’s 1924 blockbuster, Die Niebelungen, in which Siegfried must slay a dragon to reap its metamorphic powers—and also, of course, to Lang’s operatic predecessors, Wagnerian and otherwise. 4 Consider Jean-Luc Nancy on “the experience of freedom,” in which he draws back from just such a gesture of thinking feeling: “I would have liked, and it would have been necessary, for this work to have been able to go further—I do not mean only in analysis or problematization, but actually to the point of withdrawing and putting under erasure all its discourse into material freedom. I could have been tempted to make you hear music now, or laughter, or cannon shots taken here and there in the world, or moans of famine, shrieks of revolt—or even to present you with a painting, as we find in Hegel when the young girl presents the outstanding products of ancient art and the divine places that the gods have left. Quite clearly, this would be temptation itself, the cunning abdication of thought into the immediate, into the “lived,” into the ineffable, or into the praxis and art designated as the others of thought. On the contrary, it is a question of returning praxis to thinking.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press [1988] 1993), 156-157. Passing Through arguably proceeds precisely where Nancy retreats. 5 Lindon Barrett, Seeing Double: Blackness and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58. 6 Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Plannng and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 96. 7 Steven L. Isoardi, and Michael Dett Wilcots, “Black Experience in the Fine Arts: An African American Community Arts Movement in a University Setting,” in Current Research in Jazz 6, (2014). Available at: http://www.crj-online.org/v6/CRJ-BlackExperience.php [downloaded June 15 2015]. Unpaginated. 8 Moten and Harney, 98. 9 See Isoardi and Wellcots as cited above; unpaginated. 10 Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up To Heaven (Random House: New York, 2002), 60. 11 In fact, in important ways, the closing “liberation montage” of Passing Through revises and extends a similar, more nationally oriented “liberation montage” which Angelou narrates in song in the historical episode of Blacks, Blues, Black! I will explore this comparison in more detail in future work. 12 Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 13 Kevin Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 2012), 7.

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 99 Contributors

Alessandra Raengo is Associate Angelo Restivo is Associate Lauren M. Cramer is a PhD Professor of Moving Image Professor in the program in Moving Candidate at Georgia State Studies in the Department of Image Studies, Department of University in the Department of Communication at Georgia State Communication, Georgia State Communication’s Moving Image University and coordinator of University. His research focuses Studies program. Her research is liquid blackness. Her work focuses on the relationship between focused on visual culture, popular on blackness in the visual and aesthetic forms and processes of culture, hip-hop, and the aesthetics aesthetic fields. She is the author modernization. His most recent of the racial encounter. Lauren is of On the Sleeve of the Visual: essay, “The Optics of the Virtual,” currently writing a dissertation Race as Face Value (Dartmouth is forthcoming in December 2015 entitled, “A Hip-Hop Joint: Thinking College Press, 2013) and Critical in The Companion to Wong Kar- Architecturally About Blackness.” Race Theory and Bamboozled, Wai. She is an Associate Editor of the forthcoming from Bloomsbury collaborative online scholarship Press. project, In Media Res, part of Media Common’s digital scholarly network and an Editorial Board member of liquid blackness.

100 liquid blackness : volume two, issue five Ayanna Dozier is a second Nicholas Forster is a PhD student James Tobias is Associate year doctoral student in the in Film and Media Studies and Professor in the Department department of Art History and African American Studies at of English at the University of Communication Studies at McGill Yale University. He completed a California, Riverside. He is the University, under the supervision BS in Film and Television from author of Sync: Stylistics of of Dr. Carrie Rentschler. Prior to Boston University’s College Hieroglyphic Time (Philadelphia: beginning her doctoral studies of Communication in 2011. His Temple University Press, 2010). at McGill, she obtained her research interests include the work His research interests span undergraduate degree in Art of Nicholas Ray, the films of the musicality in audiovisual media, History and French at Chapman Black Power era, sound recording digital media cultures, theories University and her graduate technologies, and hip-hop. He is of corporeality and embodiment, degree at New York University in the founder and host of the Yale and critical and cultural theory. the department of Media, Culture, podcast The Lower Frequencies He lives in Los Angeles. and Communication. She currently (thelowerfrequenciespodcast.com) resides in Montréal, Québec in which features interviews with Canada. academics, artists, and activists to examine the relationship between creative production and personal histories.

liquid blackness : volume two, issue five 101 Acknowledgements

The experimental research project culminating in the the L.A. Rebellion films to Atlanta. He was an inspiring present publication and this month’s symposium on The partner throughout the film series and has been an Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble (September 18-19, essential supporter of several liquid blackness events since. 2015), is the result of collaborations that began two years David Cheshier, in his role as chair of the Department ago with the L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema of Communication and now as Director of the Creative Tour, co-organized with the Department of Film and Media Media Industries Institute at Georgia State University Studies at Emory University and in collaboration with the has always shared and supported the vision liquid Atlanta Film Festival. The seeds of this project were planted blackness pursues in its various initiatives; and so has then, when we first saw the film and met Larry Clark. Our Dean Pearl McHaney, director of CENCIA, the Center first and warmest thank you goes to Larry who has been for Collaborative and International Arts, at Georgia immensely gracious and patient with us and has generously State. CENCIA has co-sponsored our liquid blackness shared his personal papers and other important materials. Symposium in the Spring 2014, the Black Audio Film Among other things, Larry made time for an interview I Collective Film and Speaker series we organized last fall conducted with him at San Francisco State in the Spring (2014), the April 2015 screening of Passing Through, and 2014, which was generously shot by Russ Kiel and Juhee is the main sponsor of the upcoming Symposium on The So (with Daniel Robin and Chris Hunt acting as liaisons) and Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble. We thank Greg edited by Joey Molina. We thank also Billy Woodberry and Lisby, chair of the Department of Communication for Brockman Gallery for sharing photos we have posted on the additional support and graduate directors Jennifer our online dossier on the film: http://passingthroughdossier. Barker and Natalie Tindall for coordinating GRA support. tumblr.com/, curated by Kristin Juarez. We are grateful to the L.A. Rebellion Tour’s curators, We thank Matthew Bernstein, the chair of the Department Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson Field, and Jan-Christopher of Film and Media Studies at Emory, who approached Horak who have coordinated access to research me three summers ago with the opportunity to bring materials on the L.A. Rebellion and Passing Through, and to Daniel Langford for getting the materials to us co-organized with Kristy Breneman, Creative Director (with Kristin Juarez contributing to the research and of the Atlanta Film Festival (and Josephine Figoeira acting as liaison). We thank the UCLA Film & Television acting as initial liaison), in cooperation with the Plaza Archive for expediting the digital transfer of Passing Foundation. The Plaza Theater was also the site of the Through and to Steven Hill for coordinating the loan. opening night of the L.A. Rebellion film series in the Fall 2013. The screening was made possible by additional The conceptual structure of this research project first support from Patrick Freer, then acting chair of the School came together in the form of an application to an NEH of Music at GSU, Sima Kokotovich, chair of the Visual grant that sought to explore ways to “spatialize the Scholarship Initiative at Emory University, and funds avant-garde” in order to create a digital archive of black from CENCIA, CMII, and Emory’s Department of Film radicalism. We want to thank Fred Moten and Matthew and Media Studies. We thank Andy Diztler, of Film Love, Bernstein for writing in support of our project, Nedda who has collaborated with this and other events as well. Ahmed, Allyson Field, David James, Tara McPherson, Jacqueline Stewart, James Tobias and Daniel Widener, Craig Dongoski, from the Welch School of Arts and Design and for their enthusiastic response to the idea and has spearheaded the spinoff project Drawing Through Angelo Restivo for co-authoring the grant application. which will culminate in an art show, LP release and free jazz mediations and performances at the Mammal Gallery The current research unfolded through a series of events: a on September 19. Inspired by the dynamics of group public presentation at GSU library’s CURVE (Collaborative creation inherent in the jazz ensemble, Drawing Through University Research & Visualization Environment), was designed as a workshop/collaboration between organized with Lauren Cramer, Kristin Juarez and Nedda filmmaker Larry Clark and emerging Atlanta-based artists Ahmed; a public presentation at Space 2, The Sound and musicians following the screening of Passing Through. Table, hosted by Karl Injex and his wife Mona organized An LP capturing the unique layered experience of the by Lauren Cramer; a free screening at The Plaza Theater creative interaction between visual arts, music, and film will be released at the event. We thank Brian Egan, gallery We also want to acknowledge old members and director, for hosting this event. The LP was made possible supporters who helped us getting started during the with the kind support and collaboration of Michael White, L.A. Rebellion Tour and our first Symposium: Michele Chair of the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Prettyman Beverly, Dorothy Hendricks, Christina Price and Adrienne Gonzalez; David Cheshier, Director of the Washington, Christina Romo, Michael Sanders, Jasmine Creative Media Industries Institute and founder of the Tillman, and Katie Zakos and previous staffers Mary Feld Center for Collaborative Research in the Humanities; Dean and Christopher Mintz, and our community supporters Pearl McHaney, Director of the Center for Collaborative and People Store and The Sound Table. And finally we want to International Arts (CENCIA), and Annie Latta, and Kristin express appreciation to Marilyn Stiggers, office manager, Juarez, liaison for this project. It was realized and directed Jani Faison, finance manager, and Amanda Letaw, in the by Craig Dongoski with graphic design by Jeff Boortz. Department of Communication for their logistical help. This entire research project would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of the core members of the liquid blackness group—Lauren Cramer, Cameron Kunzelman, Kristin Juarez, Richard Moye, and our long- time collaborator and co-conspirator Chris Hunt who has designed the postcard for each one of our events. We are also grateful for the help of new members Akil Brooks, Daren Fowler, Jenny Gunn, and Shady Patterson. We thank Angelo Restivo, Associate Professor of Moving Image Studies in the Department of Communication, for his conceptual contributions and Louis Ruprecht, William M. Suttles Chair, Religious Studies, Georgia State University for his enthusiastic support of this project.

Our Speakers:

Matthew Duerstan Charles P. (“Chip”) Linscott James Tobias freelance writer, Los Angeles PhD Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital o h io u n iversit y Media Studies, English Department u n iversit y o f c ali fo r n ia , riversi d e Kevin Jerome Everson Barbara McCullough Professor of Art Professor and Chair of Visual Danny Widener u n iversit y o f vi rg i n ia Effects Associate Professor of History

sc ad, savan nah universit y of california , san diego Our Supporters:

Pearl McHaney and Annie Latta David Cheshier Michael White CENCIA, Center for Collaborative and Director, Creative Media Chair, Welch School of Arts and Design International Arts Industries Institute G eo rg ia State U n iversit y G eo rg ia State U n iversit y G eo rg ia State U n iversit y

Gregory Lisby Matthew Bernstein Allyson Field, Jacqueline Stewart, Chair, Department of Communication Chair, Department of Film and Media Jan-Christopher Horak G eo rg ia State U n iversit y Studies Curators of the L.A. Rebellion: Em o ry U n iversit y Creating a New Black Cinema

Nedda Ahmed Angelo Restivo Louis Ruprecht Arts Librarian and Archivist Department of Communication William M. Suttles Chair, G eo rg ia State U n iversit y G eo rg ia State U n iversit y Religious Studies G eo rg ia State U n iversit y

Andy Ditzler Fi lm Love

Our Community Marshall Davis Tamara Vrooman Lucas Supporters: The Oakhurst Market