The Contact Zone
If 70s blaxploitation films have taught us anything, it’s to never get caught between a pimp and his female entourage. Unsurprising is it that such denigratory stereotypes have lingered, even despite the committed effort of black filmmakers – Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, to name just a few – to quell their persistent entrenchment. The Contact Zone extends this struggle over images and its far-reaching role in representing black communities even further; framed under a postmodern, post-colonial context through the recent video work of Kevin Jerome Everson, R. Kelly and others, visual resistance takes political shape here via emphasis on issues of masculinity and male anxiety as it relates to black life. By means of appropriation, aural remixing, and histrionic irony, both the films and sound elements in this 2-hour program offer up refreshingly alternative, forthright articulations of black life. It is through (new) images such as these that we may all feel a little more informed. More crucially, however, these works which capture more honestly some of the daily realities faced by those of black descent, provide the necessary space for the actuation of a subjugated (i.e. black) memory. This memory made starkly resonant through the works presented, help to form an emerging visuality on which to contemplate both ourselves and those images that have come to define us.
credit: Justin Mah
Radical Software Group, RSG-Black-1 (Black Hawk Down)
