Looking for Langston
Looking for Langston
Film, History
Looking for Langston, 1989.
In celebration of the LGBT+ history month, we kindly invite you to join us on a poetic journey through Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, breaking down traditional divisions between different art forms. The film explores Black, queer desire in a setting which has no clear time or place. It brings together poetry and image to look at the private world of the Black artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The film begins with a recording of a radio broadcast made in tribute to US poet and social activist Langston Hughes after his death in 1967. A cast of mourners gathers at an imagined version of Hughes’s funeral, with Julienplaying the part of the deceased poet in his coffin. The camera moves to a bar scene, set somewhere between a 1920s speakeasy and a 1980s nightclub. Men in black tie gather and tenderly partner up to dance or sit with a drink or cigarette.
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