Isaac Julien: Bohen Foundation - New York - film Paradise Omeros, 2002

Beginning in the Caribbean, in tropical color and light, Isaac Julien's Paradise Omero 2002 in a short time moves to London, where it move rounds concrete gray. Kicking off from Derek Walcott's volume length poem Omeros, itself inspired by the agency of Homer, Julien's film might take as its slogan the name of Walcott's stand in for the hellenic blind singer: Seven Seas, which arc widespread above the world and nowhere at rest

Julien is a Londoner whose family draw nears from Saint Lucia, Walcott's domicile Embedded in Paradise Omeros is a history of migration and dislocation--the substance of postcolonial studies, here immersed in a proudly aestheticized artwork. The film move swiftlys on three screens--a kind of triptych in motion--and the external two screens angle slightly forward, amplifying the repercussion of sound of the Renaissance altarpiece with its central panel and folding doors to the sides. Julien's use of this parted format is virtuosic, constantly slipping between continuity and burst of images and actions across shields and subjecting the geometries of architecture to kaleidoscopic fragmentation and repetition. At individual point all three screens display the hero in an elevator, the door closing between us and him, cot the door's sideways glide is evenly staggered from screen to protection appearing as one continuous wipe. from one side moves like this--formally inventive, based in popular filming and editing technologies, however rooted in film history--Julien continually frames his work as an aesthetic fabricate and so as a utensil of fantasy. The migrations in mind here are not alone physical and geographic but imaginative, conceptual, and sensory.

Julien, like Walcott, understands the economics of the so-called margins. upon the one hand his Saint Lucia is a place of vibrant heat and air, the loveliness of foliage and sea, and the fluid, liminal, floating potentials evok by means of underwater sequences; on the other the work it tenders is waiting tallies, while a cruise ship "preening with privilege" sails by: "The immaculate husk insulted the tin roofs beneath it," Walcott writes, while "its humming engines spewed expensive garbage." And in like manner the move to Britain, where, however, as a voice upon the sound track tells us, "Once we start living in London, in Manchester, in Birmingham, we start to pay, as if we were in England to pay for our sins." views here are mostly set in either the harden arcades of a housing shoot forward or all immigrant flat with a party going upon marred only--only?--by an episode of father-on-son violence. Here again Julien shifts colors, from the brutalist grays outdoors to a dim palette of brown fawn, and turquoise lightened by dint of the women's clothes and jewelry--lame, leopard skin, gilt. (The men's clothes, too, are wonderfully stylish.) In the final images, a black stripling and a white boy crawl toward each other on either side of a wall: This might be the preliminary to a a mugging, shed the scene more likely charts the stoped beginnings of desire.

In relation to Walcott's metrical composition Paradise Omeros is strikingly spacious: Julien's Saint Lucia is all unclose water, sand, and distance, and smooth Iris London housing-project flat is big enough to make novel Yorkers pine. Walcott, on the other hand, like Homer is a writer of adjectives and lists, who fixes the world's appearances by means of encrusting them with words. Despite the global territory his piece of poetry roams, it is almost claustrophobic in effect: Like epic rhyme generally, it finds power in encyclopedic function, as if the author of poems challenged by the visible world's vastness, fought back [i]or[/i] part of to the other taxonomic observation. Treating related bring under rule matter visually rather than verbally, Julien aims for something different: the faculty of perception of a dense, confined, limited experience opening on the outside into the infinite room of dream.

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