Cast: Maureen Blackwood, Andrea Julien, Kevin Graal, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Antonia Thomas (Voices Off-Screen); Colin Newman, Bertram, Bruno, Pedro, Peoples War Sound System (Players) Show full cast and credits
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Isaac Julien's Territories uses experimental forms to look at life in Britain
in 1984, focusing on the experience of the Black British. The film recognises
that the different power dynamics that determine this experience are difficult
to reduce to straightforward explanations and instead uses the term
'territories' to reflect the multiple agendas and experiences at work. These
agendas - or 'territories' - involve race, class and sexuality.
The film explores these ideas in different ways. In part one it considers the
example of carnival, noting how mainstream culture reduces this complex cultural
event by labeling it as a remainder or reminder of an ancient retrogressive
custom. Julien's film instead suggests that carnival provides an opportunity for
the issues of race and class to be worked through and explored by the carnival
participants on each and every occasion. This point is illustrated with a brief
history of the Notting Hill Carnival, including a series of police clashes in
the carnivals of 1976 and in the year of the film's production. Another example
is the implementation of compulsory police passes for carnival-goers - here
ideological restrictions are turned into physical limitations. (Similar feelings
were explored in the contemporary documentary 'Struggles for Black Community:
Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill', People to People, Channel 4, tx. 29/8/1984.)
The film reinforces its message by breaking up its own narrative through
change and repetition, and by acknowledging both racial and sexual perspectives.
It presents images of two black men giving loving embraces, refers to the
'his-stories' and 'her-stories' contained in history and has both a man and a
woman deliver the same narration. This identification of different perspectives
breaks the monologue of a male dominated history and emphasises the conflict of
voices that make up the world in which we live. The matter of gender also
disrupts the male 'territories' of the film's director.
A similar effect is created through the mixing of sound and image, both in
their own realms and with each other. In the second part of the film, different
images, including archival footage, plus different music, are repeated and cut
against each other, like a DJ mixing records, to fracture the monolithic
colonising voice. This self-referential juxtaposition also illustrates the
supportive role of film in the agendas of race, class and sexuality. In this
respect, Territories identifies and critiques the fact that language itself also
carries 'territories' or agendas.
William Fowler
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