Looking for Langston

Isaac Julien's 1989 British film takes as its subject the poet Langston Hughes and Black gay men around the Harlem Renaissance. The telling is not linear: a wake, a bar downstairs and dream sequences run into each other, and archive photographs become indistinguishable from staged images. The film is counted among the founding works of Black queer cinema. Julien's method is not to reconstruct history but to imagine what was erased: an intimacy absent from the record is made visible. Hughes's estate objected to the use of his poetry and the sound of one section had to be turned off at the New York screening. It runs forty-five minutes and is extremely dense. Who it's for: viewers interested in experimental cinema and queer history. Who it's not for: anyone wanting documentary information, or uncomfortable with nudity and a poetic structure.