Directed by Barry Jenkins
In all my years of doing press, I've been repeatedly asked about the white gaze. Rarely have I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled. This is an answer to a question rarely asked.
USA USA 
This is an act of seeing. Of seeing them. And maybe, in a soft-headed way, of opening a portal where THEY may see US, the benefactors of their efforts, of the lives they LIVED.
- Barry Jenkins
guess i was a fool for thinking regina's incredible photo essay would have even slightly improved the state of things for black people on screen (especially darkskins) considering there's 10 fucking hours of this droll, sappy nonsense up ahead. i wanna say that i don't absolutely despise this because these people are all so beautiful but it really is vexxing and so very exhausting. there's no point in writing something insightful about why this is so troubling bc it seems like colorism, white liberal pandering, trauma porn, the cinematic beautification of black suffering and all these other problems are just things we'll continue to impose upon ourselves rather than inciting change. its been ten years since the help and we're…
Very much looking forward to The Underground Railroad and here we just get a bit of Barry Jenkins doing his thing - watch here in full, https://vimeo.com/546795671.
He's compiled a flowing non-narrative, atmospheric piece precursor here focusing on the rarely discussed notion of the 'black gaze', going in much further detail in the description to the video, I'll leave you to read it there. All I can say is I found this to be quite compelling and again, looking forward to the miniseries releasing tomorrow.
In the way that Mr. Marshall sought to honor Mr. Moorhead through this imagined physical representation of the artist, we have sought to give embodiment to the souls of our ancestors frozen in the tactful but inadequate descriptor “enslaved,” a phrase that speaks only to what was done to them, not to who they were nor what they did. My ancestors – midwives and blacksmiths, agrarians and healers; builders and spiritualists, yearn’ers and doers – seen here as embodied by this wonderful cast of principal and background actors, did so very much.
This quote represents why Barry Jenkins’ work is so appealing to me. In every project of his, we’re able to feel that these characters and situations are born…
A stupendous companion piece to Jenkins' masterpiece, The Underground Railroad. 51 minutes of pure black talent, with Britell's flawless score suiting the gorgeous gaze.
Brian Tallerico recommended watching this as an epilogue or as a prologue to the series, so I watched it as the latter.
The Gaze (2021) was a remarkable non-narrative gaze into history, and a great introduction to what will be explored in The Underground Railroad (2021). It’s touching, emotional, and experimental.
Here’s a link to watch it (I highly recommend doing so): vimeo.com/546795671
P.S. Beautiful score and beautiful cinematography, I’m very excited to see this series.
a great companion piece to the Underground Railroad. just beautifully done.
Most filmmakers will spend their careers trying to put together a single shot as striking as the ones contained here, in what is essentially a series of offcuts and B-roll footage that is nevertheless a visual marvel. You can, and some PoC scholars probably should, read into the significance of the gaze, the way that it starts straight at us, then is revealed to actually be at the horizon, at the future, but mostly I think this has been designed so that you simply sit and stare back at the faces doing the gazing.
Not simply a diaspora of African-American (and Peter Mullan, for some reason) features, these shots are portraits of people; as each posed figure suggests in their…
i really love this as an epilogue to The Underground Railroad both because it can provide a kind of healing space after the show and because it encapsulates a lot of what made the show such a visual feat.
there's some obvious but necessary work being done here to reframe away from the white gaze of course (cf. how 12 Years A Slave was shot) but there's also really interesting examinations of the movement in gaze, and when it is time to look away versus when it is time to linger. the way this film treats death is particularly fascinating, and i think it gives a kind of philosophical treatise on The Underground Railroad's visual language (the show is probably…
If The Underground Railroad is even a shred as masterful as this is... I think we’ll have hit the peak of filmmaking.
“What flows here is non-narrative. There is no story told. Throughout production, we halted our filming many times for moments like these. Moments where…standing in the spaces our ancestors stood, we had the feeling of seeing them, truly seeing them and thus, we sought to capture and share that seeing with you.”
Achingly beautiful in how the Black gaze is centered by using fourth-wall breaks to intimately portray ancestral memory and defiance. Looking forward to starting The Underground Railroad—hopefully soon!
this guy should make a lion king sequel
