PASSING THROUGH: THE ARTS AND POLITICS OF THE JAZZ ENSEMBLE (2015)
Introduction | About the Artist | liquid blackness in Conversation with Larry Clark
Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Events
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Introduction
liquid blackness was immediately drawn to the aesthetic fluidity of Larry Clark’s 1977 film Passing Through, the way it renders the multiple ways in which blackness exists in space and time, simultaneously indexing rootedness and displacement, originarity and alienation. By presenting as adjacent incongruous aspects of human life—the seemingly unbound creativity of the musicians and Los Angeles black artists’ communities on the one hand, and their dispossession as a function of oppressive labor conditions and anti-black violence, on the other—the film explores in the same breath both the confinement and the expansiveness of black artistic and political radicalism.
The research on Clark’s film has been ongoing since the Fall of 2013 when liquid blackness co-hosted with Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies the “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema Tour” curated by Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson Field, Christopher Horak, and Shannon Kelley for the UCLA archive. The Tour was partially funded by the Department of Communication at Georgia State University, and, as a result of liquid blackness’ outreach program, it also drew the support of several artists’ communities in the Atlanta area.
The liquid blackness research project is undertaking a long term research project on the legendary, yet seldom seen film, Larry Clark’s 1977 Passing Through. Studying the potential of the arts and politics of the jazz ensemble, we are developing an experimental project of collective research that will unfold throughout the year and culminate in a public screening and symposium in Fall 2015.
Considered part of the “L.A. Rebellion,” i.e. the independent cinema made at UCLA by students of color in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Passing Through follows a jazz musician’s struggle against the recording industry while in search of a “sound” that would reconcile his personal artistic vision with the sensibility of his community and the political urgencies of his highly repressive historical moment. It is a film that reflects on the political potential of the forms of sociality that coalesce around the jazz ensemble and on free jazz as a form of political praxis.
liquid blackness is interested in leading a study of the film. Study, in the sense defined by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), is a non-institutional way of “thinking with others,” where “thinking” offers the possibility to experiment with different forms of sociality. This is what we call an “object-oriented research” in the sense that liquid blackness is interested in letting the form of existence of the object dictate the appropriate modes of access to it. This way, we believe, we’ll be able to uncover and amplify some of the cultural and critical work that the film performed throughout its exhibition history.
In the spirit of study we’ve created the Passing Through Art tumblr, initiated by the artists working in collaboration with liquid blackness, the tumblr is a space to grow visual resources around the themes of Passing Through.
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Still, Passing Through (1977)
Still, Passing Through (1977)
liquid blackness in Conversation with Larry Clark
Research
Instead of a single claim about the film, the outcome of this research project is a methodology—a set of practical models that appear in the film itself, a series of questions and a series of interdisciplinary, collaborative workspaces.
Passing Through Research as Study
First, the film is directly and intensely about “study”, i.e. about the forms collective actions that might be engendered by the socialities that forms in and around the jazz ensemble, but also about the “study” that it (i.e. the jazz ensemble) is capable of producing. This is true at all levels of the film, which was made by leveraging already existing artists communities and especially by featuring jazz musicians who were already deliberately experimenting with alternative forms of collective political action through their community presence and through their musical practice.
Second, the film renders the inextricability of artistic experimentation and radical political praxis unambiguously. It does so by deploying newsreel footage of national and international episodes of police brutality and repression in a way that is organically connected into the ‘fictional’ story of the film: we are calling these fluid transitions “passages” and we want to study them closely. These “passages” (and the overall idea of “passing through”) are key to the film’s political work.
Third, Larry Clark never sought a wide release of the film, a decision he said was inspired by Sekou Toure’s views about art: the idea that “art has to be demanded,” that “the people have to ask for it.” The important point here is that this restricted circulation that is exclusively available on film has historically demanded a collective audience. We think this is an important way for the film to perform its critical and political work and we want to honor this mode of access and in fact, magnify it, by using it as the blueprint for the “study” we are doing on and around the film.
Therefore our project is twofold: on the one hand, we propose to study the film in the way in which it demands to be “studied”; on the other hand, we intend to “study” this very process of “study” and reflect on what it means to collectively gather around this film and collectively pursue a set of research questions prompted by it.
To draw connections between the film and our contemporary moment, we ask the questions:
Is the potential of the 1970s entirely exhausted and by now inaccessible? Or does the notion of “passing through” present us with a concept of space that links to contemporary struggles in everyday life? What kind of artistic vision does politics “pass through” in the digital age to produce spaces of communal vision and praxis?
What questions does this project pose for current ideas and practices in the digital humanities?
Object Oriented Research: how does this project relate to the tenets of OOO? How does it engage with forms of praxis? How does it conceptualize a deliberately withdrawing object?
What is the critical potential of fetishism? What are the implications of maintaining the aura of the object as a vehicle through which the film performs political work?
History of a liquid blackness project: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble
A short documentary on the liquid blackness research group by Shady Patterson
Bibliographies
Passing Through Key Framing Bibliography
Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness. Enactments of African-American Modernism. edited by Anonymous London, New York: Routledge, 2000.
Harney, Stefano & Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Introduction: Black Studies and Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44 (2014 Summer 2014): 5-10.
Film Reviews, Scholarship and Contextual Readings
“Black Filmmakers: La Nouvelle Breche Anti-majors,” Algerie Actualite 1132 (July 1, 1987).
“Festival de Dournenez ‘85,” Le People Breton 263 (1985).
“Locarno Fest Films,” Variety, August 31, 1977, 30.
“Third World Cinema Screened at Spelman,” Spelman Messenger 96.2 (Winter 1980): 8-9.
Anderson, Iain. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Borsten, Joan, “Lights, Camera, Africa: No Tarzans, Just Films for Hungry Minds” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1985, 25-27.
Bryant, Clora, William Green, Steven Isoardi, Buddy Collette, and Marlin Young. Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. Univ of California Press, 1999.
Dougherty, Carissa Kowalski. “The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design in American Jazz, 1950 to 1970.” Design Issues 23, no. 1 (2007): 47-60.
Euvrard, Janine, “Le Cinema Noir Americain,” CinemAction (1988): 155-159.
Francis, Terri Simone. “Flickers of the Spirit:” Black Independent Film,” Reflexive Reception, and a Blues Cinema Sublime.” Black Camera 1, no. 2 (2010): 7-24.
Gibson, Gloria. “Passing through by Larry Clark.” Ethnomusicology 28, no. 3 (1984): 591.
Giddins, Gary. “Boiling Point.” Film Comment 44, no. 4 (2008): 20.
Isoardi, Steven L. Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott. Duke University Press, 2001.
Jackson, Jeffrey H., “Making Jazz French: The Reception of Jazz Music in Paris, 1927 – 1934,” French Historical Studies 25.1 (Winter 2002): 149-170.
James, David E. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Univ of California Press, 2005.
Johnson, Albert. “Moods Indigo: A Long View.” Film Quarterly (1990): 13-27.
“Moods Indigo: A Long View Part 2.” Film Quarterly (1991): 15-29.
Jones, Kellie, ed. Now Dig This!: Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980: Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.
Keeling, Kara, and Josh Kun. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Vol. 63: JHU Press, 2012.
Lock, Graham and Murray, David, ed. The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Maultsby, Portia K. “Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Significance in American Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 17, no. 2 (1983): 51-60.
Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ongiri, Amy Abugo. Spectacular Blackness : The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.
Panish, Jon Seebart. The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997.
Ramshaw, Sara L. “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event.” 2006 2, no. 1 (2006).
Rodriguez, Dylan. Forced Passages : Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime [in English]. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006.
Ruelle, Catherine, Daniel Soutif, and Philippe Carles, “Le cinema des noirs americains,” La Revue de Cinema 363 (July/August 1981).
Schedel, Margaret and Andrew V. Uroskie, “Introduction: Sonic Arts and Audio Cultures Writing about Audiovisual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 10.2 (2011): 1-8.
Sterritt, David, “Film Quest for Black Dignity and Identity,” Christian Science Monitor January 24, 1986.
Tobias, James S. Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time. Temple University Press, 2010.
Wald, Gayle. “Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space.” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 673-96.
Wasserman, John L., “Energy, Passion in Black Film,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1977, 54.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Duke University Press, 2005.
Weheliye, Alexander G., “Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness,” Small Axe 18.2 (July 2014): 180-190.
Widener, Daniel. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Young, Cynthia. Soul Power. Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Exhibition Map
A story map that visualizes the global exhibition history of Clark’s film, including screening dates and archival images from international film festivals.
Dossier
A visual dossier with primary materials from Larry Clark’s papers (courtesy of the artist), including production stills, festival ephemera, and personal photographs.
Publications
Our research produced two publications: the September 2015 issue of liquid blackness, “Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble,” and an InMediaRes theme week “liquid blackness: Passing Through.” Both collections of writing explore the formal experimentation in Clark’s film and the role of black music and sound in black filmmaking--an aesthetic force and alternative form of black sociality.
liquid blackness 2, no. 5 “Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble” Contents
Alessandra Raengo – “Introduction: Passing Through Film / Passing Through Jazz”
Angelo Restivo – “The Sound of Color / The Color of Sound: The Aesthetics of Passing Through“
Lauren McLeod Cramer – “Passing Through: A Methodology for Close Analysis“
Ayanna Dozier – “Affect and the “Fluidity” of the Black Gendered Body in Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification and Cycles“
Nicholas Forster – “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below: Curtis Mayfield, Cinematic Sounding, and Cultural Memory“
James Tobias – “Three Lines for Passing Through: The Sound, Image, and Haptics of Radical Insight from the Undercommons”
InMediaRes September 14 – 18, 2015 “liquid blackness Presents: Passing Through” Contents
The liquid blacknessResearch Project - Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble
Al Natanagara - Intuition and Education: The Catch 22 of Improv
Louis Arthur Ruprecht - The L.A. Rebellion and the Personal Life
Kristin D. Juarez - Passing Through, the Black Cinematheque, and the Networks of Larry Clark
Alessandra Raengo - A Withdrawing Object