Watch Looking For Langston Videos

Release Date: 1998

Cast: Ben Ellison, Akim Mogaji, Jimmy Somerville, Matthew Baidoo, James Dublin, Dencil Williams, Langston Hughes, Guy Burgess, John Wilson, Harry Donaldson

Categories: Movies, Short Film, Drama Film, Gay Themed, Language & Literature, Literary Studies, Gender Issues, History, Lgbt, Indie, Biography

Looking for Langston is a 1989 British black-and-white film directed by Isaac Julien. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic story line celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film is a short, running about 42 minutes. Opening the film is a voice over of the original radio broadcast made in tribute to Langston Hughes upon his death in 1967 as the funeral scene of Hughes is recreated and reinterpreted.... MORE

Looking for Langston is a 1989 British black-and-white film directed by Isaac Julien. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic story line celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film is a short, running about 42 minutes. Opening the film is a voice over of the original radio broadcast made in tribute to Langston Hughes upon his death in 1967 as the funeral scene of Hughes is recreated and reinterpreted. Interspersed among such images as shifting time periods that seamlessly flow from past to present, black men dancing together within a revisionist version of the Cotton Club, or, a speakeasy, and dream sequences are brief narrative extracts from the poetic works of Hughes alongside those of Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill. Also shown are the controversial images of black men by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The film is not a biography of Langston Hughes. It is a memoriam to Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as reconstructed from a black gay perspective. Moreover, LESS