(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Field Niggas
Director and photo: Khalik Allah
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"It's like a dog – if you look at the dog, it attacks you. It's the same with the police. "
A street hiker in the portrait documentary Field Niggas talking about the cops patrolling the night streets of 125th St. and Lexington Avenue in Harlem, New York. Like many others in the neighborhood, he is used to suspicious looks.
"I don't see any other photographers where I shoot, only surveillance cameras," writes director Khalik Allah in a artist statement. He has taken many pictures in these Harlem streets. In short films like Snake Aperture, Urban Rashomon, Antonyms of Beauty og Street Opera we understand that he is familiar with the environment and that he knows many of the people hanging around the street corners. Some are drug addicts, outcasts, prostitutes, thieves. Some are random passers-by. Some are undefined residents.
Common to many of them is that they are supportive, ugly, and that the only medium that otherwise sees them is the gaze of the control community. Allah knows that taking a portrait photograph is to see a person with a specific look, that is to relate to a human in a certain way. He tries to look at the night walkers with a different look than the suspicious and judgmental – one who is not interested in the banknotes and the crack they have in their pockets.
The password for the movie is "True".
Close-ups. The street hiker's metaphor leads the mind to Samuel Fullers White Dog (1982). Fuller was a close-up poet in the American post-war film, creating an emotional and poignant expression of anti-racism here. Racism had been a theme for the American director, as shown in brilliant films like The Steel Helmet (1951) China Gate (1957) Run of the Arrow (1957) and Shock Corridor (1963) – but it was in White Dog it got its most concentrated form.
Here he tackled the story of a dog trained to attack and kill black people as soon as it casts their eyes on them. A black dog trainer tries to cure it, believing that its racism is educated and not natural.
For Fuller, what he called "visual emotion" was important. He could be didactic in the way he dealt with his themes, but he had a sense of the film's ability to communicate with eyes – camera looks and the looks between characters. With her lyrical slow motion pictures and extreme close-ups of the attacking dog, whose hateful eyes were accompanied by the melancholy tones of Ennio Morricone, White Dog became a tragic portrait of racism as an indoctrinated way of looking.
As a documentary portrait film Field Niggas another corresponds to distrustful and judgmental looks, and relies even more on the close-up and slow-motion films. The film is composed as a series of portrait images, mainly floating close-ups of face and body in one slow-motion- as a devotional dweller in the distinctive presence of each individual in front of the camera. Above these images we hear people talking to Allah and background noise from the street. The sound is not synchronized with the images, and lays down musically over silent faces.
This creates a sense of something that has been seen, heard and processed – and not something that is going on here and now. The images and sounds each carry a strong sense of closeness and immediacy, but the asynchronous juxtaposition (as well as the film's tempo) gives the film a reflective, rhythmic and more distanced feel. This somewhat abstract character is reinforced by the fact that we can rarely know about those who speak, are those we see in the pictures – the sounds flow over the images in a cinematic space that does not own a specific, defined, uniform time. The voices and faces are emphasized as two different elements, two different "media", and have a poetic connection.
One gets the impression that Allah wants to photograph the night people into a metaphysical image space; to create an atmosphere of soulfulness in the streets that is usually associated with crime.
Allah began to photograph these people with still cameras. Field Niggas feels like an extension of this rather than a violation; the use of slow motion, which goes nonstop throughout the film (except on one occasion, where we see archive footage of police taking asphyxiation on Eric Garner), gives the faces a place that lies somewhere between the still image's closed past and a more cinematic close-up, unfinished and lyrical movement energy. The sometimes intoxicated, unsteady and scarred people appear peaceful, quiet and almost dancing, gilded by the light of "passing ambulances + shop lights", as Allah Himself describes it.
Light. Several people smoke K2, a synthetic drug that does not appear in the blood or urine, thus becoming a practical substitute for marijuana. An elderly woman with yellowed K2 teeth asks Allah how he thinks she looks. Allah answers that she could look better, but that he looks past it – that he sees "light".
There is a self-proclaimed holiness in the eyes of Allah. The film lives in a tension between an interest in people's "inner", something "behind", and a fascination for the physical exterior. The camera glides brightly over the body of a woman in turquoise blue Adidas jacket, stopping at the tits, filling a bikini with the same pink color she wears in her hair, or swallowing the sight of a walking woman with tattoos directly under the buttocks.
Here, some will criticize Allah for aestheticizing poverty and social problems, as some have accused the Portuguese Pedro Costa (one of the most interesting filmmakers working today). But as with Costa, there is an ethical obligation in the aesthetic approach: Field Niggas the self-glances dedicate a time and consideration that confirms an underlying humanity that precedes any label – an inviolable and irreducible humanity by the "thief" and "the prostitute". Here is something gentle about Allah's slow-motion tempo, which lengthens and glorifies the personal glances they give him.
It's as if the eyes of those portrayed quietly confirm: "This camera is fascinated by me. This camera is fascinated by me for no specific reason. " Here, the people get a look they don't have to justify; a look that doesn't see them as a burden or a thing fixed.
One gets the impression that Allah wants to photograph the night people into a metaphysical image space; to create an atmosphere of soulfulness in the streets that is usually associated with crime. The film shows personalities where we are used to seeing types.
French filmmakers in the 20th century talked about photogeny: the film's ability to capture a distinctive quality of the objects being filmed. Rather than a purely superficial quality, to which the more well-known term "kerosene" refers, there was talk of a more moral, material quality of the depicted – something "personal", if you will. For Jean Epstein, film could show the "moral character" of things and open up new dimensions in reality. Allah's project seems to relate to such an understanding of photography. "I see light," says Allah, trying to look past the K2 teeth with his Lumix GH3 camera. He calls for a sacred dimension in these weary streets.
Personally, I don't see this dimension in Field Niggas, I just see the experiment. But if you look at the film in light of Allah's earlier short films (which are available on the director's website), it becomes clear that the trial and Allah himself are part of the film's expression. As he says in the self-portrait Snake Aperture: "Every time I take a picture, I can see a reflection of what I'm thinking, or a reflection of what I'm feeling – or not feeling or not thinking."
The film critic Eric Hynes i Movie How (May / June 2015) points out this feature Field Niggas: «Throughout, among the woven montages of faces and gestures, we return to Allah artfully shooting his reflection gliding in and out of a mirror's frame. In cargo pants and a field vest, he's not just lurking behind the camera, snatching glances at unsuspecting pedestrians – he's playing the part of photographer and casting himself into the street scenes. This is photojournalism as self-portraiture – a self-portrait of what and how the photographer sees. »
Khalik Allah asks us to see these people as he sees them himself. In his graceful close-ups, it is as if he is giving them a dignity they have been deprived of from other eyes. Among surveillance cameras and attack dogs, Allah's trusting eyes roam the streets of 125th St. and Lexington Avenue, finding "light" where others see gloom.
Eidsaa Larsen is a film critic in Ny Tid
endreeid@gmail.com
