WritingKJ Abudu

The Inexpressively Expressive Cinematic Image: Quiet and the Black Interior... | Seen Journal

WritingKJ Abudu
The Inexpressively Expressive Cinematic Image: Quiet and the Black Interior... | Seen Journal

In this essay, published in the third issue of Seen Journal, guest edited by Darol Olu Kae, I explore how Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man, 2010, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts, 1984, deploy the formal approaches of vérité and minimal cinema to attune viewers to the lower ontological frequencies of Black existence, to the quiet of the Black interior. Drawing on the scholarship of Kevin Quashie and Tina Campt, this text elucidates how the “inexpressible expressiveness” of these quiet cinematic works bespeak the existence of a Black inner life, one that is parallel to and in surplus of the Black protagonists’ existential navigations through systems of quotidian violence imposed by the neoliberal/neocolonial order.

Below is an excerpt from the essay: