Now He’s out in Public and Everyone Can See

Contradicting the “post-racial” future of Obama’s America, this dizzying interweaving of video blogs commenting various scandals draws the portrait of the “black man” and examines rumour in the age of social media.

“It’s the story of a Black man”… The editing of video blogs collected from 2009 to 2011 weaves together a collective story that is refracted and contradictory. Soon, the “FACTS” – a word hammered out by each and all in a modern-day equivalent of a classical Greek chorus – fade under the scribbles of rumour, opinion and self-staging of the speakers in front of their webcams. “He’s denying his blackness… He’s not really one of us.” Sometimes, the origin of the scandal seems to be the author of a specific news item. Then again, it must be Michael Jackson, for sure, or President Obama, whose time in power saw the revival of the “Black question” in the United States, whereas it should have heralded the advent of a “post-racial” America. It would be wrong to think that Natalie Bookchin’s polyphonic dispositif, already central to Long Story Short (the 2016 Cinéma du réel Grand Prix winner), leads to the same result. In her film on the intimate experience of poverty in the United States the individual’s words are subsumed into a politically powerful collective, whereas here the vloggers’ individuality and the variety of their speculations instead reveal the composite nature of a currently fertile populist soil. The de-contextualisation of the stories, as if filtered through the sieve of a free-floating listener, leads to the chilling realisation that the simple fact of being a man who is black and who steps “outside his home” and “into the public space” is in itself a scandal. (Charlotte Garson)