黑料社

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Now booking 黑料社 Film

Christopher Harris: Speaking in Tongues

28 May 2025 at 18.30鈥20.30

Christopher Harris, still/here 2001, film still. Courtesy the artist

  • Accessibility
  • Programme
  • Biographies

Catch the UK release of two new films by Christopher Harris and the premiere of a newly restored print

Christopher Harris鈥檚 films are haunting. For over 25 years, he has worked with 16mm film and video installations to explore African American history. In a text about his film Speaking in Tongues, Harris explained: 鈥淚n the making of my work, I begin from the proposition that descendants of enslaved people, in particular, African Americans, have a fundamentally different relationship to time and space than members of the dominant culture.鈥

From his 2001 MFA thesis film, still/here, to his recent Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Harris has remained one of the most inventive artists working in analog film. His slow, deliberate gestures of editing, slicing, and re-jigging question the practice and pace of image production.

For years, Harris has been developing a 16mm film inspired by Ishmael Reed鈥檚 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. In his Speaking in Tongues: Take One, premiering in the UK at 黑料社, Harris expands on Reed鈥檚 plot using found footage from Hollywood films, cartoons and documentaries. Mumbo Jumbo tells a story of resistance against the suppression of Black dance culture. Referred to as a 鈥渧irus鈥, the book introduces the character of 鈥淛es Grew鈥, a personification of ragtime, jazz, polytheism, and freedom. In Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Harris borrows from the tradition of free jazz and avant-garde musical forms and suggests that other 鈥榯akes鈥, or interpretations, could emerge in years to come. The film, which cites Reed, addresses the American carceral system, and Black resistance through states of ecstasy.

Two other black-and-white works by the artist follow: b/w is a short meditation on colourism, and Harris鈥 first feature, still/here, presents the urban landscape of St. Louis, Missouri, where he is from.

This programme features the UK release of two new films, b/w and Speaking in Tongues: Take One, as well as the premiere of a newly restored print of still/here. The screening is co-presented with Barbican, where Harris鈥檚 lecture God Bless the Child will be held on 27 May.

  • Introduction by Tate curators
  • Speaking in Tongues: Take One 2024, 16mm film transferred to video, black-and-white, sound, 15 min
  • b/w 2023, 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 3 min
  • still/here 2001, 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 60 min
  • Conversation with the artist and Morgan Quaintance, followed by a Q&A

Christopher Harris

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival material, his work features re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. His influences are eclectic, among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music.

Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embody the existential complexities of racialized identity in the U.S.

Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster, and curator. All Quaintance鈥檚 short films unfold in time 鈥 recollection and the connection between the continuously moving present and the past form a common thread throughout his texturally rich work. Most of his short films rely on these temporal relations and add up to an exploration of buried or forgotten histories through memory via the reconstruction of the past through photographs and archive material.

Accessibility

This event will be BSL interpreted.

Speaking in Tongues: Take One 2024

The film鈥檚 prologue features a woman鈥檚 voice speaking over a film countdown about the symbolism and spiritual significance of the crossroads. Her voice sounds somewhat mechanical, as if it is coming from a loudspeaker and occasionally the pitch of her voice shifts higher or lower. She introduces the film by title: 鈥淪peaking in Tongues: Take One.鈥

Next, a 鈥淰oice of God鈥 narrator narrates a faux educational filmstrip about stopping the spread of Jes Grew, an anti-virus that spreads quickly and causes the infected parties to dance in ebullience and ecstasy. A high-pitched beep precedes the transition from each still image in the fake filmstrip to the next. At one point, the filmstrip is interrupted with a series of beeps and the images begin to roll up so that the frame line on the filmstrip is visible. The woman narrator鈥檚 voice returns as she comments on the film strip. The film goes through a series of moving and still images some of which are distressed with bleach and scratches: Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni鈥檚 film L鈥橢clisse, people dancing in the street during Mardi Gras, Dick Tracy, the Chicago Police Department, abstract images of distressed black leader, etc. Over this we hear a variety of sound clips, most prominently, the prologue narrator, disaster warning sirens, booming, low pitched thuds, and police radio calls.

b/w 2023

The soundtrack is provided by the audience which is asked to participate during the screening by reading the paint names aloud.

still/here 2001

The film features sound clips of various voiceovers (with variations of pitch and chopped up into fragments), a slow, hypnotic bluesy, mournful solo bass score that accompanies several long tracking shots, strategic use of silence with no audio on the optical track, radio and television broadcasts, footsteps, doorbells, and ringing telephones.

You can enter via the Cinema entrance, left of the Turbine Hall main entrance, and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner Street.

The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building.

There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Natalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.

  • Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses
  • A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4
  • Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks

To help plan your visit to 黑料社, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.

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  • Call +44 (0)20 7887 8888 (daily 10.00鈥17.00)

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黑料社

Starr Cinema

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
黑料社

Date & Time

28 May 2025 at 18.30鈥20.30

Pricing

拢10 / 拢7 for Members

拢7 Concessions

拢5 for 黑料社. 16鈥25? Sign up and to book

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