“In the video Darkening Process (2014), archival footage of Griffin, along with black dancers and jazz musicians is tinted red, green, blue, and yellow in turn. These scenes are
edited together with shots of Fatmi methodically blackening his hands—palms too!—with shoe polish, in a nod to the only job Griffin was able to get while black.”
Rahel Aima, Art in America, May 2017
Darkening Process (extract from)
Dans son film expérimental, Darkening Process (2014), mounir fatmi explore la vie de John Howard Griffin, écrivain américain et activiste des droits civiques qui, exacerbé par l'injustice subie par les Afro-Américains pendant les années 1950 et 1960, alla jusqu’à noircir sa peau à l’aide de pilules et d’exposition prolongée sous ultraviolets. En dépit d’études en littérature française, en religion et en médecine, et malgré un service dans l'armée américaine, le seul métier que Griffin ait pu obtenir était cireur de chaussures. Le film Darkening Process est construit autour du plan rapproché sur une paire de mains frottant et cirant énergiquement un pied de chaussure en cuir noir. À vue d’œil, l’action s’assombrit fil de la vidéo, tandis que les mains appliquent une partie du cirage noir sur la peau.
La vidéo associe des fragments de Black Like Me, film de 1964 inspiré d’une autobiographie du même nom par Griffin. Le spectateur l’y voit poursuivi, le visage apeuré, tandis qu’une voix-off masculine, dont l’intonation rappelle le style documentaire, évoque comment pourchasser des noirs dans les rues du sud pouvait “s’apparenter à du baseball” ou à quelque activité de chasse. Tel pour un film d’horreur, les scènes du film sont retouchées puis superposées de filtres rouges, verts et sombres. La musique d’ambiance dissonante qui dure le long du film de dix minutes ajoute à l’effet claustrophobe, paraît interminable et semble ne laisser aucune voie d’évasion.
Ce film fait partie de la série de travaux intitulée The Journey into Shame, que fatmi a construit autour de la vie de John Howard Griffin. La série prolonge l’intérêt de mounir fatmi pour les thèses sur l'identité, sur l'idée de l'Autre, aussi bien qu’elle illustre sa fascination pour les archives, notamment celle des moments oubliées ou obscures de l’histoire, pourtant en résonance avec une époque contemporaine.
In his 2014 experimental film, Darkening Process, mounir fatmi explores the life of John Howard Griffin, an American writer and Civil Rights activist who was so frustrated by the injustice experienced by African Americans during the 1950s-1960s, that he took pills and had UV exposure to turn his skin black. For several months he travelled the south, looking for work and writing about his experience. During this time the only job that Griffin could find, despite having studied French literature, religion and medicine, and having served in the US Army, was shining shoes, and Darkening Process turns around a closely cropped scene in black and white that shows a pair of hands intensely polishing and scrubbing a pair of black leather shoes. Both the shoes and the hands get increasingly darker as the film continues, the hands rubbing some of the black polish into the skin, our eyes witness to the change.
Spliced throughout the film are fragmented scenes from Black Like Me, the 1964 film based on Griffin’s autobiography of the same name. We see scenes of him being chased down the street, running, his face full of fear. In the same moment we hear a male voice speaking in a very documentary-style tone about how, for example, in the south it was for some, “just like baseball” to chase black men in the streets, and other haunting facts. These images from the film have been manipulated, transposed into deep reds, greens and blacks, as if in a horror film. The dissonant music that plays throughout the ten-minute film adds to the sense of claustrophobia and fear, we don’t get an impression of their being an end, an escape.
This film is part of a larger series of work titled The Journey into Shame, which fatmi has made around the life of John Howard Griffin. The series continues fatmi’s interest in exploring theories of identity, what is meant by the idea of the Other, as well has his ongoing fascination with archives, particularly obscure or forgotten about moments in history that when revived, resonant with contemporary meaning.
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