About Me
Erin is recently graduated from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of The New School
with a dual degree in Screen Studies and Global Studies,
integrating the two disciplines through experimental documentary and essay work -
interpreting artistic and academic works through the lenses of one another.
She is a passionate screenwriter, director, and essayist with skills in digital cinematography and
independent film distribution and programming.
Erin’s interest and depth of knowledge in international film is the
locus of her film work and her critical essays.
Projects
The Point of Ruins: Writer/Director/Editor (2025)
To Save A Park: Writer/DIrector/Actor (2023) - Winner of The New Screen Fest Juror Award
Inertia by Juan-Diego Silva: Script Supervisor/ PA (2024)
Angel In Purgatory by Katherine Lightman: Assistant Director (2025)
Teto by Pau Zabaleta Llauger: Script Supervisor/Sound Assistant (2024)
Claire Denis: The Skin of my Eye By Erin Gwydir May 2025
Claire Denis is notoriously known for her mastery of a kind of cinema not driven by
dialogue and complex plots but rather sensual movement throughout a place, or rather,
non-place. The characters in Denis’ films seem to always inhabit in-between worlds physically,
psychologically, and sociologically - her cinematographers and editors fragmenting belonging in
time and frame. A few settings in her films include an abandoned truck stop complex over a
highway in the outskirts of Paris in No Fear No Die, a French Legion army base on the coast of
Djibouti in Beau Travail, a developing suburb mid-construction and its adjacent highway in U.S.
Go Home (1994), a wintery forest in the northern region of France where the hearts of monstrous
fat male nymphs reject their body in L’intrus. Indeed, the borders of cities, of hotel rooms,
property lines, and national borders, of public and private, of objectively seeing and subjectively
feeling, of pleasure and disgust - the skin that negotiates what is inside and outside ourselves is
constantly negotiating itself in Claire Denis’ films. Moreover, the intimate samples of these
themes in key frames reveal repetitions of imprisonment, estrangement, and engagement with
characters in her films, frames I use to create a montage in my video. The short video I
constructed samples a few of Claire Denis’ films, displaying the dance of contact and distance
that disrupts common principles in the scopophilia of cinema. Inspired by the work of Steven
Connor, Tarja Laine, Franz Fanon, and Jacques Nancy, I will argue that these films articulate a
particularly powerful subversive language of cinema that engages the audience in a cinema of the
senses - particularly of skin - that challenges their Western conception of borders, translating
stagnant anti-capitalist theory into dynamic carnal experience.
At the heart of Denis’ subversive cinematic strategy is a tactile form of spectatorship -
one that privileges skin over sight. Tarja Laine’s formulation of skin as not merely metaphor but
as a “perceptual surface that travels through the senses” is especially useful here. Laine argues
that skin functions as both a boundary and a contact zone: a double interface between self and
world. Denis’ cinema operates in precisely this liminal zone. Her images are often obscured,
elliptical, partial—not because they withhold meaning, but because they ask us to feel meaning.
In Beau Travail (1999), the sun-drenched bodies of legionnaires glisten and strain against each
other in choreographed exertion. Their movement, as stylized as dance, is not narrative but
haptic. As spectators, we do not decode their gestures; we absorb them. We are located “as
touching and being touched,” in Laine’s terms. The skin - of the soldier, of the screen, of the
viewer - becomes the site where meaning takes place.
Steven Connor deepens this notion by proposing that touch is reciprocal: “as I touch
objects in the world, they seem to rise to their own surfaces, to meet me.” This reciprocity of
surface is echoed in Denis’ framing. In L’intrus (2004), close-ups of human flesh, bark, ice, and
animal fur blur into one another until surface distinctions dissolve. The world, Connor writes,
“seems to put on its own gloves to touch us back.” In Denis’ films, such gloves are everywhere:
in the texture of landscape, the humidity of skin, the sonic pulse of breath and heartbeats. We are
immersed in what Connor calls “a single, intermittent skin,” where boundaries are never stable
and perception is always in flux. Rather than reifying the body as a discrete object, Denis reveals
it to be porous, precarious, and in constant negotiation with the world around it.
This sense of porousness extends beyond the body to political and aesthetic categories.
Franz Fanon’s work on colonial embodiment resonates strongly with Denis’ interest in
borderlands and liminality. In No Fear, No Die (1990), two Black immigrants attempt to run a
cockfighting ring in the industrial outskirts of Paris. The narrative unfolds in unclaimed spaces:
warehouses, alleys, motels, parking lots—zones where legality and illegality blur. These are not
mere backdrops but characters in their own right, articulating the racial and economic violence of
exclusion. Fanon, writing about the colonized body, emphasizes the psychic trauma of being
perpetually exteriorized - of being seen but never felt. Denis counters this alienation through a
sensual camera that seeks to touch rather than capture. Her cinema resists what Fanon would call
the “epidermal schema” of colonial vision - the objectifying gaze that reduces Blackness to
surface - by reimagining the surface as depth, as affective resonance.
Walter Benjamin’s theories on aura and the politicization of art further illuminate Denis’
project. Benjamin argues that under fascism, the aestheticization of politics culminates in
spectacle - the kind that allows society to enjoy its own destruction. In contrast, communism
responds by politicizing art: by embedding critical consciousness within aesthetic experience.
Denis politicizes through sensory disorientation. She does not present ideology didactically but
viscerally. In Trouble Every Day (2001), eroticism and violence coalesce in scenes of carnal
excess where desire cannot be neatly categorized as pleasure or pain. Denis pushes us into the
murky zones where binaries collapse: touch as violence, beauty as decay, love as cannibalism. In
doing so, she materializes the contradictions of late capitalism, particularly its tendency to
commodify intimacy without recourse to expository dialogue or moral resolution.
Architecture, as Benjamin reminds us, is the oldest art form experienced both “by use and
by perception - or rather, by touch and sight.” Denis’ locations are rarely inert; they pulse with
the lived residues of histories and habits. In U.S. Go Home (1994), the transitional architecture of
a suburban town still under construction mirrors the transitional subjectivity of its teenage
protagonist. The characters loiter, drift, and cling to unformed structures: hallways without
doors, streets without names. The film’s camera does not map this space but grazes it, much like
the teenage bodies it follows. The built environment, like the skin, is an interface - a place where
contact and consciousness are co-constituted. Thus, Denis’ cinema can be understood as an
alternative mode of spectatorship - not distanced observation but immersive tactility. If, as Tarja
Laine puts it, “eye may be the organ with which we see, but ultimately, skin is the organ which
perceives,” then Denis is a filmmaker of perception. Her frames are not windows but
membranes. They ask not “what do you see?” but “what do you feel?” and more radically, “what
touches you back?” “what fucks your perception of yourself, and how did your seduce it?”
This perceptual reorientation also destabilizes narrative structure. Denis' films rarely
follow linear plots or tidy character arcs. Instead, they drift through moments of contact,
dissociation, and return. This is not incoherence, but a different kind of coherence, one based on
affective rhythm rather than logical linear sequence - much like the editing structure in many of
her films by Nelly Quettier. Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, how
regimes of perception delimit what can be seen, felt, and said, is useful here. Denis rearranges
this distribution by privileging sensation over signification. Her images are not there to be
interpreted but experienced. Walter Benjamin describes painting as an art that is practiced from
some distance whereas cinema is an art “where the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.”
Claire Denis’ works bypass the analytical mind and surgically lodge the viewer in the body,
which can be operated upon unconsciously and forced to react consciously, changing its
composition in both. Denis’ intimate induction of affective collectivity is based not on
identification but on cohabitation - on sharing architectural boundaries of a dwelling you don’t
fully understand. Her cinema, then, is not just political in content but in structure. It asks us to
dwell in uncertainty, to inhabit the skin of the other without assuming that we know what it
means to do so.
Claire Denis constructs a cinema that is radically embodied, subversively tactile, and
politically resonant. Through elliptical storytelling, affective imagery, and haptic
cinematography, her films enact a cinema of skin - one that troubles the boundaries between self
and other, interior and exterior, pleasure and pain. Drawing on theorists such as Tarja Laine,
Steven Connor, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Fanon, we see how Denis’ films challenge the
visual primacy of Western cinematic tradition and instead offer a sensual politics of perception.
By engaging the spectator as a body, not just a mind, Denis reimagines cinema not as
representation but as encounter - an act of being touched (under the skin), and maybe of touching
back.
Benjamin, Walter. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by
J. A. Underwood, Penguin Books.
Connor, S. (2004) The Book of Skin, Reaktion Books, London.
Fanon, Frantz. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Laine, Tarja. (2006) Cinema as a Second Skin, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 4:2,
93-106, DOI: 10.1080/17400300600768414
Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Susan Hanson. L'Intrus. CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 2, no. 3,
Fall (2002)
Beau Travail and Billy Budd By Erin Gwydir March 2025
The original story of Billy Budd is an unfinished novella written by Herman Melville
between 1886 and 1891, published after his death by an admirer of his work in 1924. Decades
after being published, and just six years after the end of World War II, Benjamin Britten
recreates Billy Budd in the form of an opera, the tale debuting as a live performance in
London. Taking place on a British Navy Warship called ‘Indomitable’, the story begins with
the arrival of Billy Budd, a good natured and charismatic sailor taken from a merchant ship
called ‘Rights O’ Man’ who attracts the favor of the whole crew, significantly Captain Vere,
and the lethal love of the Master-at-Arms, John Claggart. Claggart is reimagined as Galloup
in Beau Travail, Vere’s point in the triangle is mirrored in Commanding Officer Forestier,
and Billy Budd is comparable to Sentian. The novella’s isolating setting on a naval ship
becomes perhaps a more isolating French Foreign Legion base in rural Djibouti. In the
novella and opera, Claggart is accidentally killed in a fit of rage by Billy Budd after he is
accused of mutiny by the superior officer. Billy Budd is sentenced to death, though whether
he dies is unclear in the opera. Likewise, Sentain’s character has an unclear ending. The two
mediums lend themselves to portraying the story in juxtaposing dimensions of sensual
experience. For example, the nature of opera necessitates an explicit plot, driven by auditory
complexity in the spoken word. A film’s job is to embed the complexity and movement
throughout the story in the image with a helping hand from dialogue and sound, something
Denis understands well and plays with frequently in her films. However, both Beau Travail
and Billy Budd blur the lines between the internal theatre of the characters and observable
interactions between them, subjective and objective. This essay will explore the how the two
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mediums of opera, Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten, and film, Beau Travail by Claire Denis
illicit contrasting and complex sensory experiences in the audience through sound and image.
Personally, I found myself reflecting on how only the choral pieces were used from
Billy Budd in Beau Travail. The quasi-religious hymnal songs illuminate the aesthetic choices
to make the men almost undifferentiable, one unit, one body; throughout these sequences, the
object of the film becomes the cultish male body. The hair is shaved, mimicking a monk. The
uniform is the same, and the muscular figures are nearly identical. Their homo erotic
behavior is an expression of belonging to one another and loving the self. The languages and
ethnicities are different, but they all converge under the same devotional purpose to be
disposable bodies for France. The majesty in the operatic sound exiles the singular identity,
he who is in power, Galoup, a feminine sexual gaze at that. “Even though women take up a
minority of the screen time, their gaze (along with that of the filmmaker herself) plays a
crucial role here by turning them into witnesses. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, women
form this film’s Greek chorus: they provide an ironic and critical frame in which to view the
presence of the legion and its men in Africa” (Shambu). Denis frames Galloup neither as a
sympathetic character nor under a critical eye. Similarly, the very presence of the Legion in
Djibouti attracts the same eye. Moreover, the feminine gaze is a horizontal one, subverting
hierarchy.
“...a feminist temporality would be an anachronical one, consisting, as Loraux puts it,
of making productive the clash between the present, which always orients the gaze of
the historian, and the past, which can open new perspectives on the present (1993:
28). Both the present and the past are thus held in suspension. Fractures and
discontinuities (often erased by historiography, but constitutive of historical
temporality) come to the fore, and new meanings become visible.”
The gaze and temporality the audience holds perhaps attempts to tell the story through the
audience in their ephemeral experience, their sensual experience in the seats of the opera,
only remembering certain songs, only listening to certain lines. In more ways than one, the
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film functions more similarly to a recollection of placelessness rather than real-time
observation.
What is it like to find belonging and pride in being disposable? Galoup doesn’t ask
these questions explicitly, but they loom in the background as a kind of haunting in every one
of them, particularly in the gaze of the locals, reminding them that they are not in a place
without history, without people; rather, the men are an invasion that closes themselves in,
much like the male psyche itself. Many shots include make us sit with the casual and
mundane cruelty of the men making fences and borders around the base. The men are already
in exile from their homes and therefore sign up to a controlled and repressive placelessness, a
performance of order and organization imposed on an imaginary world of disorder, Africa, in
which they exile the people who do indeed belong to that land. Curation of borders speaks to
not only the larger political element but also as a metaphor of a psyche vulnerable to abject horror,
one that displaces much within himself, deeming it other, particularly the feminine and sensual
desire restricted from a militarized mind. “Some of the most memorable scenes show them
performing everyday domestic tasks such as ironing, hanging up washing, or peeling potatoes.
Even the military exercises are often tinged with an unexpected femininity since they were
designed by a ballet choreographer” (Shambu). The man-made creation of borders within wide
shots of landscape juxtapose to the isolating setting aboard a ship in which the sailors are
inhabiting the same rooms. However, the suffocating feeling is emphasized in the scenes at
the club – in a room full of mirrors. The beginning of the film shows girls dancing in the club
with legionarres dressed in white uniform, a shot contrasted with the last shot of Galoup
dancing alone in black, a dress of mourning himself. We are not experiencing but rather
observing from afar, meditating in Galoup’s experience of the abject, thus exiling the
audience in a way.
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A body of water threatens the integrity of the single drop, an embrace that can
paralyze the singular drop, not letting it return home – the abject. The shots of clear water
functions as ‘that which cleanses’ when the group is together and ‘that which kills’ when
separated from the group with no compass to return home. Phrased in the crude and shallow
language in which he journals, Galoup expresses his inability to return home. He is in exile
from the Legion, from Djibouti, and from France but most importantly from himself. He
creates his condition by exiling a sapling of love in a dry arid environment, Sentain, the
seductress of the group. In remaining singular, in refusing to immerse himself in the water,
his story ends as an animal in a dark room of mirrors.
The experience as the audience watching Beau Travail, you are unsure whether you
are in Galoup’s impression or an objective observer, or a local. I say impression because of
the non-linearity in which the story is told also with many holes in the plot. Whereas, the
opera leaves out nothing. Everything is explicit, through song, through the nuance of the
voice rather than the dimension of the image. Opera is live, it lives in ephemera, moving
always with action and reaction. Nothing is hidden from us. The internal drama of each
character is sung in the same dimension of external drama. We know what Claggart feels
only by what he says, the same in both mediums as his face remains stale and cold, resisting
any recognition of emotion.
In Billy Budd, only the floorboards and uniforms divide the officers and sailors, a
division of power. On a floating island of empire. Floorboards are permeable to sound and
the closeness Claggart and Budd is felt through them. There is a vertical element to the opera
whereas all the cinematography in Beau Travail is horizontal, keeping with the horizon. The
sensual closeness we feel with the Legion dances on an even plane. Claudio Alves describes
the opening shot, “It starts with horizontal motion and a playful kiss. War and seduction,
violence and desire, masculine figures and a feminine look, they all dance on-screen, and
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Denis both invites us to join in and signals for distance. It's a push and a pull, a game that
results as often in pleasure as it does in despair.” As seen in her other films like U.S. Go
Home and I Can’t Sleep, Denis writes her films with the pen of choreography in the colors of
placelessness. In Billy Budd, there is a monologue in which Claggart puts his head to the
floor, the ceiling of Billy’s quarters, and he perfectly articulates his jealousy and attraction to
Billy Budd. The floor as the divisor makes the drama that of power within Galoup himself.
Rather than something out of reach in which he must climb or something obstructing his path,
Billy is below him, a part of him he has already escaped, risen above, conquered if you will.
The opera illuminates the film by adding the vertical dimension in which we are isolated
from the world yet the power of imperial law is the unseen grafter of space just as the
operatic Greek chorus is the unseen grafter of sound in the film.
Ultimately, both Billy Budd and Beau Travail explore the entrapment of the male
body within structures of power, exile, and desire, yet they do so through vastly different
sensory experiences. Britten’s opera externalizes interior conflict through voice, rendering the
hidden undeniable, while Denis’ film embraces ambiguity, allowing movement and image to
suggest what is never spoken. The vertical hierarchy of Billy Budd - where power is imposed
from above - contrasts with the horizontal framing of Beau Travail, where control and
repression exist within the flat expanse of the landscape, a psychological exile rather than a
physical one. In both works, the struggle against the self is inescapable, culminating in a kind
of ritualized self-destruction - Billy through his execution, Galoup through his isolation. But
whereas opera ensures that nothing remains unsaid, film thrives in what is withheld, in
silence as much as in sound. In the end, both narratives leave us suspended in the tension
between devotion and disposability, the yearning for order and the chaos of desire, reflecting
back on us the structures - imperial, personal, and cinematic - that shape what we see, what
we hear, and what we are ultimately left to interpret.
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Alves, Claudio. “How Had I Never Seen... ‘Beau Travail’? - Blog.” The Film Experience,
thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/11/29/how-had-i-never-seen-beau-travail.html.
Accessed 21 Mar. 2025.
Britten, Benjamin. “Billy Budd.” 1998.
Denis, Claire, et al. Beau Travail. 1999, Accessed 2025.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. MobileReference.Com, 2008.
Shambu, Girish. “Beau Travail: A Cinema of Sensation.” The Criterion Collection, 15 Sept.
2020, www.criterion.com/current/posts/7097-beau-travail-a-cinema-of-sensation.
Neptune Frost By Erin Gwydir May 2023
Names have power - the power to identify the continuity and change of human identities
throughout time. In the 2019 film Neptune Frost by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, the title
of the film as well as the characters’ names within it all reflect the complexity of Afrofuturist
identity. Afrofuturism is a style and movement of film defined by the “intersection of
imagination, technology, the future, and liberation,” in the words of Afrofuturist writer and artist
Ytasha Womack. Neptune is the name of not only a planet, a representation of the simultaneous
stagnation and movement of time-space, but also the name of the god of thunder (electricity) in
Roman mythology. Not only the character herself changes the meaning of this powerful name in
two existential ways, religiously and scientifically, but also as the first name of the film, followed
by ‘Frost’, the name of the white pigeon continuously shown flying throughout the air
throughout the entire film. Already, the existential complexity and crisis of movement versus
stagnation in relation to history and time come across in the names in this film, furthered by the
physical, emotional, communal, and aesthetical movement of the characters within it. The
sequence that reveals this complexity is the scene of communal singing following the defining of
the welcome phrase “Unanimous Goldmine”; this phrase identifies the coded welcome to the
Matalusa Kingdom community. The complex identity of Neptune Frost and Unanimous
Goldmine in their expression of the technological, warping of time-space, and socio-economic
liberation is demonstrated most powerfully through the unique layering of futuristic data visual
elements upon ancestral patterns of traditional African song-poetry.
When a character in Neptune Frost encounters another along their journey, the greeting
they say is always “Unanimous Goldmine”. The phrase is defined in the movie as “the greeting
of the resource rich who face a world beholden to the currency of our depletion. This golden
salute elevates the vibration of metallic injustice to the threshold of planetary sustenance,” and
thus commences the sequence of my analysis. The religious dimension is then combined with the
futurist power the group utilizes in the line “I was Moses on the mountaintop. The burning bush
was my firewall.” This line exemplifies the intersection of religious roots and contemporary
technology that transcends time and space. Thereafter, the group of young adults start singing in
unison, jumping up and down to the rhythm while one person at a time takes their turn to lead a
chant, each line ending in the repeated phrase “you know we paid for it all”. The technology,
built from the rich raw materials of Africa, coltan and cobalt, is what is referenced in this line.
The African people and land being exploited is indeed what “paid for it all”. As the song
continues to build intensity, the screen flickers like an old satellite signal is being disrupted and
the news anchor of a mainstream western media company is shown reporting. That channel is
then disrupted by the singing from the Matalusa Kingdom, the English name
“MARTYRLOSERKING'' appearing in a code-like font on the screen atop shots of traditional
singing and dancing creating the energy of disruption. The layered visuals then develop into
smaller bits of data that form more mathematical shapes meant to create an illusion. Matalusa is
the name of the leader of the group, while the english reading is Martyr and Loser, a change in
the view of African leaders as defeated symbols rather than people, a western lens. The names
and lyrics complexly identifying this community reveals the direct mission to oppose western
powers that exploit them, particularly in one shot where Neptune breaks the 4th wall, looks at the
camera, and raises a middle finger. Music and song is similar to technology in its spiritual and
scientific nature, an acquaintance of themes of religion and modern communication.
The history of Africa is passed down orally contrary to western records of history being
predominantly written. Song-poetry is central to not only to cultures within Rwanda but
throughout the entire continent of Africa, taking shapes in countless ways in each community.
One commonality of these songs is their ability to artistically link history to the present through
storytelling with song. “A dedication to ancestral patterns among traditional African oral singers,
for whatever reason this may be, does not take away their talent at, and actual creation of, newer
patterns during any performance” (Na’allah, 2019 p.14). The patterns of song-poetry are known
well among all members of a tight knit community and used as a base to often improvise
similarly to what we see in the scene described above in Neptune Frost. In the scene, the young
man leading the song says “The bullets in your guns, you know we paid for it all. Your
Scriptures severing tongues, you know we paid for it all. With our oil and our blood, you know
we paid for it all.” Not only does the substance of these lyrics recognize the socio-political
extractionism and brutal modern colonialism of the intended audience by recognizing the
exploits of Africa from the west for a growth in oil (economy) and guns (military), he also ties in
the exploitation of minds by Western Christianity as the original philosophical excuse to brutally
colonize Africa. “Repetition is also the consequence of, inspired, spontaneity and improvisation;
a result of the poet being so thoroughly moved to repeat it over and over” (Pointer, p. 68). The
repetition of “you know we paid for it all” establishes the intended audience, the “you”, as
western powers. Additionally, the meaning of ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ is exemplified in this
phrase as it recognizes the source of wealth in the bodies and land of Africa. Moreover, the
unanimous song in the background of these lyrics further strengthens the lyrics and meaning of
the welcome code as a communal belonging.
The visual elements layered in this scene strikingly reveal the depth of the name of the
film and of ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ through the series of shots, the lighting, and the editing of
data-like images overtop them. The “Frost” is demonstrated visually at the beginning of the
sequence when Matalusa is explaining what ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ is, defined in the second
paragraph of this essay. As he explains, the group stands still, frozen in time. In it, the
chiaroscuro lighting is used in a way that creates a deep contrast, enhancing the colors. Matalusa
says “code, streams of light become more visible, data..” when talking about understanding the
chaos in unanimity through technology. His words are then manifested visually as the blurry
lights and colors reflected from frozen bodies are then turned into geometrical representations of
data from moments of static. One of the directors, Saul Willims, said “One of the ways in which
we distinguish ourselves is in our color palette.” In his visual editing, the spatiotemporal
stagnation is dynamized and made abstract through code, represented by a mix of bright laser
lines, collected dots, diamonds in an illusion, and disruptions of the striking visual algorithms.
The freezing of the bodies can be seen as a freeze of African history and power during
colonization. The conversation of the future and mobility brought by data reveals the core of the
Afrofuturist movement in the reclaiming of African power through tech.
Whatsmore is the costuming and makeup of bright neon colors, gems, and wires going
through hair like bird's nests that embodies the Afrofuturist perspective of combining the natural
with the technological. Afrofuturism itself emerged in the intersection of the two as well as
what’s defined as its inspirations by Reynaldo Anderson, “Contemporary expressions of
Afrofuturism emerging in the areas of metaphysics, speculative philosophy, religion, visual
studies, performance, art and philosophy of science or technology that are described as "2.0," in
response to the emergence of social media and other technological advances since the middle of
the last decade” (Reynaldo). Such a collective of subjects typically diametrically opposed in
many western genres are embraced in their intersections in Neptune Frost and the Afrofutirist
genre more broadly. The unique costuming, makeup, and hair of the ‘Unanimous Goldmine’
community of young people is an expression of the abstract vision of hope for the future in its
path subversive to the current global condition of exploitation in which the film speaks to. “The
film’s narrative revolves around the precious minerals that are mined on the continent —
particularly coltan, which one can find in any tech device — and that inspired our approach to
color. From there, we tried to figure out which colors would emotionally express the organic, the
technological, the epic, the intimate, the fantastical, and the musical,”explains director Anisia
Uzeyman. The characters are initially in conventional clothing, no makeup, separated from each
other. The unity in the dream that brought them all together is what surfaces the subconscious
hope for a powerful movement in everything from their songs to their appearance to their power
to hack the internet almost spiritually. Spiritually because of how Neptune is shown hacking the
internet through her subconscious, from generated energy of the ‘Unanimous Goldmine’
community. The colors used philosophically by the directors are able to shine in this sequence
and in every day Neptune and Matalusa spend with the ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ community.
What Neptune Frost accomplishes cannot be measured simply by the analysis of layering
visuals and sound in the mise-en-scene algorithm of western film theory due to its gross linkage
with contemporary international socio-economic and political understanding and a history of
African culture, religion, and dress that manifests in the vision of directors Anisia Uzeyman and
Saul Williams. The art of a musical is most typically seen on a stage, but the directors’ ability to
utilize the film medium in every sense from visual edits, costuming, lighting, setting, and more is
what profoundly grips the audience by coming face to face with truths that seek to unseat their
privilege and show them the beauty and complexity of a traditionally marginalized people.
Director Anisia Uzeyman speaks on the measure of audience to film connection when she
describes the nature of conversation in her two homes. “Young people worldwide are demanding
the same things that we talk about in the film, and these are universal concerns, but we don't
always take into account that those discussions are also happening in places like Rwanda or
Burundi.” The Western spiritual and historical sentimental value of the name Neptune is layered
upon the Frost it has created in Africa; Frost is a bird, exemplifying the liberation from the
western myth of dominance and separation. The scene analyzed serves to show the
multidimensionality of not only the ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ community in the power of their
unity but also in the layers of tech/data, mining, hacking, song-poetry, and dance. Just as the
scene defines the movement in its transcendence of modern barriers to peace, it does so by
breaking barriers of conventional western film dichotomies.
Anderson, Reynaldo. “AFROFUTURISM 2.0 & THE BLACK SPECULATIVE ARTS
MOVEMENT: Notes on a Manifesto.” Obsidian, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2016, pp. 228–36.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44489514.
Gipson, Grace. “Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism.” #identity:
Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation, edited by Abigail De Kosnik and
Keith P. Feldman, University of Michigan Press, 2019, pp. 84–103. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvndv9md.9.
Marcks, Iain. “Preview: Neptune Frost.” The American Society of Cinematographers (En-US),
24 June 2022, theasc.com/articles/preview-neptune-frost.
Na’allah. (2019). Yoruba oral tradition in Islamic Nigeria : a history of Dàdàkúàdá. Routledge.
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