Isaac Julien | The Attendant / 1993

a night at the museum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaac Julien (screenwriter and director) The Attendant / 1993

 

In only 8 minutes British director Isaac Julien takes us, in this sado-masochistic fantasy, through an off-hour museum guard’s memories and interactions with a painting at the Wilberforce House in Hull, England, which is devoted to the history of slavery.

     Julien’s cinematic vision is vaguely similar to John Greyson’s Zero Patience of the very same year, and might even be described, in the attendant’s encounters with his history as a queer prognostication of the later US Hollywood flick directed by Shawn Levy, Night at the Museum (2006).

       But history here is played out primarily through the imagination of the guard (Thomas Baptiste), who, inspired by the 19th century painting of “Slaves on the West Coast of Africa” by the French artist François-Auguste Biard—a rather melodramatic and racist scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave—which is transformed through the guard’s imagination into a group of gay leather boys, a scene played out on the museum floor between the guard and a lean leather guy (John Wilson) who has earlier entered the museum, with a whiff of recognition being exchanged by the museum’s protector and its visitor.

      If the guard begins in the position of a man tied to the floor while being whipped, before the film finishes, however, it shifts to a tableaux vivant in which the black guard stands above the white boy with whip in hand.

      Moreover, this guard’s memories and imagination are not just dark and destructive, but include an array of campy angels and stunning black men poised as warriors.

       The guard also seems to recall a past life in which he sang opera, performing in the empty museum auditorium the lament (“When I am laid in earth") from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, sung often by a countertenor instead of mezzo-soprano. The female museum conservator (Cleo Sylvestre) attends and applauds the guard’s (singer Baptiste’s) beautiful performance.

 

     The scenes of this stunningly artful work in both black-and-white and color are presented, much like the work of Sergei Parajanov, mainly in the form of tableaux-vivant. But there are also scenes in a room with a number of large paintings that seem in imitation of the erotic drawings of Tom of Finland. And there are enough camp moments that keep this remarkable work quite literally “afloat.”

 

Los Angeles, May 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).