Chris Derek Van | Julian / 2023

the sound of silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Julian / 2023 [4.30 minutes]

 

Although not specifically an LGBTQ film, in Julian rather experimental filmmaker Chris Derek Van once more explores issues of loss and leaving, also with a somewhat homoerotic sensibility.

     This film begins, like several of his works with an action of appropriation, in this case with quotes the from the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, in French: “Velázquez, past the age of 50 no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares the shimmering nuance of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony.”

     The screen images are of a young handsome man sitting at a pool, as the director shifts his color lens and at one point even presents the image of the young boy upside down.

      The narrative continues: “Henceforth, he captured only those mysterious interpenetrations that united shape and tone by means of a secret but unceasing progression that no convulsion or cataclysm could interrupt or impede. Space reigns. It’s as if some ethereal wave skimming over surfaces soaked up their visible emanations to shape them, give form and then spread them like a perfume, like an echo of themselves, like some imperceptible dust over every surrounding surface.”

       The boy, meanwhile, strips off his jersey and jumps into the pool, swimming and leaping back into the water again and again. But in the midst of this, while the narrator continues to describe how sad the world was in which he lived, filled with a “degenerate king, sickly infants, idiots, depressed, cripples,” we glimpse a poster showing the boy, named Julian.

 

       Are we to presume that this seemingly large picture posted outside the Chicago theater, with a danger sign below it suggests that he is now one of the thousands of missing children throughout the country?

      The rest of the film is basically a dirge, as the director borrows Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence,” while a car drives down a long road in the rain. The images and song declare that somehow Julian either lost touch with his world or that world with him. He has moved outside the “gates” that Velázquez describes where the Auto-da-fé controls life, and the boy may have been forced to suffer it demands.

     We cannot but imagine the details about the young handsome swimmer’s life, but once more director Derek Van has presented us a great sense of loss and a nostalgic feeling of longing.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).