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Güncel Haberler

“From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas | 1843 - The Economist 1843” plus 1 more

dainnecraise Kasım 29, 2021

“From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas | 1843 - The Economist 1843” plus 1 more

From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas | 1843 - The Economist 1843

Posted: 15 Nov 2019 08:41 AM PST

From the outside, Matsoukas's rise to success seems almost frictionless. She got an agent as soon as she finished her postgraduate studies. Her first proper music video was for "Money Maker", a bombastic strip-club anthem by rapper Ludacris and R&B singer Pharrell Williams in 2006, which topped every chart. She felt in over her head. She was so nervous that her initial moodboard resembled something out of "A Beautiful Mind". "It was a mess," she says. But the resulting video brought her to the attention of Jay-Z. When he met Matsoukas at a party in 2006, he turned to Beyoncé and declared, "She's the next one." Matsoukas responded to Beyoncé by saying, "I'm coming for you!" She laughs at her younger self's boldness. "I know, I'm corny."

A month later Beyoncé came for her. The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh music videos Matsoukas ever made were for one of the biggest stars on the planet. Small wonder, then, that Whitney Houston, Solange, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and J.Lo all came for her too. The work was dynamic, beautiful and fun. And she had a knack for making her subjects feel at ease: in 2007, she somehow convinced Snoop Dogg to dance in an unbuttoned shirt in "Sensual Seduction".

Though she was in high demand, Matsoukas began to chafe at the medium's limitations. She wanted her work to be part of the central conversations about American life, to help people see the world differently. Yet too often she found herself called upon to deliver flash and swagger. "Music videos as a medium were really looked down upon and it was hard to get an opportunity," she said. Eventually her opportunity came: Issa Rae asked her to sign on as executive producer and director of her television series "Insecure". Rae was a little concerned that Matsoukas's style might be too glamorous for the more mundane settings of her show, but Matsoukas took as much care to depict the substance of twenty-something black life as she had with Beyoncé's glamour and confidence. She tooled around LA with Rae, seeing her hangouts, exploring the atmosphere of different neighbourhoods. She ultimately created a setting for the show that struck a balance between cosmopolitan aspirations and mundane realities. We all wanted to move in.

Her next proposition was different again. Lena Waithe, now an Emmy award-winning screenwriter and actress, approached Matsoukas to direct an episode in the second series of "Master of None", a comedy-drama which already had a loyal following. Matsoukas was reluctant: episodic directors are given little creative freedom and she is a self-professed control freak. But the script of "Thanksgiving", which drew on Waithe's own experience, offered the chance to portray a story previously untold in TV drama: the coming out of a black lesbian. The episode won an Emmy and cemented the creative relationship between Waithe and Matsoukas. "There was immense trust. She really gave me that story and let me take it where I wanted to," she says.

When Waithe wrote the screenplay of "Queen & Slim" she took it to Matsoukas. The pair went backwards and forwards over ten drafts. Finally Matsoukas felt like she could paint her own picture of black life in America. "I feel like this film is the first time where it's all on me, all of my influences, all of my life is in that frame, in those frames, in that film. One of my good friends saw it and she said…'It's so you'."

The world in which "Queen & Slim" begins is brutal and ugly. Slim is played by Daniel Kaluuya, an Academy Award nominee for "Get Out". Jodie Turner Smith, a newcomer, plays Queen. As the film opens, the two are enduring a not-terrible, not-scorching Tinder date at a diner in Cleveland, Ohio. Since the pair are dark-skinned people in America, they can't even get through their awkward first date without systemic racism intervening. Catastrophe occurs when Slim accidentally fires a gun and kills a police officer.

When Matsoukas was scouting for locations, she drove through the neighbourhood in Cleveland where Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was shot by a policeman in 2014. She found herself in the middle of a police operation. At least six black people were pulled over by the police. When she saw one of them getting out of a white Honda Accord, she thought "That's Slim! That's him right there." (In the film Slim drives a white Honda Accord.)

Burning bright A still from "Queen & Slim" 

The couple in the film flee on a road trip that Matsoukas refers to as a "reverse slave-escape narrative". In the early 19th century, the Underground Railroad ferried fugitive slaves from southern states to the free states in the north. Queen and Slim travel in the opposite direction: to New Orleans and then on towards Cuba.

Early viewers likened the film to "Bonnie and Clyde", a comparison that Matsoukas resists: "I feel like we can't just ever be ourselves. We always have to be compared to some white archetype…It's not about criminals." "Queen & Slim" is far more varied than that. There are elements of magical realism and ragged news footage of protests that recall Black Lives Matter rallies. The road trip traverses so many landscapes – the frozen and the warm, inner city and bayou – that the film's subject becomes America itself. Across it all is written the experience of black Americans. This is a world in which the personal is constantly trying and failing to escape the political; where, as both Matsoukas and Waithe put it, "two black people [are] trying to love while the world is burning down around them." The film itself reconciles this tension. Matsoukas sees "Queen & Slim" as fundamentally a "love story", albeit one that is set "against the backdrop of a really racist system and institution". The very existence of such a story, she says, serves "to honour all the people who lost their lives to police brutality and who aren't here".

Matsoukas trains her camera on scenes from black history that have long been overlooked: a juke joint where Queen and Slim dance the night away draws inspiration from a project by Birney Imes, a photographer who captured underground dance clubs across the South in the 1980s. In another moment of stolen freedom and joy, Matsoukas puts Kaluuya atop a white horse in tribute to her maternal grandfather, Carlos, an Afro-Cuban preacher and musician who rode in rodeos in Harlem and the Bronx. Again the political reference is oblique, invoking the "Yeehaw Agenda", a recent attempt to recover the contribution of African-Americans to the story of the West.

Up close Queen and Slim share a moment on the dancefloor

Matsoukas lingers on moments of great intimacy. She shot home interiors in the style of Deana Lawson, an artist who makes even the most threadbare possessions seem luxurious. She lights black skin so that it glows, a trick she learned from Barry Jenkins, who directed "Moonlight" in 2016: "Nobody knew how to shoot black people before Barry Jenkins," she says. She is particularly attentive to hair: Queen's braids being taken out as she tries to disguise herself; a close-up of gelled baby hairs; Slim having his locks lopped off. The risk of such an approach is that it can verge on pastiche, making black culture twee in the same way that Wes Anderson did for hipsters. Occasionally these moments tend towards the clichéd: Slim's haircut could have been taken from the cover of Beyoncé's and Jay-Z's latest album. But cumulatively they accord dignity and respect to the particulars of the black American experience.

Over the past five years Hollywood has begun to invest seriously in black film-makers for the first time since the 1990s: Waithe, Jenkins and Ryan Coogler, who directed "Black Panther", a ground-breaking black superhero film in 2018, have all found critical and commercial success. Matsoukas sees her fellow black creatives as a mutually supportive community. The practical implications of this become clear to me when we go for lunch at her regular spot, a soul-food joint called My Two Cents. Matsoukas found it through Instagram and, on her first visit, ended up staying for 11 hours. Now she cooks weekly with Alisa Reynolds, the chef-proprietor ("It's annoying that she's both so talented as a film-maker and such a good cook," says Reynolds). But Matsoukas is more than just a friend with a shared interest. She's helping Reynolds develop a tv show about comfort food around the world. "People need a black chef like her to have a cooking show, don't you think?"

In the lead-up to the "Queen & Slim" premiere in November, Matsoukas and her team carefully chose locations in which to preview it: they showed it in the Fort Greene neighbourhood of Brooklyn, whose community of African-American creatives was celebrated in 1986 in Spike Lee's first feature, "She's Gotta Have It". Then they went to Howard University, a historically black college, during homecoming week. She wanted the film to feel "for us, by us". The LA screening took place at the Underground Museum. Matsoukas was toasted by her good friend, Solange, who welled up as she asked the crowd to support the film. Afterwards Matsoukas posed for photo after photo.

The Queen and I Melina Matsoukas in Los Angeles

At that screening I realised that the moments of recognition by African-Americans of their own experiences – when Queen goes hard at Slim as a form of flirting or Slim crosses himself before eating – are themselves a form of solidarity. Even the bleak finale (it's not a spoiler to say this doesn't end well for the protagonists) can, in some lights, be seen as optimistic. "I'm not saying only black people get it, but, like, you understand who didn't get it," says Matsoukas. But she wants, and needs, the film's message to resonate with a wider audience. "I hope that it humanises us," she says. "I hope that they are able to relate to…what it feels like, even just a little bit, to be a black person living in America today. It's really infuriating that we have to live that way, constantly in fear, constantly on the run, constantly searching for our freedoms. I want to give them understanding of why we laugh at times, why we cry at times, why we dance, and hopefully they'll show their love and appreciation for black culture, while allowing us to own it."

We'll soon find out whether she has been successful. "All of my decisions really come from authenticity, creating a narrative that feels true to the black experience," she says. "And if I base my choices in authenticity, I cannot go wrong." She pauses, thinks, waits for confirmation, maybe reassurance. "Right?" she asks me.•

"Queen & Slim" is released in Britain in January

Let Us Gather to Discuss Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s T.S. Eliot–Inspired Cats Song - Vulture

Posted: 15 Nov 2019 07:19 AM PST

Victoria the White Cat in Cats. Photo: Universal Pictures

Jackson McHenry: Hello, we've gathered here like the Jellicle cats on the night of the Jellicle Ball for a momentous occasion: the release of Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber's grand musical collaboration, "Beautiful Ghosts," a song for the movie Cats. For a little context, this is what will play over the end credits of the digital fur technology–filled Christmas movie that's seemingly designed to break our minds, though Taylor wrote the song specifically for the character of Victoria the White Cat (played by Francesca Heyward) to sing in the movie, as a response to that big ballad, "Memory." It's also written in the style of T.S. Eliot, because as Taylor herself put it, "If you can't get T.S. Eliot, get T.S." But are the beautiful ghosts any good? Vulture cat and Cats-lovers and haters, please weigh in.
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