Polar Fantasies and Aesthetics in the Work of Isaac Julien and Connie Samaras

Renarrativizing the Arctic: Isaac Julien’s True North

Isaac Julien’s film True North is a strong example of a fascinating new departure in the artistic and scholarly discourse on polar expedition narratives.¹ Drawing in part from Gender on Ice, as well as the problematics of earlier Arctic representations such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, and the 1999 documentary Nanook Revisited, made by a Canadian Collective, Julien responds to a larger visual culture of the Arctic by focusing on the relation between aesthetics and politics, as well as the Peary expedition’s complex politics of exclusion. Emphasizing the significant role of Matthew Henson, Julien is attracted to the rawness and violence of the relationship between Henson and his employer, Peary, in the inhospitable male space of the Arctic, a testing-ground in which isolation and physical danger combine with overwhelming beauty. Significantly, in Julien’s film, we don’t see Peary or Cook, or evidence of the bitter controversy that ensued between the two men. Instead of the driving anxiety and competition in these white male narratives, in Julien’s film, the sheer physical, natural attraction of the North Pole is foregrounded (see Figure 2). Matthew Henson and the Inuits who accompanied Peary to the Pole serve as witnesses in Julien’s film and substitute for Peary (see Figure 3). By underscoring Henson and the Inuits as subjects, Julien’s film actually draws out what Peary and Henson share through an unusually audacious strategy of over-the-top post-colonial mimicry, which challenges the viewer’s relationship to these older arctic narratives and to the Arctic itself.

In Julien’s attempt to rethink the relationship between cinema, aesthetics and racism endemic to earlier well-known representations of the Arctic, he does not only emphasize the imperial ambitions of that period but also highlights the aesthetic drive—something that was critical to early exploration narratives. However, Julien’s use of the aesthetic provides a very different approach that challenges some of the foundational assumptions of the sublime as overwhelming and humbling. He does not offer us an unmediated vision of the Arctic, but one that is highly technologized and artificial, as evidenced by his use of three screens rather than one and his lush production values (see Figure 4). This technological beauty is compelling in the way it is used to draw out our fascinations with the North Pole and how the drive to possess it was not simply about ownership or nationalism. His film emphasizes the fact that the representation of polar exploration exceeds both purposeful activity as well as the instrumentality of the earlier colonial narrative of exploration, science, and discovery. However, he does not give up politics to focus on beauty. They are presented together as inextricably entangled.

The film provocatively rewrites the narrative of a subservient Henson, concocted by Peary in a visual register far different than one would expect from an account of a moment in history in which Blacks were excluded from the official historical script. In this way, Julien’s film insists that North Pole heroism exists both in spite of and against Peary. Julien reformulates the narrative with a different aesthetic, one that is modern, ironic, artificial and detached that is deliberately unsettling. For example, Peary sanctioned Inuit mistresses on his expedition to protect against what was seen as the potential, but more dangerous, carnal relations between white men.² Julien’s film subversively plays up the homosocial and racial relations between Peary and Henson, though in unexpected ways. This comes through in Julien’s focus on a black female fashion model, Vanessa Myrie, dressed in couture, who impersonates Matthew Henson. His use of the commercial aesthetics of fashion photography makes the Arctic appear almost as a runway (see Figure 5). This brazen strategy queers a discourse that otherwise inscribes and validates a highly simplified and formulaic narrative of white, masculinist, heterosexual agency prevailing over a feminized space (see Figure 6). The incongruous presence of Vanessa Myrie shown washing her hands and fondling the ice turns this dangerous landscape into simply ice, not life or death. However, it is the contrast between the stunningly spectacular landscape and Myrie’s banal gesture that underscores Julien’s ambition to remind us of how fetishized the ice and the black female model remain. Her presence is part of an extended joke to remind us that nobody belongs there. Julien emphasizes this visually, as there is nothing more incongruous than a black fashion model on ice wearing the darkest of clothing to aesthetically mark her off from the landscape and further highlight its sublimity.

In a sense both Peary and Julien are processing the North Pole technologically, but producing very different products. Both are open to the beauty of the landscape, and Julien acknowledges common ground with Peary and other white explorers by highlighting and creating irony in the aesthetic side of exploration. This gets us away from a simple or straightforward critique. Julien reminds us that scientific exploratory projects have an aesthetic dimension that may not be apparent in official accounts. His highly artificial and more ironical relationship to beauty is also a response to Peary’s older colonialist discourse of technology which minimizes the significance of Henson and the Inuit work force by representing them not as exploited workers but as “cogs” that are instrumental in the workings of what Peary termed his smooth and well-managed “traveling machine.”

Julien by contrast is interested in foregrounding Henson’s subjectivity and using the figure of Henson/Myrie to bring back the beauty of the Arctic. However strongly he is affirming a recovery of black subjectivity, he does it in a mockingly counter-heroic way and the heroism he maintains is deliberately exaggerated and could be understood as a form of postcolonial mimicry, to use Homi Bhabha’s well-known term.³ As in the process of mimicry more generally, Julien’s film highlights the fashioned and performed nature of the original authoritative discourse of exploration narratives and spotlights what happens when the colonialist enterprise is threatened by the displacing gaze of its double—in this case Matthew Henson/Myrie. Julien not only takes us back to these original heroic polar exploration narratives but to a whole discourse of earlier colonialist artistic and cinematic representations of the Arctic to restage, and in some sense disrupt and mock, the aesthetics and politics from which those original representations draw.

Thus, his aesthetics of the Pole cannot be simply folded back into a discussion of the sublime, science, whiteness, fashion, or politics. Instead he’s attending to it in a way that critically engages and impacts an entire tradition of photographic, cinematic, and art representations of non-white people, not only by inserting Henson and the Inuits into a central role, but by creating an entirely new parodic counter-discourse enabled by a different deployment of new technologies that underscores the nature of the human relations he represents. Julien is not only retrieving the North Pole as an arena of black male, queer and Inuit experience, but he also reminds us forcefully of the complex political, colonial, scientific, sexual and aesthetic dimensions of polar exploration.

1. See an earlier article by Lisa Bloom on Isaac Julien’s work: “True North: Isaac Julien’s Aesthetic Wager,” Isaac Julien, True North, published in the catalogue for the Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2005); republished in German and English in: Isaac Julien: True North: Fantôme Afrique. Eds. Veit Görner and Eveline Bernasconi. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2006. [↩]
2. See Gísli Pálsson’s article in this special issue on this topic. [↩]
3. See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994: 86.  [↩]