Looking for Langston

Looking for Langston is a 1989 British blackandwhite film, directed by Isaac Julien and produced by Sankofa Film amp Video Productions. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a nonlinear impressionistic storyline celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film is a short, running at about 42 minutes.

The film is not a biography of Langston Hughes. It is a memoriam to Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as reconstructed from a black gay perspective. Moreover, it purports to be a meditation on the black gay experience within a historical context built around the homophobia, oppression and denial faced by men of African descent within black communities alongside allusions and political commentary on white racism.Hughes is presented as an icon and cultural metaphor for black gay men who were confronted with being ostracized if they did not conform to black bourgeoisie standards whose overriding goal concerned fuller social integration. Contested are the ways the black male and his sexuality have been represented in the modern Western world and how existing notions of race and gender figure within American and AfricanAmerican culture. ........

Source: Wikipedia