An Artist Is Reimagining Black History Through Experimental Film

'Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement I – The Visions' is contemporary telling of personal black history.

by Antwaun Sargent

February 18, 2016, 5:10pm

Presskit Still 8 x 10 #4. All images and video courtesy of the artist

Over the last six years, video artist Tiona McClodden has been busy in North Philadelphia making a film that explores her personal heritage. The first installment of the nonlinear biographical film, Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement I – The Visions is on view as part of the artist’s recently opened solo show, Dreaming of Kin, at The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. The first of the four-part series shows what the artist describes as “a statement about ideas of body and gestural memory.”

A series of film posters, trailers, stills, and sculptural objects conceptually make up the entire first movement of the film, which is centered on the history of McClodden’s family. The artist reimagines the way Black American history is often told as a collection of heroes trying to free a group of people. Hers accounts for the everyday experiences of those who lived through enslavement.

Lobby Card #4

“My fascination with film as a form of art, the structure of film, my personal spiritual biography, my family’s history, and my interest and investment in black history is what inspired the film,” explains the artist. “I am always interested in trying to bring black history to a contemporary place,” says McClodden.

In scene five, Haint, a mute spirit, is meant to bridge both the past and present; she moves throughout the world in Dr. Martens boots and custom grills, with her hair tied underneath a scarf evoking the way black women wore their hair throughout the 19th century.

Trailer I Family Tree Still, Dear Father.

McClodden says the film’s character represents an engagement with ancestors she never met. She says, “there are things that are told to me about these people in my family but I don’t have pictures so I created these things as a maternal and fraternal generation of their history and location in the country.”

In Scene II: Bout’ Time, Protection, Haint carries a map. She is reading early black technologies—negro spirituals, the Big Dipper, and Little Dipper that contains the North Star—as a way to reassess these old technologies that are both subversive and play a fantastical role in the black American narrative. In this way, McClodden says, “I am commenting on enslavement, post-enslavement, and the Great Migration, and I am combining that with my family’s history.”

Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement I – The Visions | SCENE II Bout Time-Excerpt from Harriet's Gun Media on Vimeo.

“I’m breaking apart and exploring very specific aspects of my family’s narrative that will be explicated,” McClodden tells The Creators Project “I want people to understand that this is an artist that is trying to critique a system in terms of film in a way that modifies it. I want people to see what it looks like if you look at your family close enough and uplift them as icons. I am aligning film and family with each other. At the end of the day this [film] is a portrait of myself.”