I Am the City...Ina Archer on Medicine for Melancholy
My debut (essay) for @reverse_shot
I’ve always wanted to write about Barry Jenkin’s Medicine For Melancholy and I was pleased to be given this opportunity.
"Medicine for Melancholy, which received a 2008 Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature, stands out as both a “first” of its kind and as a disciple of earlier duet films like Before Sunrise (1995) or even Something Good Negro Kiss (1898), the newly uncovered film fragment of a Black couple (vaudevillians Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown) playfully canoodling. It is a quiet but influential work in its depiction of blackness, of Black romance and alterity in a shifting urban landscape. The film is both elegiac and symbolic, yet precisely located in San Francisco and true to the early 2000s—the beginning of the diversifying representation of Black lifeworlds that was ignited—underlined—by the Obama candidacy. A 2009 article by Dennis Lim quotes Jenkins, who said he wrote the film two years “before Obamania took off.” Obama opened up the representational arts to the notion that American identity is complex and situated and that it could be read through the experiences of the (Black) people right next door."
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