ONLY WHEN IT'S DARK ENOUGH CAN YOU SEE THE STARS

The following are a series of stills and excerpts from the film Only When Its Dark Enough Can You See The Stars (2017) produced and production designed by Abigail DeVille and directed by Charlotte Brathwaite. The title is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech, delivered on 3rd April 1968 at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee.

The text here reproduces excerpts from the film’s script, which draws from and is inspired by Eric Roach, Frank B. Wilderson III and Martin Luther King Jr. DeVille was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art to respond to Alexander Calder’s ‘Hypermobility’ exhibition in 2017. She created the film as a direct response to Calder’s film Work in Progress (1968).

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a view into black consciousness

a trance

a drowning dream

in the hole

the shackled dream

our hearts break not though they are ever broken

a froth of laughter tops our sea of sorrows

our voices bear the tracery of tears

what is a black?

a subject?

an object?

a former slave? a slave? the relational status, or lack thereof, of black subjectivity?

when I was a young student at [--] university in new york there was a black woman who used to stand outside the gate and yell at whites, latinos and east- and south- asian students, staff and faculty as they entered the university. she accused them of having stolen her sofa and of selling her into slavery. she always winked at the blacks, but we didn’t wink back. some of us thought her outbursts bigoted and out of step with the burgeoning ethos of multiculturalism and rainbow coalitions. but others did not wink back because we were too fearful of the possibility that her isolation would become our isolation, and we had come to [--] for the precise but largely assumed and unspoken purpose of foreclosing on that peril.