The Paulding Avenue Trilogy: Interview With Thomas Allen Harris

i Harris, Vintage: Families of value, 1995. Film Still T H E P AU L D I N G AV E N U E •IrY INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS O K W U I E N W E Z O R 20 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art This interview was conducted in 2003. Thomas Allen Harris is a film-maker and an experimental video artist who lives in New York. Okwui Enewzor: Shortly before our conversation began, we were talking about the relationship of the audience and processes of identification with film. I suppose that also has to do internally and structurally with the idea of desire. How do the processes of identification and desire operate in the work that you've done so far as a filmmaker? There are three critical strands I find in your work: there is first the importance of memory , second, there is the relationship between the archive and memory that you've used to a great effect in the film trilogy in which you explore your family history; and third, there is the interplay of desire, the desire for self-knowledge; particularly queer desire. Are all these strands fundamental to your thinking as a filmmaker, or are they simply different strands that come together to define your complex project? Thomas Allen Harris: I think it has to do with my identity and perception , and a certain sense of affiliation and affinity, seeing a family based around affiliation, based around affinity, based not so much around a shared desire, but a kind of courage to create a space that one can breathe in, that one can live in, even though that space might not necessarily be popular, current, legal, or traditional. And so I think that's this is something that has driven my work. I grew up in this amazing household . You know, I think all of our households are amazing and given the way we look at them, they could be much more amazing as the gist for one's art. I grew up in a family of intellectuals and revolutionaries and in a family whose members actually projected themselves beyond what one would assume of a lower-middle-class family in the Bronx. I grew up listening to adults having these amazing conversations around Pan-African ideals, and I also grew up with an awareness that it was both acceptable and unacceptable for me to be queer, to have a certain type of desire, and to create space within the family where I could be myself completely . So, I think that cinematically I wanted to actually to create a space where I could be myself completely. This is particularly true in my early films Splash, Black Body, Heaven, Earth, and Hell, which culminated in Vintage: Families of Value. That was the foundation for my beginning as a filmmaker. I wrote Vintage: Families of Value specifically to be about gay and lesbian sibling relationships and forms of identity within the context of the black family. The film was also a platform to explore queer identity itself within the center of the black family, gay and lesbian identities as the black family. It grew from there, conceptually to explore more directly this other kind of spiritual identification. With the second film in the trilogy , E Minha Cara/That's My Face, I began my quest to explore the spiritual relationships among diasporic Africans in the Americas and for this exploration Bahia, in Brazil, became my location. The film is spiritual in the sense of it being a journey of self-discovery, and spiritual in the sense that it's also a kind of sense-talking, communication with one's ancestors . But I don't mean spirituality here in a religious sense, I am speaking about a kind of spirituality that exists within space of meditation— with one's self, with another person, the feeling of goodwill and love, a certain sense of desire that is not necessarily just about sexual desire, but more about intimacy: to be able to reach out and touch someone, stroke someone, feel like I want to be touched. I became an adolescent in Tanzania and there, men...