e-flux presents True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films
Black Code/Code Noir
Louis Henderson
2015
10 Minutes
Courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Date
March 9–22, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Louis Henderson’s Black Code/Code Noir (2015), on view from Tuesday, March 9 through Monday, March 22, 2021.
Black Code/Code Noir unites temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the murder of Michael Brown and that of Kajieme Powell by American police officers in 2014. Archaeologically, the film argues that behind this current situation is a sedimented history of slavery, preserved by the Black Code laws of the colonies in the early Americas. These codes have transformed into the algorithms that configure police Big Data and the necropolitical control of African-Americans today. Yet, how can we read this in the present? How can we unwrite the sorcery of this code as a hack? Through a historical détournement, the film suggests the Haitian Revolution as the first instance of a hacking of the Black Code and, perhaps, a symbol for future hope.
Black Code/Code Noir is presented here as one of four films in Part Three | Tracking the Coded Real, the third of five programs in the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists‘ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.
True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.