We saw them working together on Uniform prestige (Dupuis) in 2005. They put their talent together to Black-out. Loo Hui Phang explains the reasons for this return: ” We thought for a long time about what we could do that was not repeated. And then very quickly, we said to ourselves that the world of cinema interested us a lot, but not the official history, we wanted to explore the margins of cinema, the hidden side, the occult side. The first idea was to make an almost fantastic story about cinema, almost a story of witchcraft with this strange thing of cinema that is the ability to make things appear and make them disappear. I had in mind an actor who would not print the film, who would be invisible. As I started to think more specifically about the question, I asked myself: “What is invisible in the cinema?” I quickly came across the idea of comedians of color who were underemployed, erased, cut out of movies and the difficulty of being a comedian when you weren’t white in classic Hollywood. »
- Thanks to Pixel Vengeur at the Forum des Images.
She continues: ” By documenting myself, I found a lot of food for thought, a lot of lack too and I also scoured my memories of this classic Hollywood. Like a lot of people of my generation, I grew up with the last shoot, all the movies from the golden age of Hollywood with a lot of westerns, a lot of musicals and therefore a lot of Indian characters in the westerns. which were either played by real Indians but which were often relegated to the background. Sometimes we did not have the names of the actors and there was a real mystery concerning these people who were very often white actors dressed as Indians. It was also to answer all my questions that I wrote “Black-out”? It ties in with themes that are dear to me, which come up regularly in my books: identity, invisibility, hidden things, lies, double characters, where are we in the society in which we are evolves, the feeling of being a foreigner too. These are very personal questions that run from book to book. »
We are therefore faced with a work that is both fantastic, historical but also sociological and political, developed through the character of Maximus, more and more involved over the course of the work, like these actors of color who have submitted to customs. and the codes of this cinema industry with no real alternative. Hence this dissenting voice, that of Maximus who gradually rejects proposals for the roles of slaves, atrocious or stupid, a niche reserved for characters of foreign origin. The particularity of Maximus is that he embodies all these ethnic minorities of the United States, a hero who plays an Indian in The Broken Arrow, of Delmer Daves, of a Latino in Vertigo d’Alfred Hitchcock or an African in The Maltese Falcon of John Huston.
- © Loo Hui Phang & Hugues Micol – Ed. Futuropolis
It was also Loo’s will: ” Maximus is different people. I borrowed part of Paul Robeson, a part of Lena Horne and pieces of several colored actors, Yul Brynner for seduction, for ambiguity, there are a lot of real actors. I would have liked to be able to write a real biopic of an unknown actor who would have this career there but I did not find an actor with so many ethnicities, I wanted him not to be exclusively black, Asian or Indian but that it is a mixture of all that, that it represents a kind of universality which would be the counterpart of the universality of the white man, of white Americans. “He was the Americans” as said Rita Hayworth at the end of the album. But he also has white blood: Maximus therefore really represents the Americans on his own. »
A multifaceted artist, both through his career and his talent which was accomplished in acting, singing or dancing. A mix of genres and arts that Loo Hui Phang is familiar with, being herself a writer, graphic novel writer, playwright and director, most notably the show Hide and seek, where she called on comic book authors Hugues Micol and François Olislaeger in 2009 and director.
“I had already imagined Maximus’ journey as being a victim of McCarthyism, erased and cut from films and when I discovered Paul Robeson and his journey, it is exactly what I imagined for my character and when I thought it for Maximus I said to myself I am going maybe a little hard, it is maybe a little too big what I’m telling and in fact the reality is largely at the level or above the fiction, I did not invent anything , all this is terrible and really existed and so it seemed natural to me that my Maximums met Paul Robeson, that he be his idol and that there is a very strong bond between them. There are a lot of broken destinies, of things unfulfilled, of talented actors in Hollywood who never made it through because of segregation, because of racist prejudice, it was a script challenge to get to tell all these stories. through a single character and synthesize all this complexity and all these problems of ethnic difference, of this Hollywood which is this terrible machine for making stars and which is this showcase of white and conquering and imperialist America, all of this told by the reverse. “
A colossal density of information that the screenwriter has managed to condense into an album of 200 pages, sublimated by the brush of Hugues Micol. Plates that bring us almost into a parallel world where it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the true from the false: ” “It is at the same time the fruit of an active reflection from which I document myself, I support my reflection by proven facts, historical data, several cross-checks of the real order, then there is a great part of instinct, intuitive, where I feel that my unconscious is more intelligent than me and that I only have to gather material. It is the fruit of my unconscious and my reflection that will knit all this together and find a natural form of writing. This is why there are several levels of narration in the book: there is a historical, documentary, didactic level, but also fantastic, in any case dreamlike. underneath all that, an invisible architecture, partly explicable but which, sometimes, remains a little mysterious for me.I try to stay in a correctness. »
- © Loo Hui Phang & Hugues Micol – Ed. Futuropolis
The subject of the album echoes in particular a certain topicality like the movements #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter: “It’s very disturbing, because I started working on the script several years ago. These are questions that have been in the air for a while: there was already an Oscar boycott in 2016 because the Oscars were exclusively white, there were no black figures named. This issue of segregation and racism in Hollywood has never been regulated and neither has that of sexism, at some point it all had to explode, for sure. “
Loo Hui Phang develops: “ There was also the fact that during the era Obama, for eight years it felt like the United States had become more tolerant, less racist, I think this is huge progress and that a lot of countries are not ready to elect a black president, like the noted the director of “Get Out”, Jordan Peele, which deals a lot with this issue. He said America hadn’t become less racist, they had suppressed their feelings about a black president. People hadn’t felt the right to openly say they were racist except at the end of Obama’s term when Trump was elected. Everything exploded at that moment, a kind of uninhibited speech was released. There was something in the air and I think like everyone else I noticed it. It all matched my work on the book. I don’t know if we can speak of a coincidence of timing but, for me, there is never really any chance, things organize themselves. I think it’s … a conspiracy of the collective unconscious! The book comes out when we need to tackle all these issues and think together, not to confront each other. »
- © Loo Hui Phang & Hugues Micol – Ed. Futuropolis
She insists on this way of leading the fight: ” What touched me a lot was when people who are not from an ethnic minority, people who are not directly concerned with the issue of racism, told me “I understand better what this is about. ‘is and I identify 100% with Maximus. I understand what it feels like to be different, I feel extremely close to him ”It really makes me happy because it’s this mirror effect. I find that fiction has precisely this strong ability to create identification. »
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