Inertia
Inertia (2018)
Created by: Brandon Markell Holmes
Inertia is an experimental visual album, a meditation on the history of Black survival in the face of personal and political trauma held together by the vocal and lyrical artistry of Brandon Markell Holmes.
In the piece, we mostly see Brandon – gazing directly at the camera, running to it and away from it, occasionally dancing – amid a collage of digital post-production and found footage, from Civil Rights protests to Soul Train. The overall effect of the piece reminds me of the opening line of Julius Fleming’s Black Patience: “The history of blackness is at once a violent history of waiting and radical refusal to wait.”
For Brandon, those political histories are allegories for inner struggles:
“All of the emotions I was feeling, now I’m able to put meaning to them. These were all the things that were living in my subconscious that I couldn’t necessarily say in words, I could only see them in pictures,” he said in a talkback after a screening and live performance.
Credit: Jaclyn Rivas
Inertia is a rare work of film focused on mental health struggles among Black and queer men. Brandon said that the piece reflects his coming of age in his teen years struggling with narcissism and self-image, bulimia and anorexia. In the piece, we see the “VHS” effect that later became quite trendy among rising Black and queer filmmakers, which recalls Brandon’s history watching MTV, where celebrities would complain about their weight and showcase plastic surgery, which has now shifted to social media, fueled by narcissism.
“I became upset by the way I looked,” he said.
The vintage touches overlaying Brandon’s images play on his mental struggle, a fogginess and suggestions of schizophrenia amid the scratchiness we associate with TV fuzz.
The references to civil rights reflect the unjust things Brandon saw growing up on the west side of Chicago in Austin, the residue of the movement and slavery which relate to community-wide mental instability.
Meditating on the images of Soul Train, Brandon remarks that creator Don Cornelius, purveyor of Black joy, committed suicide. “Black men needing that love, needing that support. Knowing that it’s OK to hug another man, it’s OK to cry.”