Submitted for Your Approval, #4: oh my homeland (Stephanie Barber, 2019) (Patreon)

Currently featured at the online Screening Room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, along with several other Barber films and numerous other artists' works, oh my homeland (stylized in all lowercase, like most of Barber's recent titles) is a kind of found cinematic object. As Barber herself explains it, she is interested in both history and portraiture, using found footage to generate new contexts in which previously understood cinematic documents might be reconsidered. 

What she presents us with in oh my homeland is a single-take close-up of internationally renowned soprano Leontyne Price during her 1985 farewell performance. She is singing the title role of Aida, and at the moment this particular piece of film was shot, she has just completed the aria "O patria mia." At this moment, the audience explodes in a spontaneous ovation which lasts nearly four minutes. What we are watching in the film clip is Price, subtly responding to the adulation while attempting to remain in character, gradually being overwhelmed, and then regaining her composure.

There are several things happening in this clip, of course, and in Barber's film. The most obvious is the dialectic between performer and audience, wherein the integrity of Verdi's opera is momentarily disrupted by the live audience and their acknowledgment of the legendary performer in their midst. But more than this, there is the question of Price's bearing, her place within opera as a European fine art as a raced body, and her ambivalent role as a spectacle. 

As we know, we live in a white supremacist culture, where violence against raced bodies is so random and wanton that millions are forced to take to the street to make an urgent yet elementary assertion: black lives matter. Yet here, we see a high culture audience rapturously praise Price for what she can do with her body. In one sense, this is because she has conformed to the demands of European high culture. But as we know, often even that is not enough to "overcome" blackness, to the degree that a black subject is insured of safety and value. 

As we watch Price respond to the overwhelming adulation, not just for her current performance but for her career as a whole, we can see many emotions take form across her face. She embraces this love and acceptance, and after all, she has earned it, and then some. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the pain and prejudice she faced, and that she knows that others are facing even at that moment. This is the end of the longest climb, and Price waivers between self-possession and an urge to let the mask drop. In the end, Leontyne Price seems to accept the audience's love as though her acceptance of it were a gift in itself.