Into the Cool
notes on 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘴, Isaach de Bankolé's collaboration with his then-wife Cassandra Wilson
IF PREVIOUS VOLUMES of Element X relied too heavily on the anecdotal, it was only to be up front about their necessarily skewed, human perspective. There was a time in my life when I thought I was writing about movies for posterity: some vague notion of helping a future reader-consumer-cinephile navigate an imaginary marketplace of opinions and recommendations, like I was carving my two-and-a-half-star ratings of random fourwalled documentaries into marble, an eternal pressure to say something that would last. It’s impossible not to wince when revisiting my criticism from the past decade: a sad but extremely common situation where a young writer pantomimes wisdom to cover his inexperience and insecurity. The truth is that many of my most important encounters with le cinema took place through random happenstance, and I suspect my own personal canon of movies is likelier the result of blind fate and dumb luck than some long and winding road of systematic research. (This is also why it’s more fun to be a programmer than a professional critic!) Enter the 2000 concert documentary Cassandra Wilson: Traveling Miles, which I encountered on a Japanese DVD while helping a friend last summer, an industry vet who was clearing out their office after many years.
The typical “backstage” documentary following a musician on an important tour, a performer approaching their final curtain, a star about to retire a signature persona, et cetera - it always has a certain gaucheness to it, a whiff of vanity. By dint of being from the 1990s, shot on black and white film, in and out of hotels and dressing rooms, Traveling Miles invites inevitable comparison to 1991’s infinitely more famous Madonna: Truth or Dare, an elongated PR stunt that traded on the promise of risqué footage of Madonna and her romantic interests at the time, including Warren Beatty in his mid-Fifties. (Whenever I need a laugh I remember a line from a Making of Dick Tracy coffee table book I once scooped at a flea market: “Who is Warren Beatty? If Hollywood is one big party, he’s the music in the other room…'“) Now, a documentary following Cassandra Wilson on tour at this juncture would be interesting in its own right: before the Starbucks-Norah Jones CD industrial complex flattened cafe culture in the United States at the turn of the millennium, Wilson was the biggest jazz vocalist of her generation. Purists ridiculed her for covering pop songs while others credited her with keeping vocal jazz visible, responsive to the shifting marketplace. Traveling Miles appears to be the official tie-in film for Wilson’s album of the same name, for which she wrote lyrics to accompany reinterpretations of select songs by Miles Davis - a project considered audacious for good reason, an outgrowth of Blood on the Fields, a 1997 oratorio by Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center which featured Wilson on vocals. (Marsalis is among Wilson’s band of musicians in this film.)
Curiouser and curiouser, the director of Traveling Miles was Wilson’s husband at the time, the tall/dark/handsome French-Ivorian movie star Isaach de Bankolé, most famous in the States for his performances in films by Claire Denis (Chocolat, No Fear No Die) and Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth, The Limits of Control.) The cinematographer was Derek Cianfrance, who went on to direct indiewood prestige dreck like Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond The Pines - although Traveling Miles also contains footage that matches with that of Arthur Jafa’s music video for Wilson’s single “Until”, from the 1995 album New Moon Daughter. Like Traveling Miles, Jafa’s video is essentially an impressionistic and footloose depiction of Wilson and de Bankolé’s relationship, trading on their obvious frisson, drawing and then skirting a line between public and private, from back when the word “verité” was all but a synonym for handheld, black-and-white, 16mm. Here, we enter a rich cinematic landscape: movies made by/about real life couples, starring or directed by lovers, cinematic vanitases of relationships in media res. Brad Pitt x Angelina Jolie in Mr. And Mrs. Smith or By The Sea, Olivier Assayas x Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep or Clean, Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful, Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake, Minnelli x Garland, Jean-Luc Godard’s entire career, Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s Silverlake Life - the list goes on. (Every film, after all, is about attachment……) Jafa himself was married to Julie Dash when he worked as director of photography on her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust, now understood as one of the most important Black films of the last quarter-century.