Black Code / Code Noir

Using editing that’s as much poetic collage as outraged agitprop, Louis Henderson strips bare the chain of events that leads from the Black Code (the legal text that regulated the status of slaves) to the cutting-edge technologies used by the police in the same coercion of black Americans – or how unconscious bias about slavery continues to be exercised with impunity in disguised forms. The director has a very ’Godard’ way of organising the images and sounds (double exposure, sections, text within the image, a taste for quotations), contexts and eras (the sound from one era superimposed on pictures from another), setting them against one another, provoking a dialogue, making the secret connections between them emerge, and constructing a community where past and present, the living and the dead, are battling for the same ideal.

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin
Critic and filmmaker