Written between the lines of Shawn Peters and Kya Lou’s artist talk at the “Opticality: Seeing in the Way of Things” event is Terrence Nance’s visual counterpart to Andre 3000’s debut solo album by the same name, New Blue Sun (Listening) (2023). The film features Andre listening to the album and experimenting with various listening positions, activities, and objects in an entirely blue room. As he improvises his performance in response to the improvised recording, the room shifts in lighting, shade, and mise-en-scene. 

For instance, Andre’s traffic cone is used as a viewing device, a listening device, a toy, a potential threat, a friend, an object that might feel heavy but not be (just as emotional heaviness can add physical resistance that deters sustained engagement), and a hat. Like the instrument, understood as a “tool or implement,” Andre’s use of the object affects how it is understood.[1] If cinema is a weapon (as Bradford Young has said), but Andre’s flute can easily become a walking stick and a baseball bat when used as such, then cinema need not be. Its function depends on how it is used, and thus how we see it—or how we arrive at the object as Daren Fowler would say. In the filmic space of New Blue Sun (Listening), the traffic cone does not regulate movement. 

Lou was the film’s colorist and, in many ways, New Blue Sun (Listening) makes plain a soulful sensibility that, arguably, colors her claim that, for her, cinema is not a weapon, but an instrument. I see this figurative “shade,” so to speak, seep through the record both from and toward Peters’ sensibilities when he fondly reminisces on his early work with Nance, which often came together spontaneously and through experimentation as much as their meeting on a subway platform did. I see it also in Peters’ Zoom meeting with the liquid blackness team in preparation for the event, where he compares the lens to a paintbrush— “You can use a fine paintbrush to spread the paint, or you can use a broom” and “16mm could be watercolor; digital is gouache”—when outlining his stance on opticality, which takes as reference Young’s characterization of the lens as “the final [and most neglected] frontier between image and viewer.” 

Yet, he says, it’s also “maybe more than a paintbrush” which he describes as “a fine line” and states that he doesn’t “want to be too poetic about it.” I, instead, would like to be a little poetic about it. 

I want to pose this “more than” as that sense of vitality and aliveness that flows through human actors (Lou, Peters, Nance, Andre 3000) and their “instruments” (broadly: a musical instrument, a tool that extends one’s capacities, an apparatus of violence or, perhaps, an instrument of the State).[2]

As these colors bleed together, Lou insists on “finding the heartbeat” and “finding the pulse” of the project in each instance, which may very well include a beat from Peters’ that emerges in New Blue Sun (Listening) through Nance. These artists are seeing through their previous practices with one another, even when those artists do not come in direct contact with the project.   

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In this article on his screening of Andre 3000’s “A New Blue Sun,” Jonathan Tolliver of The Knockturnal writes that the video features "Andre in a blue room just living. A living room, if you will.” Rather than a gathering space, here a living room is a space where one (1) guy listens to music. Yet the objects within it read more as “props” than the togetherness of object and space implied by living room “décor.”[3]

But Corey, aren’t we always undergoing changes in mood and activity, which would make every room a living room? Why does this room acquire the title, but not others that offer a better sense of familiarity and togetherness? 

I’m glad you asked, rhetorically productive question-asking voice. My inclination is that Tolliver is picking up on the sense of aliveness, in a poetic sense and as Kevin Quashie understands the term as an openness to all relations that would be possible within a Black world.[4] Such aliveness fundamentally depends on rupturing the social givenness of the world at present and therefore provides an opportunity for a heightened awareness of alternate relations of existence. As flow between person and world by means of instrument—perhaps a room, a poem, a camera, or a body—aliveness as practice shrinks the distance between person and world as perceptually separable things.[5]

In the artist talk, both Lou and Peters emphasized the importance of emotion in guiding their perspectives and practices. Peters noted that, moving (or not) an audience depends upon several material choices, such as the glass within the lens in Young’s case, or the feeling and memory of the natural world when designing lighting on set. About his work on the pilot of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Peters says: 

…that house is a set. It’s not real. There’s no sun. The sun is created by me. It’s on a stage. It’s on a black void […], eventually the cinematographer in conjunction with the director, [must] look through that lens, […]  that monitor and make sure we’re making these little micro-decisions based on […] a feeling and memory about what the natural world is supposed to look like.

For Peters, an approximation of the world is made possible by the affordances and limitations of the instrument used to depict it. Yet “more than a paintbrush” signals the feeling and memory of the “natural world” that Peters seeks to channel. Perhaps, it is this “more than” that remains in the use of any instrument that meets the various “lenses” that audiences bring with them, and which becomes a site of virtual gathering. This space is made possible both by the film lens and several lenses that are not present at the time of shooting.[6]

This virtual space can be used as a weapon, an instrument, or a living room: a place of familiarity and togetherness that can move through any material thing for this purpose. In New Blue Sun (Listening), Andre sees through but also listens and feels through the instruments of flute, figurine, and traffic cone. While the room is blue and empty, the set of New Blue Sun (Listening) is also an improvisational space that carries energy: a new blue sun.

As learned from Peters, there is no sun in the black void of cinematic space. So, when tending to the blackness of that space, a soulful practice provides a glimpse of life where the monumentally weighty and oppressive social structure of whiteness—now a blur in the background of perception—can be felt as if it were temporarily easy to carry, by focusing on the possibility contained within a Black world as the ground for aliveness.[7] The source of soul is not stationary but ongoing: the act of creation itself, figured maternally. [8]

That is to say, the “light source” comes from Peters, Lou, Nance, the crew, as they meet the photoreceptor cells of the viewer. The living room is where our experiences come in contact to consider the color that’s on the walls and whether a different one should be there instead. Creators always carry “more than a paintbrush” as part of their instrumentation, … that, one day, we will hopefully wear as a hat. [9]

 

Figures

Figure 1. Andre 3000 wearing a traffic cone as a hat. New Blue Sun (Listening) (Terence Nance, 2023). Frame grab.
Figure 2. Andre 3000 seated and listening to his album. New Blue Sun (Listening) (Terence Nance, 2023). Frame grab.
Figure 3. Andre 3000 laying next to a candle, moving a figurine in front of the light. New Blue Sun (Listening) (Terence Nance, 2023). Frame grab.
Figure 4. Andre 3000 kneeled, peering through a traffic cone at the camera. New Blue Sun (Listening) (Terence Nance, 2023). Frame grab.

 

Notes

[1] Definition provided by Oxford Languages and Google. 

[2] This is part of my present thinking on the difference between spirit (spectral inhabitance, possession) and soul (a sense of Oneness, both individual and collective, without separation). 

[3] I am thinking of djones’ “Track 25: The Living Room Studio” where his old home, a house that no longer stands, provided a nurturing and transformative experience that continues to move through him. 

[4] Quashie, Black Aliveness, 13, 14. 

[5] This idea of “shrinking of distance,” such that self can be looked at from a viewpoint of self-and-world comes from Alessandra Raengo’s commitment to take Jomo Fray seriously when he says The Nickel Boys provides a “sentient image,” rather than a POV shot. For Raengo, the sentient image cinematically illustrates Fred Moten’s theory of “seeing with” that is explained in literature via the grammatical anomaly used by James Baldwin when he reflects on “all that beauty,” which includes himself as a part of the thing he is looking at. 

[6] Anna Winter has brought to our attention that, when talking about “detuning” the lens, which typically refers to the intentional degradation of the lens to achieve a less pristine, film-like quality in the image, Bradford Young and Shawn Peters often call it “tuning” the lens. This language aligns the imperfections of the wear that comes with use over time with the accumulation of memory, rather than loss. The lens lives a life and shares in the story and, in passing the lens on, acquires a chain of memories unique to each lens that it’s tuned into, or attuned to. 

[7] Cramer, “Building the Black Universal Archive,” 132-133. Instead of considering how the immense structure of Blackness might appear light in a singular screening due to its many social grounds that stabilize it, I am considering this proposition with regard to the structure of Whiteness, which appears heavy and solidly fixed in place due to its own prolific social supports. If there is a mode of seeing and feeling that can make the traffic cone feel physically resistant to Andre 3000, another mode could reveal major kinks in the well-established, fortified object, and produce a sense of aliveness instead. 

[8] When Lizette London asked the artists, as a follow up to the question of vitality, how they optically lens (or understand the sensibility of) blackness, they responded with a discussion on their mothers and the maternal. See London’s IMR “The (Black) Maternal Function and Opticality” for further context. 

[9] I am thinking of the swirling galaxy contained within the drum and the black hole within the saxophone, both at rest, pictured in A Love Supreme by A.G. Rojas with Shawn Peters as DP, which was screened at the Opticality event; 'A Love Supreme, Pt. I' John Coltrane — Directors' Library.