Wu Tsang’s film Girl Talk features poet, scholar, and long-term collaborator Fred Moten rhythmically moving to a performance of a jazz standard. Moten wears a beautiful studded cloak, assimilating light drag, that catches the sunlight as Moten spins in a garden slow mo, lip synching the words to the song. The simple amateur gesture of the performance and also the device it was filmed on (an iPhone) suggest a moment of spontaneity that is captured as much as staged through the exploration of the identity of the two protagonists and their shared space, which becomes the third entity in the film. The viewer can perceive a call and response between the two creators, as their dominant practices alternate between foreground and background, Wu Tsang’s being visual and physical communication and Moten’s text and speech.

The song itself, Betty Carter’s version of “Girl Talk”, is a song about women written by two men (Neal Hefti and Bobby Troup for the 1965 movie Harlow). It was performed by men until a version was written to be sung by women, in which “they” became “we” in the lyrics. The version you hear in the film, however, is produced by Josiah Wise, aka Serpentwithfeet, an experimental Brooklyn-based musician.

Girl Talk, 2015
Single channel HD video with stereo sound, 4’00’’
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin