“Wildcat is a state of mind; an experiment inspired by the composition and performance of jazz music.
The characters that populate this world are actual – cowboys; and envisioned – angels.
The town they all inhabit is real – Grayson, Oklahoma.”
2012 gave us “Until the Quiet Comes”, the pithy collaboration between filmmaker Kahlil Joseph and musician Flying Lotus. Its difficult to imagine how the two could follow up and overcome the emotional, sociocultural, and cinematic panorama realized in their singular first film. With 2013’s “Wildcat,” Joseph and FlyLo expand on the audiovisual lexicon they formulated and introduced in “Until…”
Again Joseph inscribes the life of all-black rodeo in Grayson, Oklahoma with his semiotically dense montages and dreamlike cinematic gestures, all too sensitive of the sublime. Pun aside, monochrome–sharply contrasting with its predecessor’s brocaded hues–highlights several undertones in “Wildcat”: nostalgia for American romanticism, a Malboro Man stoicism typically associated with the Midwest, and the irony inherent in the existence of a black rodeo. FlyLo’s score holds balance with all these. His track for an alternate American Midwest sounds delicately surreal, but no less majestic for it.
