ABSTRACT
This essay explores British installation artist and filmmaker Issac Julien's historiographical and artistic project of rewriting cultural memory, and considers how music and sound help to manufacture the rich set of visual images across multiple screens in two of his works: True North and Ten Thousand Waves. Isaac Julien's technique of incorporating sound into "parallel montage," or the editing of several screens at once rather than sticking to the strictly linear editing of a single screen, results in the carving out of an "architectural space" for his multiscreen installations. The soundtrack for True North provides a kind of narrative unity, stitching together the various screens for the viewer. Through his conception of sound as inhabiting a prior compositional space, and indeed one that guides the visual material, Julien's film installations gracefully bridge image and sound, land and ocean, colonizer and colonized through multiple narratives, offering the viewer/auditor new ways to apprehend, to mourn, and to remember.
