The Image Left Behind: The Films of Kalil Haddad
As it continues to tour across North America, Sarah Fensom examines Kalil Haddad's provocative, self-curated program of short films, titled "He Never Dies".
A few weeks ago, I received a pitch from Sarah Fensom, about the films of Kalil Haddad. I’ve been fascinated by his work ever since I saw The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) a few years ago, though I’m sad to say I haven’t had the chance to see the rest of his films in the time since. That unfortunate reality is rectified, in part, by Sarah’s sensitive, insightful essay, which identifies the provocative and the tender inside Haddad’s archival-oriented films. They repurpose and re-contextualize images of male youth — be they boys and teenagers on school picture day, or young men performing performing sex acts for the camera — which an invisible audience, hungry for innocence and desperation, devours. Full of the promise, these images comprise an underutilized archive of queer imagination. In her essay, Sarah homes in on this inherent tension, unlocking something fresh in Haddad’s cinema I personally hadn’t quite considered. It was a pleasure commission this piece, and it’s a perfect way to (belatedly) kick off Pride month.
— Chris Cassingham, Substack editor
Several of Kalil Haddad’s films begin with a school picture. An adolescent boy poses for the camera, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, a wide smile revealing stubby new teeth. At face value, the school picture establishes normalcy—it’s a rite of passage and shared experience every American boy can recall. School pictures are also evidence, a paper trail of youth and innocence. The viewer has seen this before and knows what’s coming next, at least to some degree, because the school picture is the eternal image of lost or murdered or molested children. It’s the face on the milk carton, the image that anchors the primetime news magazine segment on network TV, where the journalist or talking head says so-and-so was always such a happy child, or had such a normal childhood. It’s the image that lives even when its subject doesn’t.
