Sunshine State: Steve McQueen’s haunting art installation

• Reviewed from the International Film Festival Rotterdam

“Sometimes I felt my father was holding me back; I didn’t realise until he told me that story that he was holding me tight.” This sentence closes Steve McQueen’s first voiceover in Sunshine State, a two-channel installation commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The work relays a story his father shared on his deathbed. In Florida in the 1950s, after a racist confrontation in a bar, the elder McQueen narrowly escaped a mob. His two companions, also migrant workers from the West Indies, were killed. The voiceover repeats three times. Different parts are excised from each iteration, shifting emphases as the story is distilled to its factual essence, but the last five words are always the same: he was holding me tight.

Inviting reflection on the entwined processes of personal and historical memory, this gradual reduction takes up most of the running time. As McQueen speaks on the soundtrack – his voice measured, solemn – two large screens suspended in a dark space show the dress rehearsal scene from The Jazz Singer (1927), the first ‘talkie’. The footage is doctored, so that when the protagonist Jack Robin applies blackface before going on stage, his face disappears; it evokes and embodies the central idea of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. A positive image of the scene plays backwards on one screen, while a negative image plays in correct order on the other. The two streams meet when Robin, who has renounced his Jewish roots for showbusiness, is visited by his distraught mother and they tearfully embrace. An intersectional gesture, literally and figuratively, the doubling of this moment elaborates the themes of heritage and responsibility evoked in McQueen’s narration.

That the first film in history to give characters a voice climaxes with a minstrel show is inherently symbolic. McQueen’s probing of cinema’s origins links back to his early installation Deadpan (1997), a recreation of the iconic collapsing house stunt from Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), with the artist taking Buster Keaton’s place. In the 25 years separating the two installations, McQueen entered the film business and became hugely successful, the first Black director of a Best Picture Oscar-winner. His implied identification with Robin – a character who rejects his father, adopts a non-Jewish name and finally achieves success by donning blackface – makes for a pointed interrogation of his own standing within cinema’s tainted history.

The black-and-white world of The Jazz Singer eventually gives way to images of the sun, sourced from NASA. The shock of colour is accompanied by McQueen’s voice saying the phrase “Shine on me, Sunshine State” over and over, the repetition transforming his words into a chant whose import remains ambiguous. It could just as well represent an imploration as an attempt at exorcism.