Black Poirot
A Film by Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Animated Captioning Design
Black Poirot is a 20 minute ride on the Orientalised-Other Express, investigating a crime no one can remember, an internalized struggle with latent respectability politics, and featuring a special guest appearance from Edouard Glissant in the role that could have defined him.
Words from Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Still from Black Poirot
Still from Black Poirot
Abbey Lincoln (right) and Eddie Khan (left) perform on a television show in the 1960s, footage from which features in the film.
Black Poirot is a video and sound installation by artist Rosa-Johan Uddoh - a 20 minute “recasting” of Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The film features collections of archive footage and audio together with a narrated script voiceover.
While this is a video and audio work, it is more an invitation to listen than to watch, where the images serve to support the pieces of audio and text in the piece. As such a lot of the film is a black screen, where a hearing audience member might even close their eyes and focus on what they are hearing from time to time. This was the rationale for a more creative approach to captioning - to try and capture more of the feeling of the sounds for d/Deaf audiences.
Installation View of Black Poirot at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2021
Installation View of Black Poirot at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2021
Since the audio takes up the “full space”, and the screen is otherwise completely black, it felt right that the captions should take advantage of the full screen. This allowed a broad interpretation of the feelings, textures, pitches and tones of the audio to be captured within the text.
Percussive instruments can be established, flashing in a position and then blur out later, still peripherally present, as we shift focus to the voice. Letters can take on the vibrato, the scream, the pitch or the groove.
Tiresias Infofont, the official font of the BBC, was chosen as the captioning font for the film. The narrator’s voice is in yellow, voices from archive footage in green, and music in cyan. This lends the film a very classic TV-captioning aesthetic - such that breaking out of it is an exciting prospect for the animated captions, which set this conventional typeface free to express itself to the fullest.
Excerpt from Black Poirot featuring “Triptych (Prayer/Protest/Peace)” by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and footage from a 1960s TV show performance of a different part of the piece.
Excerpt from Black Poirot featuring “Silly Games” by Janet Kay, and footage from her performance of the song on Top of the Pops in 1979
An audio video installation piece by Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Lead Captioner and Descriptive Captions by Emilia Beatriz
Black Poirot was first shown at Black Tower Projects in London, curated by Phil Serfaty. It then went on to be part of Brand New Heavies, a three person show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2021, curated by Mickalene Racquel Chevremont (Deux Femms Noir), before going to Tate Modern in November 2021 as part of a Tate Modern Lates night. The film was shortlisted for the 2022 Jarman Award.