ARTH 290B: Music Video and American Visual Art: Exploring Lemonade

Look familiar? There are some the similarities between this sequence and an earlier video by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. Here’s how the feminist scholar Peggy Phelan describes the work, Ever Is Over All, which Rist created for the 47th Venice Biennale, in our monograph.

Critics and Beyoncé fanatics spent much of this past weekend poring over the artist’s new visual album, Lemonade, to decipher its sometimes oblique references and messages. In one of the album’s most provocative scenes (which coincides with the song “Hold Up”), Beyoncé strolls down the sidewalk in a frilly dress, merrily smashing car windows with a borrowed baseball bat.

The unpreviewed release of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” on Saturday night — you can’t really call it a surprise, given that it’s what most people were expecting — left critics scurrying to post their reactions. Less than 48 hours later, the accumulated weight of analysis already runs to tens of thousands of words, as befits an album that’s stunning in its breadth and irresistible in its gossipy particulars.

http://www.freecinemanow.com/2016/04/video-essay-film-fidelity-beyonces.html

Beyonce's new visual album Lemonade is chock full of images begging to be unpacked, from the Yoruba face paint to the baseball bat named Hot Sauce to the brief shot of a kintsuji bowl. "You could write a think piece on every single frame of Lemonade and it almost still wouldn't be enough," writes Lainey of Lainey Gossip. She's not exaggerating.

Black Camera is devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States. It regularly features essays and interviews that engage film in social as well as political distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.

"In that same song, “Freedom,” Kendrick Lamar raps about himself as an object of persecution, by the news media and consequently by law enforcement. There’s blackness — the mere state of one’s racial self — and there’s being politically black, which amounts to the degree to which one wields or weaponizes or calls attention to one’s blackness. “Freedom” constitutes a wielding. This kind of blatant statement is new for Beyoncé, who before the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement was thoughtful about the politics of the beauty of black women’s bodies, and since its arrival has wed the complexities of feminism and the vicissitudes of marriage with political blackness. She’s learned. And people are listening. “Lemonade” is the No. 2 album in the country."

"The call-and-response tradition is so deeply embedded in black cultural practice, so to help understand the meaning of this moment I sent out a call of my own to writers and thinkers who center black women and girls in their work. They responded. I like to think of this as MHP's lemonade stand, getting in-formation about Bey's latest contribution."

The visual album can inspire women everywhere to cultivate and nurture their own creative impulses.

Beyoncé’s Lemonade is grown-ass black woman magic. And the lemons that Queen Bey is working with, powerful hoodoo ingredients for overpowering bad energy, are clearly the Louisiana kind. Lush, troubling visuals show that Beyoncé is the goddess, the goddess is furious, the goddess is victorious, and most important: The goddess is every black woman. Slay.

The mothers joined Eric Garner’s mother for the visual album, appearing with photos of their deceased children.

We all know Bey slays, but commentary like bell hooks' moves the conversation forward.

New York federal judge Jed Rakoff has dismissed a lawsuit against Beyoncé concerning Lemonade, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In June, independent filmmaker Matthew Fulks had filed the lawsuit, which alleged elements of Lemonade were lifted from his short film, Palinoia.