User:Arms & Hearts/Gravesend


 * http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/velez/velez12-14-07.asp
 * https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-09-27-0709250502-story.html
 * https://www.artforum.com/picks/steve-mcqueen-18786
 * https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n09/iain-sinclair/diary
 * https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.6 [cited in Toscano & Kinkle]
 * https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ikS2AgAAQBAJ
 * https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PoYRBAAAQBAJ
 * https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OGLH_4bfkWAC
 * https://read.dukeupress.edu/nka/article-abstract/2010/27/6/48801
 * https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Migrant-Image/ [cited in Toscano & Kinkle]
 * https://ashleydawson.info/2013/06/14/interview-with-t-j-demos/

The film's name refers to Gravesend's role as the starting point of Charles Marlow's journey in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Scenes in Gravesend depict coltan miners in the Congo region, a refinery in England, a sunset over the Thames and an animated sequence tracking the course of the Congo River.

Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle identify Gravesend as one of "a wide array of works in the visual arts and popular culture, which in various forms and genres track the production and distribution of particular commodities and the societies they traverse." They argue that it contains references not only to Conrad's Heart of Darkness but also to Gustave Courbet's painting The Stone Breakers.

Toscano and Kinkle argue that films such as Gravesend "can be seen to dislocate the fetish of the commodity by bringing to the fore, howver tentatively, the social relations largely shrouded by the final products, to disclose the violence behind the anodyne surface of exchange."