Justin Williams Event & Visit to the BFCA
Justin Williams is the Project Manager and Archivist at the University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP). At this talk, they introduced new interactive features on the South Side Home Movie Project’s recently redesigned website (www.sshmp.uchicago.edu) that allow users to create and share “community tags” and “memories.” These features allow users of all kinds to immerse themselves directly in descriptive practices as full partners. Williams presented on the collaborative design process that led to the development of these features and the SSHMP’s innovative programming approach.
SSHMP is a community-engaged initiative to collect, preserve, digitize, research, and exhibit small-gauge home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. To date, SSHMP has served over 35 families and preserved more than 700 films shot between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s. This time period overlaps with the growth of Chicago’s African American communities fueled by the Great Migration. This racial demographic shift is evident in the first-hand accounts of family and community life, social and cultural events, and historic moments depicted within SSHMP’s collections.
BFCA Archival Assistant Essence London
Unique in its focus on home movies from this region, SSHMP aims to build an alternative, accessible visual record, filling gaps in existing written and visual histories. The project brings materials that are typically kept in private collections into public light and discussion. By asking home movie donors to share their footage, describe it from their personal perspectives, and allow it be creatively reused in novel ways, SSHMP hopes to transmit the cultural heritage of Chicago’s South Side and ensure it reaches new audiences and will be available to future generations.
Carmen Jones Film Screening on April 4th
In partnership with the local chapter of NAACP and the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center (NMBCC), we hosted a public screening of Carmen Jones (1954) in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive screening room. The film features an all-Black cast starring Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, and Pearl Bailey. Set to the music of Georges Bizet’s famous opera Carmen, it changes the setting from a cigarette factory in bull-fighting obsessed Spain to a World War II American parachute factory. Oscar Hammerstein II wrote new lyrics, but the murderous love triangle remains.
The screening was followed by a panel with former BFCA Director Dr. Audrey McCluskey and Director of the NMBCC, Dr. Gloria Howell.
Black Filmmaker Interviews
The Black Film Center & Archive holds hundreds of rare interview recordings documenting the stories of Black film artists. In our ongoing monthly series, “The Black Film Center & Archive Presents: Black Filmmaker Interviews,” we will widely publish one previously-unreleased interview from our collections. The series continues with a conversation with filmmaker Regina Kimbell, recorded February 5, 2008 with then-BFCA archivist Mary Huelsbeck.
https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/9z903m479
Regina Kimbell is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. Growing up in Indianapolis, Ms. Kimbell earned her B.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington and worked as a fashion photographer in California before graduating from the film program at Los Angeles City College. A true independent filmmaking voice, Ms. Kimbell worked for years (with co-director Jay Bluemke) on her first feature-length documentary, My Nappy Roots: A Journey Through Black Hair-itage (2006), exploring the politics and cultural history of African American hair and beauty standards. Her experience with the film led her to found the nonprofit Nappywood, which has produced various lifestyle exposition events since 2013, including a multi-media exhibit in 2020 on the history of Black women hairstyles at the Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles.
Kyra Knox visits the BFCA
The Black Film Center & Archive has launched an outreach campaign focused on filmmakers, no matter where they are in the world, introducing the BFCA as a home for them as well as for their work. Among the filmmakers excited to connect is Philadelphia native Kyra Knox. She made time out of her busy production schedule to stop by for an in-person visit!
Knox viewed archival materials on display, including Lena Horne’s graphite handprint for the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and a letter from Spike Lee to our Founding Director Dr. Phyllis Klotman. She also sat down with us to share the experience of making her first feature documentary Bad Things Happen in Philadelphia, scheduled for release this summer. We look forward to Knox’s next visit and to all that unfolds with her promising career.
Johanna Tesfaye “Performing Memory Through the Archive” event
In a talk on March 29th, Johanna Tesfaye drew connections from the academic and creative work of queer Black filmmakers, artists, and scholars to her own creative and memory practices. As she shared a trajectory of past projects, she encouraged the audience to challenge temporal conceptualization of archives. She also screened an exclusive clip of her work-in-progress How Those Who Were Sent Away Wept and Made a Plan.
Johanna Tesfaye is an artist, researcher, and therapist. Her creative and academic work utilizes film, sound media, art exhibition work, historical documents, and fiction/non-fiction text to synthesize historical narratives focused on Black temporal realities that interrogate the archive, re-imagining and documenting a cosmos of work, thought, and life in pursuit of alterity.
The Black Film Center & Archive co-sponsored this event which is one of many within IU Cinema’s semester-long program Forever Queer: Community, Memory, Survival.
Social Media Highlights
Tim Story
March 13 marked the birthday of filmmaker Tim Story (born 1970)! Co-founder of The Story Company with wife Vicky Mara Story, Mr. Story is one of Hollywood’s most financially successful Black directors, helming popular hits like Barbershop (2002), the Fantastic Four series (2005-2007), the Think Like a Man series (2012-2014), and the Ride Along series (2014-2016).
Prior to his industry breakthrough, Mr. Story’s first feature One of Us Tripped (1997) won best feature at the Black Filmmaker Hall of Fame’s (BFHF) annual film competition. The Black Film Center & Archive retains a work-in-progress cut of Mr. Story’s film The Firing Squad, which he submitted to the BFHF in 1997.
(Screenshots from The Firing Squad from the Mary Perry Smith Collection; headshot of Mr. Story from the Collins Jackson Agency)
Al Freeman Jr.
On March 21, we recognized the birthday of stage/screen actor and educator Al Freeman Jr. (1934-2012)! A Broadway star for much of the 1960s, Mr. Freeman earned more mainstream success on screen starring in Anthony Harvey’s searing race drama Dutchman (1967), acting opposite Frank Sinatra in The Detective (1968) and Burt Lancaster in Castle Keep (1969), and securing a Daytime Emmy for his role as Captain Ed Hall in the soap series One Life to Live from 1972-1988. Mr. Freeman dedicated much of his later career to teaching and chairing at Howard University’s Theatre Arts department, though Spike Lee convinced him to return to the screen playing Elijah Muhammad in the 1992 biopic of Malcolm X.
A friend of the Black Film Center & Archive, Mr. Freeman met with our founder Phyllis Klotman at Howard University in 1992.
(Photo of Freeman with Phyllis Klotman from the Black Film Center & Archive’s General Collection; publicity stills from The Detective and Castle Keep from the African American Contributions to Film Collection)
Mya Taylor
On March 28, we wished happy birthday to actress Mya Taylor (born 1991)! After several years working on the margins as a sex worker in California, Ms. Taylor was recruited by director Sean Baker to star in Tangerine (2015) alongside her real-life roommate Kitana Kiki Rodriguez. Ms. Taylor’s fierce, funny, and loosely autobiographical performance as Alexandra was hailed as one of the best of the year, making her the first openly transgender actor to win a Gotham Award and Independent Spirit Award. Since her breakthrough role, Taylor has appeared as gay liberation icon Marsha P. Johnson in Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel’s short Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2016), as well as roles in the AMC series Dietland (2018) and film Stage Mother (2020). Frustrated at the lack of opportunities offered in Hollywood, Ms. Taylor obtained a nursing degree and, as of 2022, was working at a nursing home in North Dakota.
(Screenshot from Tangerine from the Black Film Center & Archive General Collection; Gotham Awards image by Kevork Djansezian via Getty)
Maya Angelou
April 4 was the birthday of legendary activist, poet, and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014)! In addition to her landmark legacy in the written word, Dr. Angelou also made frequent contributions to film and TV, from guest appearances on Sesame Street, to narrating M.K. Asante’s Kwanzaa documentary The Black Candle (2008), to small acting roles in John Singleton’s Poetic Justice (1993). Her screenplay for Georgia, Georgia (1972) was the earliest produced film written by a Black woman, and she achieved her lifelong goal of directing a feature film with Down in the Delta (1998).
(Screenshot of Angelou in Poetic Justice, poster for Georgia, Georgia, and photo of Angelou with Black Film Center & Archive founder Phyllis Klotman from the BFCA General Collection)
In Memoriam
Lance Reddick
The Black Film Center & Archive remembers the life and career of veteran character actor Lance Reddick (1962-2023), who passed on March 17 at age 60. A performer of unique power and poise, Reddick lent his gravitas to productions both large and small, from the John Wick franchise (2014-2023) to Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004) and Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods (2018). Among his dozens of TV roles, admirers will remember his unforgettable turn as Lt. Cedric Daniels in every episode of The Wire (2002-2008). Our condolences to his loved ones.
(Headshot by Jeff Vespa via WireImage)
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