BFCA Welcomes New Interim Director Rachael Stoeltje
On August 1, Rachael Stoeltje began a term as Interim Director of the BFCA for the 2022-2023 academic year. Rachael brings decades of experience in archiving and moving image preservation. She founded and also serves as Director of the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive and is the President of AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists). She served on the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Executive Committee (2013- 2019) and co-founded the FIAF Training and Outreach Program. Most recently, she concluded her role as the Director of the mass digitization for film project at Indiana University that wrapped up in June 2021, resulting in 23,803 digitized film reels. She has served on the Editorial board for AMIA’s The Moving Image Journal. She teaches in the graduate program of the Luddy School’s Department of Information and Library Science. Rachael frequently participants in local and international training and outreach events and initiatives, dedicating herself to mentoring burgeoning archivists and working to bridge the global archival communities in order to address shared challenges in the field of moving image preservation.
Farewell statement from departing BFCA Interim Director, Akin Adesokan
Dear staff, patrons, and friends of the Black Film Center & Archive,
I appreciate the warm welcome you all extended early this year upon my acceptance of the Interim Director role. My hope is that the seven months I served has reoriented the BFCA on a path back toward the vitality we know and love it for, and that you’ll feel it the next time you attend an event or stop by the office to say hello. In its 41st year, the BFCA is still just getting started.
We are actively nurturing the relationship with Black Camera, IU Cinema, and other departments with similar values across IU’s campus including the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center, the African Studies Program, and the African American and African Diaspora Studies department.
We are planning events that bring exciting filmmakers and scholars from across the world to Bloomington. In turn, we are dreaming up events that’ll send the BFCA and our collections across the world. We are reconnecting with you all as well—online and offline—because the BFCA can only thrive with your support. Whether it be through a donation or through advocacy, we need you.
I send my sincerest regards to Rachael Stoeltje, the Interim Director as of August 1, 2022.
Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank the staff I’ve had the honor of working with this year. In your goodbyes, you said my contributions to the BFCA are “indispensable,” but I did not do any of this on my own. You too are indispensable to the legacy of the BFCA.
Sincerely, Akin
Open House at the Black Film Center & Archive
Come and check out the BFCA on September 7th or September 8th, 3:00pm – 4:30pm! As the semester starts, we wanted to open our doors to welcome you all to come take a look, meet us, and learn about our resources, facility, and history.
We are located in Herman B. Wells Library Room 044, on the ground floor, across from Media Services and the Bookmarket Eatery.
Our BFCA team is looking forward to meeting you or reconnecting with you! Please join us and bring a friend!
Soyinka Festival Screenings/Q&A
From July 12-14, the BFCA celebrated the 88th birthday of Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka with a series of joint screenings between Bloomington and the Crown Art Factory in Nigeria. In collaboration with the Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange, the BFCA screened Kongi’s Harvest (1971), So Be It (1997), and Nigeria: Culture in Transition (1963). The series closed with a virtual discussion on the films titled, “Soyinka, Citizenship, and the Moving Image,” featuring panelists Rejoice Abutsa (Cornell University), Tunde Awosanmi (University of Ibadan), Deji Toye (lawyer, Lagos), and IU Media School PhD student Essence London.
Tongues Untied screening at Cook Center
On Friday, August 5, the BFCA co-hosted a screening of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), at the Cook Center with the IU Arts & Humanities Council. Riggs’s life-affirming film explores his personal experience as a Black, gay man in the 1980s, the effects of racism in the gay community and homophobia in the African-American community, and the national silence around the AIDS epidemic. It was screened in conjunction with the IU Arts & Humanities Council and the Kinsey Institute’s exhibit opening of Wild Horse Running: The Courageous Journey of Tom Fox, which documents the last few months of Bloomington native Tom Fox’s experience with AIDS. We’d like to thank everyone who attended the screening and encourage you to visit Maxwell Hall before September 23 to see the photographic exhibit.
BFCA Archival Assistant MarQuis Bullock interns with Harvard Libraries!
At the start of June 2022, MarQuis Bullock, an archival assistant at the BFCA, traveled to Cambridge, MA to work with Harvard Library’s Office of Antiracism as one of their inaugural cohort of EDIBA (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Antiracism) Collections interns. For the summer, the interns were charged with conducting research to identify diverse and dissenting voices in their existing collections, collaborating with faculty across Harvard Library departments, curating recommendations, and producing a report to significantly influence the construction of a new EDIBA reading room with the Harvard Library Task Force on Inclusive Spaces.
The overall guiding objective for the reading room is to create a counterspace that disrupts normative conceptions of library spaces, generally, and across Harvard University campuses, specifically. The project aims to provide a safe, inclusive space where Harvard’s diverse student population, namely students of color, can feel seen, welcomed, and centered.
Beyond this work, the interns also spent a significant amount of time touring Harvard’s vast and decentralized campus and libraries. A particular highlight from these tours was the opportunity to visit the Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research, founded by Henry Louis Gates, which houses the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute. At the end of the summer, the interns provided a presentation of the median stage of their work to the Vice President of Harvard Library, and their direct reports which was met with excitement and praise. MarQuis and his fellow interns will continue their work into the fall and will also assist the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to build their Library Guide for the “Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery” report.
Social Media Highlights
Beah Richards
On July 12, we wished a happy birthday to Beah Richards (1920-2000), veteran actor of stage and screen! Beah Richards began her career in theater, where she appeared in the original Broadway runs of The Miracle Worker and A Raisin in the Sun, as well as a Tony-nominated performance in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (1965). Ms. Richards made her mark in Hollywood with roles in Gone Are the Days! (1963), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Great White Hope (1970), and Mahogany (1975). In 1967, she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, becoming the sixth Black performer to receive a competitive Oscar nomination (following Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge, Juanita Moore, and Sidney Poitier).
Beah Richards continued a prolific career in television from the 1970s until her death, with recurring or guest roles on series like Roots: The Next Generations, ER, Frank’s Place, and The Practice (the latter two earning her Emmy awards). In 2003, filmmaker LisaGay Hamilton released Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, honoring Ms. Richards’s life and exploring her offscreen political advocacy with activists like Paul Robeson and Angela Davis.
(DVD of Beah: A Black Woman Speaks from the BFCA General Collection; portrait of Beah Richards from the Mary Perry Smith Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Collection; publicity still of Richards and Sidney Poitier from In the Heat of the Night from the African American Contributions to Film Collection.)
Juano Hernandez
On July 19, we celebrated the birthday of pioneering Afro-Latino actor Juano Hernández (1896-1970)! Born and self-educated in Puerto Rico, Hernández worked vaudeville and radio in New York before entering the film industry in low-budget “race films” like Harlem Is Heaven (1932) and Oscar Micheaux’s The Girl from Chicago (1932), Lying Lips (1939), and The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940). Hernández achieved more mainstream success in 1949 with a starring role as a farmer falsely accused of murdering a white man in Intruder in the Dust, for which he became one of the first Black actors nominated for a Golden Globe. He is recognized as among the first Latin American film stars, appearing in meaty supporting parts opposite Sidney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk (1958) and They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt in St. Louis Blues (1958).
(Screenshots of Hernández in Intruder in the Dust and St. Louis Blues from 16mm and VHS copies in the BFCA General Collection.)
Woody Strode
On July 25, we recognized the birthday of Woody Strode (1914-1994)! Following a distinguished athletics career as one of the first Black players in the NFL, Mr. Strode dabbled in the movies beginning in the 1940s, mostly in small roles in low-budget jungle adventure films. His film career expanded in the 1960s with a Golden Globe-nominated appearance in Spartacus (1960), as well as prominent roles in John Ford-directed westerns like Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). With additional roles in The Professionals (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and numerous Italian spaghetti westerns, Strode cemented himself as one of the most prolific western stars of the second half of the 20th century.
(Publicity photo of Sergeant Rutledge from Mary Perry Smith BFHF Collection; poster of Strode in Black Jesus from BFCA General Collection)
Esther Anderson
On August 4, we celebrated the birthday of Esther Anderson, whose 50-year career has spanned the fields of film, music, and photography! Ms. Anderson has had a sizable impact on pop culture in her home country Jamaica, helping pioneer the island’s film industry as co-producer of The Harder They Come (1972), developing the music label Island Records in the 1960s, and, in 2011, directing the film Bob Marley: The Making of a Legend celebrating that label’s most famed musician. Her appearance onscreen alongside Sidney Poitier in the romance A Warm December earned her a NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in 1973. The BFCA’s collections feature multiple publicity and production stills from A Warm December, including rare images of Poitier (who also directed) collaborating with Anderson on set
Allen Hoskins
On August 9, we celebrated the birthday of Allen Hoskins (1920-1980), popular to pre-war audiences in the Our Gang/Little Rascals series and among the first Black American child stars. Hoskins appeared as the androgynous “Farina” in over 100 Our Gang shorts between 1922-1933, becoming the highest paid cast member of the Rascals by the early 1930s. After aging out of the role, Hoskins struggled to establish himself as an actor in the Hollywood studio system, but was stymied by limited roles and systemic racism, before leaving the industry to dedicate his professional life to rehabilitation services for people with disabilities. Near the end of his life, Hoskins was honored as an inductee in the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975.
(Photos of Hoskins as Farina from the Mary Perry Smith Collection.)
In Memoriam: Mary Alice (1941-2022), Nichelle Nichols (1932-2022), and Roger E. Mosley (1938-2022)
Mary Alice’s Emmy- and Tony-award-winning career included roles in A Different World (1987-89), Sparkle (1976), Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), and Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta (1998).
Nichelle Nichols commanded the screen opposite Isaac Hayes in Truck Turner (1974) and, of course, as Lt. Uhura in the Star Trek original series (1966-69), animated series (1973-74), and six feature films (1979-91).
Roger E. Mosley (1938-2022), best known as Theodore “T.C.” Calvin on the series Magnum, P.I. (1980-1988). Prior to his TV breakthrough, Mr. Mosley was also a prolific character actor in many action and Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. These promotional photos and lobby cards from the BFCA’s collections spotlight his roles in productions like Sweet Jesus, Preacherman (1973) and Leadbelly (1976).
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