
This week: 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!
Upcoming Events: Maya Cade program + IU Cinema Exhibit

This September, the IU Cinema welcomes Maya Cade as their guest programmer-in-residence. The creator of the Black Film Archive website tracking Black films available to stream online, Maya is curating a series of five programs with the Cinema collectively titled “Home Is Where the Heart Is: Black Cinema’s Exploration of Home.”
Past and upcoming screenings/events for this series include:
September 1, 7:00pm
- Your Children Come Back to You (1979), directed by Alile Sharon Larkin
- Claudine (1974), directed by John Berry
September 8, 7:00pm
- A Different Image (1982), directed by Alile Sharon Larkin
- Alma’s Rainbow (1994), directed by Ayoka Chenzira
September 22, 7:00pm
- Dreaming Rivers (1988), directed by Martina Attille
- Black Mother (2018), directed by Khalik Allah
September 30, 7:00pm
- Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture featuring Black Film Archive founder Maya Cade
September 30, 9:00pm
- African Woman, U.S.A. (1980), directed by Ijeoma Iloputaife
- My Brother’s Wedding (1983), directed by Charles Burnett
October 1, 7:00pm
- Behind Every Good Man (1967), directed by Nikolai Ursin
- Pariah (2011), directed by Dee Ree
To accompany these screenings, the BFCA has contributed an exhibit in the basement level of IU Cinema. Included in the exhibit are original production and publicity materials for several of the programmed films (including original scripts for My Brother’s Wedding and promo stills for Claudine), in addition to other items from our collections that explore themes of Black homemaking.
Stop by and check out the exhibit the next time you are at the Cinema! And visit the IU Cinema’s site for more information on individual screenings and ticketing for this series.

Upcoming Event: Body and Soul at the Buskirk-Chumley, featuring DJ Spooky!

On September 16, the BFCA is co-sponsoring a screening of race film pioneer Oscar Micheaux’s silent masterpiece Body and Soul (1925) at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre in Bloomington, IN — featuring an original live score by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky!
Starring the great Paul Robeson in his screen debut, Body and Soul is an excoriating critique of gender relations and religious hypocrisy in the Black church, now widely considered one of Micheaux’s most ambitious films. DJ Spooky is an internationally-acclaimed composer, author, and multimedia artist who uses electronic music to bend genres and comment on social and environmental issues. He previously visited Bloomington in 2017 to screen Rebirth of a Nation, a remix and reimagining of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Further information and ticketing can be found at the Buskirk-Chumley’s website.
Check out the new poster display in our shared study table area

The BFCA’s collections include hundreds of original posters and promotional materials from productions across the breadth of Black film history. We recently rotated in a new themed exhibit of posters (entitled “A Woman’s Touch: Black Women and the Power of Solidarity”) to observe the start of the fall 2022 semester. If you are in Wells library, please stop by our reception area on the ground floor level for a quiet place to hang out or study while being surrounded by beautiful historical examples of Black film promotional art.

BFCA materials on display at the Academy Museum’s exhibition
The Black Film Center & Archive was very honored to loan objects from our collections to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ exhibition, Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 – 1971. The exhibition, open from August 21, 2022 – April 9, 2023, explores the contributions of Black performers and filmmakers in the United States from cinema’s infancy in the 1890s through the height of the civil rights movement. It fills seven galleries in the museum and features rarely seen moving images, as well as photographs, scripts, drawings, costumes, equipment, posters, and historical materials that document the Black experience in both independent production and the studio system. Some of the items on display from the BFCA include sheet music for Stormy Weather, tap shoes worn by the Nicholas Brothers, an original poster for Reform School (1939), and ephemera from Norman Studios. If you would like to learn more about the exhibition or how to visit, you can do so at the following link: https://www.academymuseum.org/en/exhibitions/regeneration-black-cinema


Social media highlights
William Marshall


On August 19, we celebrated the birthday of actor William Marshall (1924-2003)! Born in Gary, Indiana, Marshall channeled his towering 6’5″ frame and commanding bass voice into a rich Broadway career, including a long-running performance as Othello widely acclaimed as one of the greatest renditions of the role. His screen career suffered in the 1950s after being blacklisted as a communist sympathizer, but he eventually built an impressive TV resume, with roles on Bonanza (1964), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1964), Star Trek (1968), The Jeffersons (1982), as the voice of Iron Man on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1983), and as the King of Cartoons on Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1987-1990). Marshall cemented his place in film history with his title role in Blacula (1972)–one of the top-grossing Blaxploitation films of the ’70s and a milestone in black horror–and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973).
(All images from the BFCA General and Mary Perry Smith Collections.)
Ava DuVernay

August 24 was the birthday of Ava DuVernay (born 1972). Since taking up filmmaking at age 32, Ms. DuVernay has risen as a multi-hyphenate powerhouse as director, producer, and/or writer of dozens of shorts, features, music videos, and series. Her work—including Middle of Nowhere (2012), Selma (2014), 13th (2016), A Wrinkle in Time (2018), When They See Us (2019), and Colin in Black & White (2021)—has netted multiple historic award nominations and wins, and as member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences board of governors, she has continued to fight for the elevation of BIPOC talent and social issues in the entertainment industry.
In 2013, DuVernay visited the BFCA and then-director Michael T. Martin during a visit to Indiana University. A Middle of Nowhere poster she autographed hangs proudly in the BFCA lobby.


Seret Scott

On September 1, we recognized the birthday of actor, activist, and theater artist Seret Scott (born 1949)! Ms. Scott has been deeply immersed in activist theater scenes for over 50 years, directing, writing, and/or starring in dozens of Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional productions. In 1982, she starred as philosophy professor Sara Rogers in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, one of the first feature films directed by a Black American woman. Initially overlooked and not theatrically distributed, Losing Ground has been reappraised as a landmark of American independent cinema since its 2015 restoration and rerelease.
In a 2011 assessment of the film in the journal Black Camera, L.H. Stallings argued for Scott’s sensual and cerebral performance as “required viewing for any black woman” for the ways it challenges common ideas about “intellect, creativity, desire, ecstasy, and black women’s agency.”
(Production stills of Scott in Losing Ground from the BFCA General Collection.)
The 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.
Join us in welcoming Rachael to the BFCA team!
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
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