Bridgett M. Davis to Visit: 25th Anniversary Screening of Naked Acts The Black Film Center & Archive is honored to welcome back multi-talented writer, novelist, teacher, and filmmaker Bridgett M. Davis on Thurs., Feb. 23. Ms. Davis is Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she instructs classes in creative… Read more »
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January 2018 Newsletter
Race Swap film series at IU Cinema Unearthing early roots of Jordan Peele’s political horror film Get Out (2017), Race Swap presents three cult films which similarly explore and exploit racial ideology. Combination science fiction, horror, and exploitation comedy films, they play on the supposedly irreducible fact of racial groups and the disgust/desire to get… Read more »
December 2017 Newsletter
Alice B. Russell Micheaux Memorial Campaign Alice B. Russell Micheaux was a pioneering film actress and film producer, as well as the widow of Oscar Micheaux, renowned African American filmmaker, and both were active during the silent era through the 1940s. Yet unfortunately, Alice spent her final years as a ward of the state suffering… Read more »
November 2017 Newsletter
Dee Rees’s Eventual Salvation On Friday, November 10, the Black Film Center/Archive and the IU Libraries’ Liberian Collections present a rare screening of Dee Rees’s first documentary feature, Eventual Salvation (2008). This free screening will take place at 3pm in The Media School’s Franklin Hall Screening Room (304C). Founded in 1847 as a home for former… Read more »
The Trooper of Troop K: Rediscovering Footage from the Earliest Black Film Production Company
Although Black Americans began producing films in the earliest days of the moving pictures, nearly all of these films from the silent period (1896-1927) are lost. For decades, film historians have believed that the earliest surviving Black produced films date to the 1920s. Recently, Cara Caddoo (Associate Professor in the Department of History and The… Read more »
Phil Moore: Seven Careers in One Great Lifetime (Composer, Arranger, Songwriter, Conductor, Instrumentalist, Coach, Producer)
Renèe C. Baker visited the Black Film Center & Archive in May 2022 to conduct research on the Phil Moore Collection. Ms. Baker wrote the following post documenting her findings and thoughts. In 2016, my first encounter with the genius composer/arranger Phil Moore occurred. While nosing through boxes that had not yet been catalogued nor digitized,… Read more »
ONCE HAUNTED: FILMS AND CONVERSATION, SEPT 14, 2019 at 7PM IU Cinema #DIRECTEDBYWOMEN
Once Haunted is a two-part series examining the idea of haunting, both as a multifaceted trope of desire, physical ruins, loss, fear and social change, as well as a citation from specific genres of horror and surrealism. Conversation will follow the screening. Curated by Sarah Lasley formerly of Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design… Read more »
See BORDERLINE, Starring Paul Robeson (1930) with a new score by composer Renée Baker.
The Black Film Center/Archive is excited to welcome back to Indiana University Renée Baker, who is scheduled to be present for a post-screening Q&A of the 1930 film Borderline on Wednesday April 24th at 7:00 pm. (Click HERE for tickets.) Baker, who recently visited Indiana University in 2017 to premier her score for a different film, The… Read more »
Together Un/Known
Together Un/Known Archival Ethics and the Case of Acquisition 6130 Anonymous home movie collections, while not entirely rare, present unique challenges for archives. In the case of Acquisition 6130 at the Academy Film Archive, archivists discovered what appeared to be home movies of a gay interracial couple living in Southern California in the early 1970s…. Read more »
Nontheatrical Ecologies: The Films of Esther Figueroa
The Black Film Center/Archive is proud to welcome Esther Figueroa, PhD, for a screening of her work Monday, March 25 at 6PM, hosted by the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive. Dr. Figueroa is an independent Jamaican filmmaker with over 30 years of experience in political documentary cinema. A self-taught activist filmmaker, her work focuses on… Read more »