13755 – Project Archivist, Communication and Culture (Black Film Center/Archive), Indiana University – Bloomington
The Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive (BFCA) seeks qualified candidates for the position of Project Archivist.
SUMMARY: Reporting to the Archivist and Head of Public and Technology Services, the Project Archivist will provide support for the project, Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization. The principal responsibilities will be to: reprocess, arrange, and describe the reintegrated holdings of Richard E. Norman; prepare and encode a finding aid and other descriptive access tools; participate in outreach activities; contribute to the management and production of a large-scale digitization project; and participate in the training and supervision of a student scanning technician.
ABOUT THE BFCA: The Black Film Center/Archive was established at Indiana University Bloomington in 1981 as the first archival repository dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available historically and culturally significant films by and about Black people. The BFCA’s mission today encompasses within its scope films of Africa and the Diaspora. The BFCA’s primary objectives are to promote scholarship on Black film and to serve as an open resource for scholars, researchers, students, and the general public; to curate and exhibit Black film, ephemera, and memorabilia; to encourage and promote creative film activity by independent Black filmmakers; and to undertake and support research on the history, impact, theory, and aesthetics of Black film traditions.
REQUIRED: Master’s degree in library science from an ALA-accredited institution with coursework in Archives or Master’s degree in archival studies and two years relevant experience in a library, archives, or manuscript repository.
Applications accepted until May 21, 2015, or until position is filled. Resume and cover letter required. For a full position description and to apply, visit http://jobs.iu.edu and search for job number 13755.
DVD Spotlight: Stanley Nelson's "Freedom Summer"
“The documentary is not only inspiring and instructive, it holds surprises even for those who believe they know this epochal American story.” – 2014 Peabody Awards
The Murder of Fred Hampton, Howard Alk’s 1971 portrait of the Black Panther leader’s last days, turned Stanley Nelson onto the power of documentary as a tool to reach audiences and change perceptions. Nelson has since become one of the premiere documentarians of American and civil rights history, producing and directing films including the Murder of Emmitt Till (2003), Jonestown: the Life and Death of the People’s Temple (2006) and the Emmy Winning Freedom Riders (2010). Nelson’s latest DVD release, Freedom Summer, employs archival footage and photographs, illustrations, and interviews to present a richly complex history of the of the violent summer of 1964, when over 700 university student volunteers came to Mississippi from across the country. The young activists moved in with local organizers and residents for the entirety of the summer to help register African American voters, set up freedom schools, and create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s segregationist Democratic Party. Available for viewing at the Black Film Center/ Archive, the PBS “American Experience” documentary won the 2014 Peabody Award for excellence in media storytelling.
Nelson’s documentaries continually dispel the idea that because we’ve seen the images of the bus rides, sit-ins, marches, and murderous violence, that we know the history of the civil rights movement. Upon winning the 2013 National Humanities Medal, Nelson said, “What I’m trying to do is part detective. There’s a feeling that we all know about the civil rights movement. So part of it is finding new and exciting voices that we haven’t heard.” In just under 2 hours, Freedom Summer traces not only the major events—the successes and failures—of those long months in the deep-south, but also the intricacies of its organization and implementation. A very small group of predominantly black organizers associated with the Students for Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) enlisted student activists to bring sustained national media attention to the poor living conditions that black Mississippians endured, and especially to voter discrimination that kept registration among African Americans to under 7%. Because Mississippi rarely made the evening news, it seemed that no one in the country knew much or cared about these abominable injustices. Bringing a coalition of young, affluent university students, black and white, would help bring Mississippi into the spotlight.
The documentary presents a variety of perspectives to reveal the multiple systems of oppression employed to keep both black and white southerners “in their place”: legal structures and police enforcement, violent threats and action, and everyday fear and intimidation. Speaking with surprising candor in his documentary interview, Citizens’ Councils member William Scarborough explains that the Ku Klux Klan was largely absent from Mississippi until Freedom Summer, because his organization, deeply entrenched in the state’s political machinery, effectively enforced white supremacy with full support of the law. The students selected for the program were warned of expected violent repercussions before their arrival and given the option to turn back, but few did. Several of those interviewed now acknowledge that the plan worked because they were “young and foolish” enough to go through with it. Shortly after their arrival in Mississippi, one black and two white members– James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner– would go missing, later to turn up dead (the “Mississippi Burning” murders). Some of the black visiting students interviewed said that they realized the extent of the danger that they were in after this event, knowing now that the whiteness of some of their colleagues would offer no protection.
Those from Mississippi already knew the extent to which the state coerced its residents—both black and white—into abiding by its dictum of “States rights, racial integrity” (the slogan of Citizens’ Councils). Nelson’s film makes clear the essential role that black Mississippians played in the successes of Freedom Summer, both by opening their homes to students and by joining the movement, an especially dangerous, even life-threatening, decision for those with no protections and little prospect of leaving Mississippi if the violence continued to escalate.
Sharecropper Fanny Lou Hamer emerges as a central force of Nelson’s documentary. Hamer registered to vote with full knowledge that it would mean losing her job, and became one of the most powerful voices for change in Mississippi. Nelson’s documentary culminates at the national stage: Hamer’s famous televised appeal for a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party follows Rita Schwerner’s visit to Lyndon B. Johnson to demand justice for the murder of her husband and his two colleagues. The President’s response to both women, revealed through audiotapes to J. Edgar Hoover and firsthand accounts, is chilling. Johnson would sign the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 that very same summer, but Nelson’s film (like Ava DuVernay’s Selma) shows that the path to voting rights was politically fraught and did not follow a straight or easy line toward forward progression. Significantly, Freedom Summer presents its history as a collective struggle, when a female sharecropper played as important a role as a president or the nationally recognized civil rights leaders.
Nelson works primarily in research-based, historical documentary, drawing comparisons to another PBS mainstay, Ken Burns. In a recent New York Times piece on Nelson and his Black Panthers documentary, Burns describes the difficulties of translating an enormously complex and unbounded history into compelling, even poetic, storytelling: “So as a filmmaker, when you bump into a Stanley, you go, wow, that was great. There’s a real frisson, an excitement and an energy his films always have.” Nelson returned to the subject that first drew him to filmmaking for his most recent documentary, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, which premiered to sold out audiences at Sundance and as the opening night screening at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeAsxK7PRa0 Today is the final day of Nelson’s fundraising campaign for a theatrical release to help his documentary reach a more diverse audience, including those who may not go to film festivals or watch PBS. Noting the timeliness of the documentary, the filmmaking team explains the impetus of a wider release on their crowdsourcing page: “For us this Kickstarter campaign is about more than just getting into theaters, it’s about sparking a national conversation on the conditions that created the Black Panther Party, conditions – like police violence, substandard education, joblessness – that continue to plague us today.” The fundraising goals have been met, but Nelson plans to use additional funds for screenings in cities including Ferguson, MO, joining forces with the #blacklivesmatter movement.
Black Panthers screens this weekend at the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, where Nelson is currently living as a visiting film instructor at Morgan State University, a historically black college. “Spending time in the city has given me insight into the troubling conditions so many young African American women and men face. It has also given me an opportunity to witness the amazing potential, work ethic and desire among my young students to tell their own story about their city,” says Nelson. He hopes that the Panthers’ example of community organizing will inspire young people in the area, and that his own work as a filmmaker will turn the next generation onto the power of film as a tool for social change.
~Noelle Griffis
Ava DuVernay's SELMA Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray
Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed 2014 film Selma releases on DVD and Blu-ray today. The high-profile film garnered considerable attention for its complex account of the debates and strategies that led to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and for its humanizing portrait of its leaders, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by David Oyelowo) at the forefront. DuVernay’s film sparked debates about factual accuracy in historical fiction after some claimed Selma misrepresented LBJ’s role in the events, while others saw these criticisms as a conservative backlash against a civil rights account that foregrounded black leadership and collective achievement over myths of white saviors and individual heroes. To commemorate the DVD/ Blu-ray release of this remarkable film, two friends of the Black Film Center/ Archive at Indiana University, T. Michael Ford and Katrina Overby, have shared their responses to Selma.
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DuVernay’s Selma: “Getting it Done”
The movie Selma is not a documentary, as some have tried to make it that are critical of Ava DuVernay’s latest cinematic offering, but a story that needs to be told time and again as it speaks to the elevating of the human spirit in the face of evil. And with her film Selma brought to the big screen, DuVernay has triumphantly and emphatically put her imprimatur on a film that is deserving of all the accolades and awards that have been and will be bestowed up on it. Further, the ensemble cast that brings the Selma story to life are applauded for displaying and imbuing their “A” game on historical events that resonate and have relevance to present day.
Though the persona of Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK, portrayed admirably by David Oyelowo) is part of the primary focus of this film, for this author, so many of the other characters, male AND female, loom equally as large in their artistic and historical impact. From the opening scene where one of the producers of the film, Oprah Winfrey portraying Annie Lee Cooper, attempts to register to vote and is challenged by the city clerk to recite the names of the sixty-seven (67) country judges in the state of Alabama (which was just another version of the Poll Tax to dissuade and disenfranchise black voters), this film is meant to give the viewer the gritty, granular feel of what the reality was like for black citizens in Alabama (and throughout much of the rest of the country). The film displays in dramatic and emotional impact a key event in the civil rights history of the USA when MLK and his supporters ventured to Selma, Alabama to assist, participate and lead marches that were demanding voting rights for local black citizens who were being denied these rights as U.S. citizens. The series of marches (and televised beatings and brutalization by law enforcement and white citizen supporters), the meetings between MLK and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, eventually lead to the culmination of this chapter of civil rights history with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
There are many others, film critics, industry experts who will write and wax-and-wane eloquently about this film…but for this author the resonance of the film was that I can recall seeing these events on the television when I was but a young child of around 7 years, and now to view this film with my 16-year old son, and to hear his questions and our discussion of events that seem so long ago and foreign to him (because so much of the story of U.S. Civil Rights still gets short shrift in our nation’s schools and too many adults have ‘selective amnesia’ on the violence and ugliness that is our nation’s history…) fully informs that films such as Selma are needed in a contemporary context with talented and visionary directors like DuVernay. She is a director, and a black female director is just icing on the cake (!), that illustrates there has been some progress in the film industry but much more is yet to be done. Further, beyond just directing this film, DuVernay was instrumental in rewriting the original screenplay, which is a formidable task and accomplishment that should not get short shrift.
There are many laudable scenes were you hold your breath (the marches on the Edmund Pettus bridge, hearing Governor Wallace rant while talking at President Johnson….) and others that warm you over and rivet you to the screen (MLK having his necktie tied by his loving wife Coretta, portrayed by Carmen Ejogo, before the Nobel Prize ceremony, when she visits MLK in jail…) which makes the movie real and palpable. You are there. You can feel the heat of the day, smell the sweat of the people, and have that knot of apprehension in the pit of your stomach that the participants surely had as well. Selma manages to evoke all of these emotions and more which goes to the skill and talent of DuVernay, the assembled actors and crew. Also, the portrayal of other characters who played key roles in the events (James Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, Diane Nash, John Lewis and many others) is pivotal in telling the story to the audience that the events surrounding Selma weren’t just about MLK but were predicated on the common everyday men and women who said “Enough!” to second-class citizenship and discrimination which was at the time one of the many legal degradations manifested in whether one could register to vote or not.
In the telling of the events of Selma, DuVernay presents a clear, focused lens on what people of that time and place were being subjected too and how they and their allies, who came in various hues from light to dark, were willing to sacrifice, fight, and die for their legal rights as U.S. citizens. How through non-violent protest and persistence, even the President of the country and a reluctant Congress, could do what was right and legal for ALL citizens. The fact that the some politicians of this country and so many citizens still harbor bigoted and biased attitudes towards anyone who is not like them, points to the need and power of films such as Selma and why it and many others are worthy of being made and seen. In that regard, DuVernay triumphs in “getting it done” and most definitely raises her profile as a director. She tells a story that needs to be told and skillfully presents a subject and events that many are not comfortable in being confronted with because it illustrates a time and people who willingly and joyfully indulged in a version of apartheid that is very home-grown. Viewing Selma brings saliency to that old adage: “If one does not remember their history, they are doomed to repeat it.”
~ T. Michael Ford (May 2015)
Copyright © 2015. T. Michael Ford. The text and any related information is the property of the author and may be used only with the expressed permission of the author. Any review, retransmission, copying, dissemination or other use of this material without the permission of the author by persons or entities other is prohibited.
Ford is the Special Assistant to the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Indiana University, and a lifelong cinephile.
Selma Released on Blu-Ray and DVD
Director Ava DuVernay’s highly acclaimed and widely celebrated film Selma has its Blu-Ray and DVD debut on May 5, 2015. Selma was nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Award nomination for Best Motion Picture and Golden Globe nominations for Best Director for Motion Picture and Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, and won several awards including, both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for a motion picture for the song “Glory” featuring John Legend and Common. The film, which had a limited release date on December 25th, 2014 and was widely released on January 9, 2015, has had an overall Domestic Total Gross of$52, 076, 908 (Box Office Mojo). To say the least, Selma is an important film and there are several reasons to add this film to your personal home collection.
First, Selma had several well-known actors and actresses and some break-out stars that included but aren’t limited to: David Oyelowo, Oprah Winfrey, Stephan James, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Carmen Ejogo, Common, Trai Byers, Niecy Nash, and Tom Wilkinson. Each of these characters, and others in the film, fully embraced their roles and made the film that much more enjoyable because they made it real. I use the term enjoyable loosely however, as DuVernay was very unapologetic in the narrative she used to retell the devastating yet triumphant history of what took place in Selma, Alabama and the actors and actresses that she casted helped make the story come to life.
Second, DuVernay showed us things that we did not think we would, or maybe that we didn’t want to see relived in this film and some of the scenes were very heartbreaking, emotional, and unsettling. The retelling of major and minor historical events and facts throughout this film was significant to the storyline. One of the first scenes of the film retold the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church explosion, which killed four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair. 
You would have to know the story and history of the four little girls to know that scene was about them, as it was not stated explicitly where they were nor who they were, as you witnessed the church exploding from the inside and images of school books and little white dress shoes soaring in the air with the rest of the debris, capturing the current racial climate and foretelling the struggle that would take place during the rest of the film. Another series of touching scenes was seeing the systematic techniques, fear and intimidation used to keep Oprah Winfrey’s character Annie Lee Cooper from being able to vote. While trying to register to vote, they asked Cooper to recite the preamble and a host of other unnecessary questions, showcasing the ridiculous illegal systematic tactics used to keep African Americans from voting. Scenes like these help audience members, especially those who may not be familiar, to understand the many pieces of the puzzle that led to planning a march for voting rights.
Finally, the film Selma highlighted the grassroots efforts of all involved and shed light on some of the tension and disagreement and compromise in strategizing to fight the illegal voting system. The film highlights the significant roles that youth and the members of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) played, which included John Lewis (Stephan James), and how they were getting the community involved in demonstrations and informing them on the ground level in Selma before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived. DuVernay also included some of the tension that was inside of Dr. King’s home amongst him and his wife Coretta, played by Carmen Ejogo, concerning accusations of Dr. King having affairs with other women. The film also included a short scene with Malcom X, played by Nigel Thatch, where he is trying to show support for Dr. King, right before he is murdered, and speaks with Coretta to get her to understand that he wants to assist with the march to Montgomery.
Again, this is one movie to have certainly have in your collection. Ava DuVernay has already guaranteed one free copy to every high school in the United States and I think every school needs to have a copy. It is no secret that we support Ava DuVernay and her accomplishments, as she visited the Black Film Center/Archive in 2013 and truly left a great impression on us as several of her films and documentaries were screened. However, it is not just us who support DuVernay, it seems as if the world is acknowledging her work and she is an inspiration for many, which may be why just last month Barbie made an Ava DuVernay Doll. I leave with three words that resonated with me at the end of the film that were stated during one of the meetings for the march: Negotiate. Demonstrate. Resist.
~Katrina Overby
Overby is a PhD Candidate in the School of Journalism at Indiana University, the community service chair of the Black Graduate Student Association, and a graduate assistant at the Black Film Center/ Archive.
The Backstage of Intellectual Practice: Terri Francis and Andy Uhrich
Calling attention to the backstage of intellectual practice: Professor Terri Francis and Archivist Andy Uhrich Talk Archives, The Quandries of Seeing Educational Films Anew, and Whiteness
In this interview Professor Terri Francis and Archivist Andy Uhrich discuss their upcoming participation in The Streets and the Classrooms: Educational and Industrial Films in an Era of Massive Social Change, a film series at South Side Projections in Chicago.
On Friday, May 1 at 7pm,
Mr. Uhrich will present “Using Classroom Films to Teach about Race” at the
South Side Community Art Center. The program consists of a selection of educational films from Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive collection, dating from the mid-twentieth century when IU was a major distributor of 16mm educational films. Professor Francis’s presentation on Saturday, May 9 at the Washington Park Arts Incubator is “For Educational Purposes Only: The Jamaica Unit Film Works, 1951-1961.” Her presentation is based on research she conducted at the National Library of Jamaica and subsequently published in Film History. Both programs are a chance to see rarely screened materials and to re-examine them with fresh frameworks.
Their conversation was recorded in the Black Film Center/Archive on April 22 and is published here with edits for clarity and length.
Terri Francis (TF): My thought was that this could be like a show-and-tell of what we are each doing in the Streets and the Classroom program that Michael Phillips (Executive Director of South Side Projections) put together in Chicago.
Andy Uhrich (AU): That sounds great! I’m really excited that you’re going to be a part of this – because I was talking to Michael and we were thinking of what to fill in—and I knew you had come here to Bloomington and you had done this work. I was thinking that it would be great to expand the series outside the United States of America and look at how educational films work with different audiences and different political worlds. And so with the films that I’m dealing with it’s great to talk about them because I’m not an expert on them. It’s stuff that I found in the archive – the Moving Image Archive here at IU. Take them out of the shelf. And see what comes out of it.
TF: I’m intrigued by so much there. Tell me about presenting on something that you’re not an expert on (but that you are actually really knowledgeable about).
AU: I think part of it is the degree to which as an archivist you’re dealing with all this massive stuff. There’s no way you can be an expert on all of it. And it’s kind of a scary position to be in. But at the same time it forces you to collaborate. It forces you to find people who want to watch these films and who might know more about it than you do.
TF: In some ways the academic project is the manageability and the framing of material. But this is more excavation. Not architecture but archeology. Digging stuff up out of the ground. I’m really moved by the pathos of the archives and the way that there is this sense of the instability where your job is to be an expert but every time you walk into the archive you’re actually walking into questions. And into this space of vulnerability where you don’t know what this thing is. Yet. You approach it as evidence but you don’t know what it’s evidence of yet. And the more you think about it is the more questions that an object can respond to and that it generates coming out.
AU: Coming at it from the archivist’s standpoint – a lot of the work you are trying to do is trying to sort of fix these objects. You make a finding aid. You follow best practices to do cataloging, which are super important. But it is easy to forget the ways that that leaves out information so I think what you’re talking about – this coming in and this openness and rediscovery means you have to negotiate these different pre-established roles of the scholar and archivist and what can be done. The films I picked out for the program are a subsample. There could be a whole different set of films. There are so many films that these just represent a mass variety. But I’m still asking the questions: How were these films described in the late 1960s and 70s and what were the terms used? Who were the audiences they were intended for? I think that is important to study. But at the same time they have all these new possibilities.
TF: I introduced the archive to my students as a place of play. And of course you’re not supposed to play in the archive! Pencils only. It’s a very quiet place. And one of the reasons I love this particular space [Black Film Center/Archive] is its sense of order. Tell me more about your selections.
AU: There are a couple of ways I started researching these films. One was thinking about locally produced films.
TF: Chicago- local?
AU: Indianapolis, Indiana. Indiana is a locale.
TF: I keep forgetting that this is where I am! Sorry!
AU: IU made a lot of films starting in the teens but in seriousness in the 40s. They are made locally but they don’t feel local.
TF: So there was a production company at the university. And these are made for broader—for national or international distribution?
AU: Exactly. So it might be a dissection movie and it’s made here with local scientists, so it has to do with the university but not the place of Bloomington, Indiana.
TF: Well that tells us a lot there.
AU: The films that have a place are made in Indianapolis. A four-part series called Inner City Dweller, made in 1972 in collaboration with the Black Arts Theater, which lasted from 1970 to 1978 and was run by Wilma Greene, who is in the one of the films I’m showing: Inner City Dweller: Work (Indiana University Audio-Visual Center, 1972, 19 min). I’m still trying to figure out how this film company in IU started this relationship. The University Archives have a lot of papers on this production company so I’m looking through those now. We know they were shot in Indianapolis, but they are still made slightly generic to represent urban black experience at a national level but because of the connection to Black Arts Theater there is specificity.
TF: Some parts of Indianapolis have a used-to-be feeling to it.
AU: The films have that quality too where they are so specifically there but not. That’s part of educational films in general. You don’t want to limit the audience. Looking at the Indianapolis Recorder, there is an article talking about the way that they were trying to show different topics. There was the urban problem film on riots—actually there were a lot of educational films that were addressing that issue. This was trying to do it from the [the perspective of] people that lived in those neighborhoods instead of being like an NBC news reporter asking what’s wrong with the inner city from the outside. Let’s let people who actually live there and know something about it speak. They’re the actors. They are the co-writers. So there’s a degree of letting the people who the film is about make the film. The other thing that they try to do with this series is –
TF: Are these online?
AU: Yes the Inner City Dweller films are. [Inner City Dweller can be watched at https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/avalon:6660.] They can be found at They have been digitized and we digitized just the prints. So we have the higher quality production elements, but they are projection prints so they are slightly faded. They need the restoration work. All these films do. But there is a way in which I feel like getting out what we have is important and then maybe later go back and do the restoration work. The other thing about this series that I think is worth thinking about is that a lot of educational films or sponsored films are made because there is an issue that they want to solve and they’re going to show a solution. So in this movie Inner City Dweller: Work. George, the husband, is out of work. He goes through a work-training program. He works really hard. He gets a good job. He deals with the welfare state. He’s learning how to negotiate the welfare state because he hasn’t been on food stamps before. So I get where it’s going. It’s showing how the Great Society of the Johnson era – the war on poverty– is going to be successful. And we think that because near the end he gets a check so you’re thinking good, problem solved. But in the end credits there’s narration that says we’re sorry we had to lay you off. So at the very end of the movie he’s gone through all this and the positive welfare state has ended up sort of failing him still.
TF: I love that tension of the film continuing under the credits that normally signals conclusion, resolution, and even happiness.
AU: That might seem like a minor form of filmmaking but they’re definitely intriguing in terms of the thought process that they are trying to get across.
TF: Was it a particular department within IU?
AU: That’s what I’m still trying to track down. The filmmaking department – the Audio-Visual Center had its beginnings in 1914 and it’s now University Information Technology Services UITS or instructional services – the people who put in the classroom VCRs. At a certain point audiovisual became instructional services.
TF: Because it’s tied to equipment probably.
AU: Exactly. So in some ways the filmmaking was just part of this larger media production. Your question about the impetus for it being made is still the thing I’m trying to figure out. That’s always the thing I think about: who’s behind the movie? Some of the movies I’m showing were funded by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). So the NEA clearly saw there was a problem with teachers not understanding their students so they supported a film to bridge that gap. What I did find is that starting in 1969, and it ramped up in 1971, there was a program through the School of Education that would take students here and they would spend a semester in Indianapolis. And it was this idea of taking white middle class kids who have no understanding of black life in the city and they spend a semester there.
TF: Go on…
AU: It was called urban experience or urban semester. And it starts out with what they call “the plunge” where they are given 50 cents for the week and they can’t use their cars. They have to go through the welfare process.
TF: So urban experience is black experience defined by 50 cents and walking or public transportation. That’s fascinating. I’m intrigued by how these films sit in a matrix of relationships between Indiana University and Bloomington, even if Bloomington is somehow silent or invisible. The university and the state, the city or town. But then this kind of college town relative to Indianapolis which has colleges and universities so there is a kind of editing of that space relative to IU and then the collaboration between the production unit here and the theater arts group in Indianapolis and what that must have been like in terms of whose story this is and what the problem is – there’s that wonderful reflexive phrase – “the Negro Problem” that gets at questions of blame and shame around issues of social inequality: wealth, work and education. Whose problem is it? Whose story is this?
AU: All the films that I’ll be showing deal with those issues. To your point Indianapolis was and is a big town. There’s a college there and to limit Indianapolis to one form of life, excludes so much more, in the sense that we don’t see the Black Arts Theater doing the Black Arts Theater. They’re playing roles in this movie and they helped with the script but in terms of their performances that they would have done at the time that was left out. At the same time these films are reacting to films about the ‘Negro problem” but they can only go so far. They recognize the problem with that mode of thinking and say we’re going to flip that around but you’re still in that binary even if you’re taking the other side. The question of whose problem it is comes up in some of the other films. In this film when he loses a job it’s unclear whose fault that is, where the failure is. Some of the other films such as the teacher training films are saying that the problem behind the Negro problem is white teachers and their inability to understand the students.
TF: And these are in your series?
AU: They are. One is called Portrait of a Disadvantaged Child and it’s about cultural and economic disadvantages. The goal was to force the white teachers to acknowledge that they have some advantages that other people don’t. And there’s another film called Real Self. Where the problem is presented as inherent biases of the teachers. The problem is children aren’t learning, specifically black children aren’t learning, and the film suggests that the teachers don’t understand the world that they live in, which again, is reduced to poverty, drugs, and the clichés. But at the same time it’s the teachers’ fault for not understanding that they are not communicating in a way that their students will understand.
TF: I’m thinking that a city that has a black arts group has a broader cultural infrastructure. I’m curious about how these films might engage or represent that through the credits. Because one of the ways that these films can resonate today is giving us a way back to that history.
AU: With films like this it’s always the fact that they open up stuff. They were incomplete. I think in some ways they were made to be incomplete because they were made to have someone talk before and after. They were made to have additional readings. It’s not like a feature film that’s going to have a clear diegetic world that ends after you leave the theater. A lot of these films are purposefully incomplete.
TF: Which is suggested by that narration of “I’m sorry we had to lay you off,” which suggests that the movie is going to continue somehow into theater into conversation into the world outside the theater.
AU: It was a discussion film.
TF: Which is what we’re doing – reading into the film and against the film. And trying to recreate as much as we can what the intentions were behind the film and what those discussions might have been like.
AU: It’s tenuous sometimes doing it. The historical evidence is going to be thin but all these questions that you’re asking are pointing to how they leave out so much on these actor’s lives and the people who made it. I’ll show you the little bit that I’ve been able to find: This [studio portrait above] is Wilma Greene later [than the films] and this photograph [see below] is from a performance.
So that’s two very different viewpoints of her. Note the stance she’s taking here, which is very different from her role as the put upon housewife whose husband can’t/won’t get a job. It seems clear, although I’m guessing at this point, that there’s probably a basic script that would have been written through IU and then improvised on by the actors.
TF: Earlier you mentioned the Indianapolis Recorder, which is the African American newspaper, still publishing. That whole infrastructure is not part of the film. My films, the Jamaican educational films are written about in the Jamaica Gleaner but they are screened like theatrical movies and are talked about in relation to a film industry. One of the films I’m going to show, Let’s Stop Them (Martin Rennalls, 1953) was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1953. It had an educational framework and reason for being but then it fit into the movie-desire space. I’m wondering if there’s anything in the way the Indianapolis Recorder reporters talked about these educational productions that indicates that they saw them as black film.
AU: In terms of the research I’ve done, the actors always mention that they made the films alongside their other performances. A lot of the articles about the Black Arts Theater, until they dissolved in 1978, mention the films and then there is a profile on Wilma Greene in 1980. She worked in local TV and had a show called Black Is, which I haven’t found anything about yet, that she did on WRTV. It seems like it was something that they would keep in their bio. But in terms of the question precisely: no, it’s not connected to other forms of black filmmaking at the time. I think it’s really connected to educational film rather than theatrical film. In the article they talk about how they are “telling it like it is” in these films. They are using some of the rhetoric that would have been in black filmmaking at the time.
TF: Yes, “Tell it like it is” –was just used as the title of an exhibition on black independent filmmaking at Lincoln Center.
AU: What connections would they have to the other forms of filmmaking going on? Since they were IU produced they would have circulated in ways that were similar to the films you’re talking about. They would have gone to educational film festivals. They would have traveled and been in the catalogs for classrooms and organizations that showed films.
TF: It’s important to remember that the audience is students in the classroom.
AU: It would be that but also adult learning classes, private clubs, so it wouldn’t have just been the classroom. It’s education writ large. I think this is where your films add another component to that. It’s the educational intent behind filmmaking but then you have it as a short before a feature. Or it plays at art cinema festivals.
TF: They’re examples of pedagogical work that can be done outside the school, such as in a theater or community center.
AU: There’s a mid-century attempt to rebuilt America post-war. Educational film was a big part of that. Big organizations were funding these kinds of films thinking that it could have that kind of impact. It’s part of this belief in what film could do and how it could transform society. With these particular four films, it’s an attempt to engage with the subject matter. Like you’re saying though it’s still representing the IU educational viewpoint to a large degree. But it is very different from a film that was done five years earlier, called Portrait of a Disadvantaged Child: Tommie Knight.
TF: What year?
AU: 1965. Made by McGraw-Hill.
TF: The famous textbook publisher?
AU: Yes they made educational films as well. On the one hand it’s presented as the teacher’s inability to understand but at the same time it’s got these images that show Tommie Knight in a ruined junkyard.
TF: As though he lives out there and that’s where he’s doing his homework!
AU: Yeah the idea is that kids have to go to these dangerous junkyard ruins because their home life is troubled. So while I think it is to a degree saying the teacher can’t understand, it’s still trafficking in the view of a kid like Tommie Knight at the time of living in what the so-called ghetto became visually; he can’t escape. In terms of the visual rhetoric the limitations of the film are clear. In a way they show us how none of us can escape the worldviews that we were born into – we can try but – in films like this you see that struggle somewhat.
TF: Well, your thesis for the program is that the cliché is that these films are ineffective at presenting or engaging race, racism and racial inequality but that you see it more as a struggle that is happening, something more nuanced. Do you want to say a little bit about that?
AU: I think you see it stylistically and in the difference between the Tommie Knight film and the City Dweller film. It was part of a larger attempt to make educational films more of the time but the fact that this one has this almost generic narrator, which later films get rid off, is important. That seems like a minor stylistic point but having the narrator speak versus letting the people speak is the key distinction.
TF: This is so important in the Jamaican education films.
AU: So I think on this level you see [the struggle] play out. Poverty is not just something you can focus on in one group. There’s poor white people as well. Seems like an obvious thing.
TF: Well, that’s teaching. You have to remind people of things they already know, including the chaos of a certain kind of poverty that crosses race and color.
AU: The films are at least sort of struggling with these issues. We can say where are they ineffective, where are they patronizing, where are they limited by the people funding it– but even a film like this where there is a generic film narration you see an attempt at trying to deal with these issues–trying to hold the teachers accountable. There’s another film called The Real Self and the last line is you want to be Americanized but you don’t want to give up your real self. It shows African Americans and Latino students and again that the teachers don’t understand where they are coming from. There’s no narration in this one. It’s photographs by Declan Haun, who was a photojournalist who photographed the civil rights movement for decades. So in Real Self, there’s no narrator and all of the voices are African Americans and Latinos. It counters somewhat the photographs. There’s a photo of kids gambling then you’re going to have a different story being told in the commentary. And so I think it allows for multiple voices. It allows for multiple viewpoints though it is made for a white audience.
I think these films that are showing black life are really for the white audience. And that is made explicit in this film called Lonnie’s Day that was shot in Robert Taylor Homes on the south side of Chicago, which like Cabrini Green, has been torn down. The ad for it shows the idea that the film allows that entry point. So even though this film follows Lonnie as he goes about his day, from waking up to going to bed. There are moments of interior life, such as when he has a dream and he imagines himself as James Brown, as a singer. In some ways there’s a hidden white audience that’s not in the film.
TF: But is implied by the storytelling strategies.
AU: and then this question: “shouldn’t you show your students what it’s like to be black?”
TF: What I think is funny about that is no one knows what that is. There is that white gaze though…
AU: That’s why the films stand out. For the way that they are that gaze. Because they are so explicit about it. Because they are trying to train teachers. They are the calcified version of that gaze you were just talking about. I think they are useful to examine how that gaze operates to create blackness from white need.
TF: In the Seeing Whiteness class what has emerged for me as the actual object study is whiteness as a way of seeing. What we’re studying is a gaze. A power structure that is enacted through looking and that whiteness resides there. And its ability to influence what people do under it –whether to court its attention or to deflect its attention or to please it or to accommodate.
AU: What these films show is the need to adjust that gaze in moments of political stress. Especially when you see things like the NEA funding these films you get the sense that at a national level they are seeing what they see as a problem and make these films that will ideally make teachers more understanding. But it’s still from a position of power.
The other thing that is interesting about that white gaze that you’re talking about is it’s not included. It’s not something you would catalog. If you look at the terms used to describe them you’d find inner city, African American, black. But you don’t see the fact that Lonnie Day was made out of that white gaze that you’re talking about. It’s there but hidden. You’d never say as a librarian that that’s the subject of the film. I guess you would just assume that all the films—not all—but most of the educational films are from that position so you wouldn’t need to make it explicit. Because these films are trying to address what they see as a problem head on and it brings that to the forefront. It would have to be in the title or in the subject matter.
TF: The explicit subject matter.
AU: Exactly.
TF: Like if there is a documentary about that.
AU: But a film showing a kid —
TF: That’s what scholars do — the theorizing part of you that engages these films. So just going back to where we started with the subject headings and the labels. They only underscore how much more there is to say about what’s in the box and what’s in the can and what’s on the reel. It’s a kind of excess.
AU: Other people have done this critique of the field better but I’ll say that the work of archivists is to remove that excess. To make things legible. To make it transferrable. To make it go into WorldCat. But you’re right but there is this excess. Not to say that’s where all the meaning lies but that’s sort of the meat of the meal.
TF: It gives such a clear vision of what scholars do in the archive and what a powerful partnership there is between the archivist and the scholar.
AU: Definitely and I think your point is a great one. The hope is then that becomes more explicit in collaboration. Even when it’s more structured as to what people’s jobs are there will still be that collaboration. And it’s incumbent on the archive world to make explicit the work they do in structuring knowledge. But I think instead this idea of collaborating with scholars and with the community – who ever that might be — allows this play between having to remove the excess and to acknowledge it. I try not to be pedantic about the use of archive. Sometimes the word is used in a way that ignores the actual institutions and the actual people working there. But it’s the key to questions of why we have the record of the past that we do.
TF: Do we have time to talk about Jamaica a little bit?
AU: Absolutely! I’m curious. I’m not even sure where you found these films.
TF: Let’s start there. I found them at the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston.
AU: And they’re Colonial Film Unit stuff?
TF: The Jamaica Film Unit began as a project of the Colonial Film Unit. You were talking earlier about films where it’s giving people the means to represent themselves or discuss their own issues. Something like that is happening here. At a structural level the CFU wanted to shift the burden of the educational films on to folks in the empire so they created these schools like the West Indian Film Training School. At the same time Martin Rennalls, an educator, wanted to make films that more directly addressed Jamaican problems and showed Jamaican people negotiating these problems, starting with how own classroom and extending that. So his motto was for Jamaicans by Jamaicans in Jamaica. The project of education was still there – and the question of what these films mean today is a tough one. Sometimes when I’ve presented these films one of the tensions that comes out is this desire to have the films be revolutionary filmmaking. And for Martin Rennalls to be the Spike Lee of 1950s Jamaica. But he’s a teacher. There is that romantic figure of the radical instructor who is bucking the system and telling students to be alive with their barbaric yawp and everything. But teachers are also teaching people to fit in too. These films are right in that tension of the teaching space as a potentially radical space and as a deeply conservative space. More and more I’m digging that and I’m really interested in that conflict as a way to understand their project but also what they can mean now.
AU: I can see the tension there between the sponsor having an agenda and the filmmaker wanting to insert radical politics or stylistics. How are these films going to play in Chicago now in 2015? And what work will you do to sort of set the stage?
TF: One of the ways these films can be presented is as orphan films, which are films that are disconnected from their original purpose and don’t have parents. Don’t have family. But this is an idea that is completely rejected by the films’ current custodians in Jamaica. I’ve been really schooled out of this idea by my peers in Jamaica. They said these films have a home: they belong to us. These are not orphans. There, it’s about a relationship to the physical object – these films are heritage and a whole issue of repatriating the films from England. The orphan film framework, which I think is important as a provocation for this whole discussion, is a great way to talk about where they belong and that they mean something different in a Caribbean film context than they can in a film studies context. And that I’m standing within both of those. I’m creating an overlap between them.
The other question is one of education. That is, education for whom and how do they educate now versus then. And is this black cinema? Is this Jamaican cinema?
The films that I’m presenting are from 1951 to 1961 but the Jamaica Film Unit continues in a different form after that as the Jamaica Information Service. The cinematographers for The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972) come out of the Unit. Franklyn St. Juste, who made some gorgeous 16mm films in the 1960s, and who worked on Henzell’s film, was a filmmaker in the JIS.
What’s radical about them to me is that possession of the equipment. The vision of making something. The ambition. The problem solving. How do we sync sound when we don’t have the equipment for sync sound. How do we screen in places that don’t have movie theaters. How do we create that desire for narrative and story? How do we resolve the problem of sound? Voice is a big ambition for the Unit but actually having Jamaican voices proved to be a real problem.
AU: Because of the British dialect being the dominant mode in the Empire?
TF: It’s two things. One is that mode of having the voiceover that explains everything. Then on the other hand not having recording equipment. So they get photographed in Jamaica then they go to London where sound can be recorded – but as Rennalls said that is giving away the most sensitive part of the process. He was trying to make the films feel true to everyday life in the rural areas. That’s a big difference between our films. Mine are rural productions aimed at farmers.
AU: And the city would have a cinema available.
TF: There are countryside cinemas in in small towns but yes movie-going was more accessible in the city.
AU: In terms of the rural it’s making these films for a slightly imagined audience. At the same time they are addressing the problem, they are creating ideas of the audience.
TF: It struck me that there were references to “my Jamaica” indicating a nascent nationalism, maybe pre-independence ideas, in the colonial era from a government agency. I didn’t expect that. There’s already some transition that’s happening. There were so many faces. Black Jamaican faces on screen for such a long time. Picturing participation and collectivity. The credits startled me – directed by Martin Rennalls. They felt like the race films of the 20s and 30s in that they had a signature.
AU: They weren’t just making a visual tool. They were making a movie. That’s why I think people thought educational films would be such a great tool for social change and instruction. That they would be more exciting than a pamphlet. They would be the little sibling to Hollywood cinema, but still trying to glean some of that.
TF: Rennalls said the instructors were explicit that this was not Hollywood. There’s no red carpet for this. But he was convinced that narrative was the only way to make this material relevant.
AU: The little bit of reading I’ve done about the creation of educational film as a genre says the intention is you have to make it somewhat narrative and entertaining. But you can’t have it too good or people will follow that instead of the lesson maybe.
TF: Right, they’ll start rooting for the villain.
AU: You’ll wanna be the bad kid.
TF: It Can Happen to You (Martin Rennalls, 1956) has the health office director, which is important because you see the institutional involvement in these films.
AU: Sort of mirroring someone like a lecturer.
TF: Yes.
AU: And there couldn’t be [a lecturer] because you’re showing it in a place where you just have a projector and you don’t have a doctor.
TF: Yes. Probably so.
AU: That takes the place of the voice of the teacher.
TF: And the conflict within the community — conflict within the community with dignity.
AU: Like it’s being solved.
TF: That it’s not taking away your humanity to have a problem.
AU: Right, right. Instead of this vantage point of, some of these films on the Negro Problem as in why are there riots?
TF: Yeah.
AU: Right, and that’s definitely–
TF: Yes.
AU: Almost a criminal, not criminalizing, but its putting that onus on the community as a whole.
TF: In It Can Happen to You the story is that Jamaica could be so great but we need to treat what they used to call venereal disease properly and seriously, so to illustrate I’m gonna tell you a story about one of my neighbors.
AU: Yeah.
TF: As the voiceover plays I’m thinking so this is a film from within.
AU: Hmmm…
TF: It is a film from on high, because teachers, yes. It is an asymmetrical relationship. There is condescension. There is class condescension. There might be color condescension too. But at the same time there is that positioning of “I’m gonna tell you a story about one of my neighbors.”
AU: And this idea coming from within is because the films are made at that sort of transitional moment and that would be different than–
TF: Oh yes.
AU: I mean this is a question. It maybe doesn’t sound like it at the end. I imagine that it would be different than films that were made for England.
TF: The 50’s are a period of social change but the culmination of that change hasn’t happened yet.
AU: Right.
TF: I had to reorient myself to what these films mean. That the existence of these films indicates and emerges out of the period of massive social change. Otherwise we’re looking at 1962 as the point of change. The year of independence. But actually like a decade earlier, longer actually, there are these uprisings, there are confrontations. But the films are weird in that way though, because they, they’re not radical count-insurgence, counter-governmental products. They’re from within the government.
AU: Right, which in some ways would put them in the space of the audience in a different way, right?
TF: What do you mean?
AU: It’s similar to American educational films where there’s those moments where it stands out before the 60s, before you know, the rig with the sound is standard, when there’s the sync sound. It feels different sort of and you’re with them a little bit more in some ways.
TF: I want to contextualize them, bring them out, show them to people, I want the makers to be visible and for their intentions to be made known. What we make of them after that is something else. It’s not that I wouldn’t contradict them, but I think it’s first important to hear that they had this project of making a new and indigenous and the first Jamaican cinema, and looking at that content. That educational impulse is anyway an ethic in current Jamaican filmmaking. It doesn’t even matter like what the film is about, how fictional it is, there is a desire for film to be useful. OK, this is the first one Farmer Brown Learns Good Dairying. And it’s pretty different from those that came later.
AU: Even the music. You’re right. It’s like generic educational film music almost.
TF: Yes.
AU: Yeah, so, there’s a different thing going on there.
TF: It’s the first one. The good and bad farmer is much more separate, and we although, the Farmer Brown character is designated as the leader and we have that sort of semi-close up of him, his voice isn’t a part of this film the way that in later films this problem of voice is addressed more directly.
AU: And like you’re saying, it’s a mix of technological problems and also, you know, stylistic and the relationship to the empire.
TF: Yeah.
AU: That doesn’t put him as the main character.
TF: It’s their agricultural director, who arrives in that car, that big fancy car.
AU: He’s not walking with his cow behind him.
TF: And then we saw the other folks. Even the milk delivery man had a horse, a donkey-driven vehicle. Those contrasts are definitely there. I’ve seen the films in different ways, over time, but I initially just couldn’t believe that I was seeing film from the 50s of actual Jamaican people.
AU: Right.
TF: It’s still unique and surprising. When I first saw them I was like that guy could be my grandpa!
AU: Say more.
TF: So one of my acts of viewing is actually to watch them without the voiceover, so that I could see it and enjoy it. So there was this connection of, almost like a home movie connection that started happening and that was another kind of educational film for me or some kind of documentation.
AU: Despite the intent of the film, those men lived in Jamaica, they’re Jamaican, so you can sort of not reclaim them maybe but remove them slightly from the setting. That’s what you’re talking about trying to do.
TF: Kind of, I mean, because it’s like I’m now the audience.
AU: Right.
TF: And the custodian, in a way, of these films.
AU: Absolutely.
TF: They have other custodians in Jamaica, and with the colonial film sites, and the editors, the curators there. But I do feel a sense of interpretive, and I think benevolent, possession over them and how they’re discussed. I feel a personal connection to them in a way.
AU: Yeah.
TF: One of the other contexts that the films can be seen in through orphans that is problematic and that’s kitsch. This ironic, giggly response, particularly to films about like sex education.
AU: That’s probably good to remind the Orphans people of that.
TF: I initially thought Oh! I have a place now in film studies through these films and the concept of orphan films, but after this conversation that I had with one of the filmmakers in Jamaica about orphans, I became more critical. I realized it’s not gonna be that comfortable, but even with that it’s been an important exercise to try to be open to the audience. Like I showed these in Jamaica a couple of years ago and there were a variety of responses: indignation, curiosity, appreciation, anger – a whole range. How do we treasure heritage with messages we don’t agree with?
AU: Not just these films but I think a lot of the films have a similar issue. We see them differently now. If it has factory workers we want the movie to be about them. But we don’t get the movie we want now.
TF: Right [laughs].
AU: You know, and it’s sort of, I guess in some way it’s the responsibility of archivists, or scholars, or relatives or whatever.
TF: Or artists–
AU: To think about how are these films viable now. And I think in some ways it’s your point of watching them without the sound and just wanting to imagine, you know, what that gentleman did after the camera turned off.
TF: There’s just such a desire to hear what they’re saying to each other.
AU: Yes.
TF: Just to hear, not even what they’re saying, but to hear them saying it.
AU: And when you mentioned people wanting films to be more like revolutionary. This one of your ways that your suggesting that despite the fact that they’re made within the governmental vantage point that there’s still these parts we can pull out. But I think you raising that point of the different audience responses is a really viable one to think about the inherent ways of presenting it from an archive standpoint. What your saying is that history is complicated. We don’t necessarily agree with this. While finding the overall project, reprehensible maybe, or having some sort of understanding that people are, well, I’m not religious necessarily, but that we’re fallen.
TF: Yes, Yes…
AU: And we can accept that.
TF: Yes.
AU: But the degree to which maybe that needs to be made explicit, that these are being presented in that spirit and not necessarily agreeing with it, and I think that’s a strength. It’s very different than if you’re a different kind of programmer, film programmer showing stuff that you believe in and that you feel like is making a change now. And it’s like, no, we’re showing stuff that we don’t agree with.
TF: Yeah. But the object is–that’s what I treasure, is the object itself and the other project of making.
AU: Your point about the men in this film as being something to think about and learn about and imagine. It’s only, I mean it’s not only through this film, but in some ways it’s only through this film that you would have access to that.
TF: Exactly!
AU: You know, so, you know, that’s right, there’s maybe slave imagery in the other film, which is worth criticizing, but at the same time, it does allow us a view, however. I mean I guess that’s reading against the grain.
TF: Yeah, but then also, he has to be arrested, he’s a criminal.
AU: I know! I mean, I don’t.
TF: He’s stealing people’s bananas. That is the worst. When you have been growing stuff, you know how long it takes? And then somebody comes in the night – chop. Lock him up!
AU: Well the other thing I was sort of thinking about is when you talk about the teacher being conservative and radical at the same time.
TF: Oh yeah.
AU: From doing research for how a lot of these films were used, presented in libraries, by librarians at the time that were collecting these films and showing them to audiences of all kinds, right? And this idea that you need to be the librarian activist. It’s like on the one hand, as a librarian, you know you’re following cataloguing rules and stacking books the right way, and the other hand, there’s that tension between wanting to be a radical and wanting to be orderly I guess?
TF: Well it’s like what you said earlier about the politics of knowledge and how archives or how librarians structure knowledge. Those education films are really asking the teacher as they’re asking the librarian to animate the politics of that role.
AU: Right.
TF: And to use that authority for social change.
AU: Right.
TF: It’s not every school or every teacher who will receive a criticism of how he or she understands the students or wants to discuss race relations, so it’s making tools for a progressive classroom that, well, can be limited in all kinds of different ways. By the way, I interviewed my dad about his movie going, and I was surprised when he said, “well umm, we had a movie theatre, so I didn’t have to go to those films,” meaning the mobile unit educational films.
AU: That’s interesting. The sort of thing about non-theatrical film in general, in a classroom or in a church, is that they’re films but they’re not. They’re sort of more quotidian, more everyday, more easily ignorable and I think in some ways that makes them even more–it’s the stuff that’s there but you don’t think about is sometimes worth studying.
TF: Totally.
AU: Because that’s what’s going on and no one’s really talking about it.
TF: Yet they’re super exciting. They’re an event: there’s the find, there’s the contextualizing, but yes, to return to them as part, as wallpaper, as part of everyday life, as saying things that are boring. Some of these were shown with cowboy films.
AU: Like from the United States?
TF: Yeah, yeah.
AU: Wow.
TF: Cowboy films were popular in Jamaica, and they would show these with them, mix them in.
AU: That’s great. I guess it makes sense, cowboy films with The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972).
TF: Oh yes they become part of the Jamaican understanding of the movies, it’s not some kind of weird foreign thing. Or not just that.
AU: But even in this there’s sort of a rural to rural. I mean different nations, but–
TF: People connecting to the landscape of a western?
AU: Yeah.
TF: Totally. Absolutely. They’re even more interesting to me now after talking to you about them.
AU: [laughs] Well, I appreciate you talking to me about these films because it’s been really helpful. I think these films, sometimes, I mean all films do but educational films or whatever we want to call them –non-theatrical films need to be activated through conversation and different viewpoints, and talking about it forces you to actually really think about what you’re showing, so I appreciate it.
TF: Conversation is a part of research that often either doesn’t happen or happens in this ephemeral way.
AU: Yeah, absolutely. Can I ask one more question?
TF: Of course!
AU: And this, this is more, this might be outside of the scope of things.
TF: Even better.
AU: I was never thinking I would write about this. Thinking about the screening and thinking about meeting people and talking about them as the academic product? And I know that’s probably not being a good student or I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I’m thinking about screenings and programing as an end result of research? As a form of scholarly communication?
TF: I think that programming, curating, creating civic space around film is absolutely critical, a critical, not even dimension, but outcome of finding this work, otherwise, or why are we doing it? And I mean especially for films that teach about race, Jamaican films, early African American film, I mean we need those in the public sphere to intervene in the existing, dominant archive of what counts as media, what counts as image. That white gaze that we were talking about? This work is engaging that and looking back at it and is a way to talk about it that doesn’t happen if we’re not there. I think it’s crucial to– just even in how you invited me into this conversation, on educational films, that expands the conversation that would have happened in this series. It’s actually making me want to write about them again, and I think that our blog conversation is going to move me in that direction.
AU: Oh good! I think that’s a smart way of thinking about this conversation that includes different iterations and then you’ll write about it in a way that you would have not written about.
TF: That’s right.
AU: Or that you didn’t write about these films.
TF: It’ll be different from that earlier piece. There I was parsing each text and describing them for people who were not going to see them.
AU: Sure.
TF: And now from our conversation, I’m kind of seeing them as a collection. I’m asking what does this collection mean? What does it mean to collect them? So it’s more maybe the theory of drawing out an archive within. The work that I’m trying to do on Caribbean cinema is through this idea of the unexpected archive and of looking around like in weird places, or in non-film places.
AU: There aren’t those boundaries, especially if you’re talking about someone like your father, who went to see the movies. You can’t get at that through the object.
TF: Right.
AU: The interest is going to be things other than the film text.
TF: My conversation with my dad was so surprising, like what was showing where and that he thought it was important to see different types of theatres: this is the type of theatre I took your mom to, this is the other kind of theatre I wouldn’t take her to, yes!
AU: [laughing]
TF: Yes, it’s so interesting. It was so, it was too much.
AU: This is a total aside, maybe that means it’s time for me to leave if I’m talking about other things, but so Bloomington, the Von Lee, which is now a noodle shop on Kirkwood.
TF: Tell me.
AU: It was a movie theatre, and it was like the bad movie theatre.
TF: Oh?
AU: Because it would show foreign films. So I read this oral history of projectionists in town and this woman whose dad ran another one, which is now the Buskirk-Chumley, the Indiana, she was like “oh, I could never go there” so, even in a place like Bloomington.
TF: Right…
AU: With three or four screens there was still the bad theatre.
TF: Yeah and that bad theatre would have the foreign films.
AU: Yeah, like Fellini.
TF: I thought you were gonna say…exploitation films or porn or something.
AU: Absolutely not. It was the kind of stuff that we would see as tame.
TF: Wow, or even fancy
AU: Exactly. Like big city.
TF: Oh that’s so interesting. This was fun!
AU: Thanks so much! It was really a pleasure.
TF: You’re welcome! It was a pleasure for me too.
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The Streets and the Classrooms: Educational and Industrial Films in an Era of Massive Social Change, a film series at South Side Projections in Chicago.
Friday, May 1 at 7pm
Using Classroom Films to Teach about Race
Presented by J. Andrew Uhrich, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave.
1965-1973, 74 min., 16mm projection
Saturday, May 9 at 4pm
For Educational Purposes Only:
The Jamaica Film Unit Works, 1951-1961
Presented by Terri Francis, Indiana University Department of Communications and Culture
Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd.
1951-1956, 56 min., video projection
Post-screening discussion with Professor Francis will be moderated by Shadow & Act’s Sergio Mims.
Black Film Center/Archive awarded 2015 NEH grant
From the IU Newsroom:
The Black Film Center/Archive at IU Bloomington received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the project “Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization.”
The NEH has awarded $572,000 in grants to Indiana University in this current cycle, including more than $450,000 at the Bloomington campus. Other projects receiving NEH funding at IU Bloomington include the Archives of Traditional Music, which was awarded $275,000 to digitally preserve one of the largest collections of unique ethnographic wax cylinders outside of the Library of Congress.
Richard E. Norman project
The Black Film Center/Archive will produce a new finding aid for the collection of Richard E. Norman, a pioneer in development of films for African-American audiences. Project staff, working in partnership with IU Libraries Digital Collections Services, will enhance this online resource with over 20,000 digitized items from the archive.
“The Norman Collection constitutes a unique resource for the study of the formation of American cinema in general and the history of race films in particular,” said Michael T. Martin, director of the Black Film Center/Archive and a professor of American studies and of communication and culture in The Media School. “Arguably, of no less importance to both histories as the Lincoln Motion Picture Co. and Micheaux Picture Corp. are, this grant ensures the preservation and access of our Norman holdings for current and future generations of researchers, film historians and the public, as it will be to the teaching mission of Indiana University.”
In the early 1900s, Norman, a southern-born white filmmaker, was among a small group of so-called race filmmakers who set out to produce black-oriented pictures to counteract the racist caricatures that had dominated cinema from its inception.
Norman began his filmmaking career in the Midwest before relocating his Norman Film Studios to Jacksonville, Fla., where from 1919 to 1928 he produced silent feature films featuring leading black actors and actresses. He cast his actors in positive roles such as a banker, businessman and cowboy, and not in demeaning roles often given to African Americans by Hollywood. In his 1926 feature, “The Flying Ace,” he notably depicted an African-American pilot in the U.S. Armed Forces — an impossible career in reality for a black man until 1940.
Apart from short fragments, all but one of Norman’s films are now lost, making the collection at IU even more important. His lone surviving film, “The Flying Ace,” was restored by the Library of Congress in 2010 and screened at IU in 2013 as part of the “Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film” conference. (Note: Full proceedings of that conference are available online here.)
Norman’s archive at IU — an extensive collection of his personal and professional correspondence, detailed theatrical distribution records, original shooting scripts and other records — is among the most important resources for the study of early African-American film and movie-going culture from 1912 to 1954. Norman ceased film production with the advent of the sound era, but he remained active in the motion picture industry as a distributor and owner of theaters.
“Since the 2013 publication of Barbara Tepa Lupack’s scholarly biography on Norman, we’ve seen a surge of research interest in Norman’s collection from scholars internationally,” said Brian Graney, archivist of the Black Film Center/Archive and principal investigator on the Norman project. “This support from NEH will greatly increase the discoverability of Norman’s records and make them readily available as digital resources for remote research and new forms of scholarship on African-American movie-going.”
The collection was donated by Norman’s son, Capt. Richard E. Norman Jr., to the Black Film Center/Archive under its founding director Phyllis Klotman, emeritus professor of African American and African diaspora studies, who died late last month.
The Short Films of Abderrahmane Sissako, Thursday 4/16 at IU Cinema
“I think the main source of my inspiration is human beings: my neighbor, my neighbor’s neighbor, the person I buy milk from—all of those people.” – Abderrahmane Sissako
Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako is often described as a filmmaker who expresses a particularly African point of view to an international audience. Although “African filmmaker” is both too expansive and too limiting of a label for Sissako, he has remarked that he is concerned with the generalized way that African people are presented in film and media. In a recent interview with Film Comment, he laments, “Africans are portrayed in a way that makes their issues seem mysterious, when in fact they’re really in many ways no different from Europeans.” Alternately, Sissako works from a deeply humanist perspective. Shot on location in places including Moscow, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, Sissako’s short films, made between 1991-2010, give a sense of the international scope of his body of work and provide insight into his unbounded interest in humanity.
October (1993), follows an African student studying in Moscow and his Russian girlfriend, who contemplates abortion on the eve of his departure. Tiya’s Dream (2008), one of eight shorts on the Millennium Goals Development film 8, follows a young Ethiopian school girl with a rich imagination and an ailing father. In Sabriya (1997), shot in the desert of southern Tunisia, brothers Said and Youssef bide their time playing chess at a café in male-dominated Maghrebi society. When a free-spirited woman named Sarra pays a visit to her mother’s homeland, she brings excitement to the quiet outpost, but disrupts daily routines and long-held traditions when one of the brothers falls in love with her.
These short works explore universal matters of love, friendship, suffering, and desire that motivate human interaction and govern daily life. Yet the specificity of place, and the ways that geography, architecture, and culture shape experience, is also central to these films. October and Sabriya, for instance, both feature characters who travel to unfamiliar landscapes and become involved in romances complicated by race, religion, and tradition. Cultural misunderstandings abound as the source of both humor and conflict. However, these exchanges represent a breakdown in communication, rather than fundamental difference.
Sissako’s films often begin at a turning point, or just prior to a moment when the otherwise quotidian lives of his characters have been ruptured. But even when circumstances drastically change for these characters, it remains understated. The most pressing issues are rarely confronted head on. The silent tensions in his films are familiar, but frustrating, as we want fictional characters to say what often goes unspoken in real life. However, Sissako has called regular human beings his primary source of inspiration, the “anonymous” people like our neighbors and shopkeepers, who we pass by but hardly see: Real people who function in the world without a script.
In his Film Comment interview, Sissako mentions the achievements that go unnoticed, like a seemingly ordinary woman who has given birth to 10 children, as especially profound. This remark is quite telling, as it is more often women’s stories that go untold. Sissako’s films, alternately, turn our attention to the unseen. Significantly, his films frequently place the dreams, desires, and struggles of girls and women, into the foreground.
The Short Film Program (1991-2010) includes all of Sissako’s short works and will screen this Thursday, April 16th at 9:30 PM as part of the retrospective series “Transnational Poetic Cinema: Abderrahmane Sissako” at the Indiana University Cinema. The program follows a screening of Sissako’s Timbuktu, nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Mauritania) and winner of France’s Cesar Award for Best Film. Sissako will be present for the Timbuktu screening, and again on Friday for the screening of his 2006 feature Bamako at 6:30 PM. He will also deliver the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture this Friday, April 17th, at 3:00 PM.
This series is sponsored by the College Arts and Humanities Institute, African Studies Program, the Black Film Center/ Archive, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of History, Film and Media Studies, The Media School, the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, the Russian and East European Institute, and the IU Cinema. Special thanks to Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Institut Français, Amélie Garin-Davet, and Marissa Moorman.
Sexuality and the Black Radical Imagination symposium, Friday, April 10
On Friday, April 10, the Department of Gender Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences will host the Sexuality and the Black Radical Imagination symposium, an exploration of the importance of black radical imagination to gender and sexual politics in 21st century black communities.
This daylong event will be a transformative interdisciplinary conversation between emerging dynamic scholars in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies.
Featured speakers include:
- C. Riley Snorton, Assistant Professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.
- Amber Jamilla Musser, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
- Ariane Cruz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.
- Kai M. Green, Postdoctoral Fellow in Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.
The event begins at 2:00 PM on April 10, 2015, at the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center, 275 N. Jordan Ave., in Theater Room A201.
The event flier is online here. For more information, contact L.H. Stallings at 812-855-0101 / lhortons@indiana.edu.
In Memoriam: Phyllis R. Klotman, Founder of the Black Film Center/ Archive
Phyllis R. Klotman, founder of the Black Film Center/ Archive and professor emerita in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, died on March 30th at her home in Manhattan.
“She was one of the first to preserve black independent films, and in doing that, she encouraged us,” Charles Burnett remarked in his interview with the New York Times following Klotman’s passing. The Times’ obituary recounts many of Klotman’s contributions to the study and preservation of black cinema during her tenure at Indiana University, including: the establishment of the BFC/A, the founding of the Black Camera newsletter (now Black Camera: An International Film Journal), and the publication of Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography (1979).
Professor Klotman also conducted interviews with filmmakers Larry Clark, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Marlon Riggs, and Zeinabu irene Davis, just to name a few. Collecting interviews with filmmakers continues to be part of the Black Film Center/ Archive’s mission, and Klotman’s transcripts and audio recordings are available on site. In 2012, following celebrations of her legacy upon the 30th anniversary of the BFC/A’s founding, a classroom and screening venue at the new BFC/A facility was named “The Phyllis Klotman Room” in her honor.
The BFC/A holdings include several photographs that document Professor Klotman’s time at IU and at the BFC/A. Below is a photo gallery of some of our favorites of Klotman with colleagues, visiting filmmakers, and other notable public figures.
Photo Gallery
See also:
“Phyllis R. Klotman, Archivist of African-American Cinema, Dies at 90,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 2015
Leslie Houin, “The Black Film Center/Archive: Thirty Years of Archival and Educational Progress” Black Journal 3 no. 2 (Spring 2012): 220-236.
Afrosurrealist Film Society: Conversation with Terri Francis, Part 2 – Blues Cinema
“The blues connects all my work on home movies, Caribbean cinema and experimental film.”– Terri Francis
Last week, part one of my interview with IU professor Terri Francis, founder of the Afrosurrealist Film Society, focused on “Afrosurrealism” as a conceptual framework and highlighted the work of Akosua Adoma Owusu, the first visiting filmmaker of the series. In anticipation of our next visiting filmmaker, Mike Henderson, we’re picking up where we left off to discuss Francis’ work on “Blues Cinema” and the relationship between the blues and black independent filmmaking. – Noelle Griffis, BFC/A
NG: In your Black Camera interview with Kevin Jerome Everson, “Of the Ludic, the Blues, and the Counterfeit,” you write, “Family Pictures” or “blues cinema” is about the various means by which African American cinema steps into the vacuum where real family photographs and home movies have been lost to migrations, floods, and the precariousness of black life in America.” Are your notions of “Afrosurrealism” and “blues cinema” related?
TF: Well, I thought of blues cinema and Afrosurrealism at different times. And when I wrote about blues cinema I wasn’t really thinking of experimentation. I came across references to the blues in my research on Warrington Hudlin, Kathleen Collins and other independent filmmakers here at the Black Film Center/Archive back in 2007 or 2008. They meant to evoke a sense of the everyday and the ordinary and work I think. Hudlin used the blues to talk about a film he shot in New Haven. Later on when I started thinking about form, I found myself drawn to the bluesiness of a lot of black experimental films. Afrofuturism, alternately, doesn’t have that worn look generally – it doesn’t look handmade. I feel like most of the work I see connected to that is actually futuristic, slick, smooth and new looking because it is probably digital. Which makes sense since it is about the future and technology as a mechanism of futuring.
Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts might have been digital but then it is about a handmade space shuttle. So it’s in-between. But I guess everything is handmade at some level.
There might be something in Afrosurrealism about evoking a past. Kevin Everson’s films re-tell the past. His filmmaking walks a line between fiction and nonfiction that I think of as Afrosurrealist. When experimental films are doing their most exciting work they are delving into an interior, they are introspective and they explore the past an as imaginary.
NG: How do you see these films by Everson and others as a form of the blues?
TF: I personally respond to the blues – films that look roughly textured, that weep, that mourn and long. Films evoke the ruined, labored or even wounded. Like they had been lost, buried or burned and still smoking. An aftermath. If I made films they would all look like we barely got away. The fact that the blues are rural might make us forget their radical experimentations with form and feeling. Blues musicians are easy to caricature because they have been so commodified and we can easily forget their depth even while citing them.
Mike Henderson’s 16mm films have a greater sense of absurdity and humor than the other films we’ve been talking about. There’s a strong DIY aesthetic that I just love and I’m fascinated by the descriptions of Henderson’s paintings as gestural, with large brush strokes, spread and layered thick, then scraped away. How would you do that in a film? I used “blues cinema” as a metaphor but Henderson is actually a blues musician with a substantial collection of experimental films. I’d love to hear him talk about the relationships between the lyrics, the music, the paintings and the filmmaking. But I don’t want to get too caught up in making him representative of blues filmmaking because that might be too literal and too easy. From what I’ve read he used out of date stock sometimes. He shot reversal. His films remind me of Blonde Cobra (1963) and Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-1963) where it’s guys playing around in costumes. Identity and the gaze. Performance. Big ideas but it’s “just another notion.” Henderson’s films seem both really well thought out but full of accidents and discoveries yet not embarrassing or vulgar. They seemed performative and introspective. The richness of the 16mm and all that is put in front of the camera contrasts with the elemental structure of something like Money Done or King David. The earlier ones recall Ken Jacobs and even Hollis Frampton more strongly than the later ones which are abstract in a different way. That’s at first glance. I’d love the chance to look at them more closely. I thought of Renee Cox’s photograph Yo Mama’s Last Supper and Robert Colescott’s painting Lightening Lipstick (which you can see at IU Art Museum) –the approach and scale of ideas. Other Bay area filmmakers came to mind – Melvin Van Peebles, Barry Jenkins and of course D. Scot Miller who wrote an important manifesto on Afrosurrealism is based in San Francisco. http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/2009/05/afrosurreal.html. He first published that in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
I read that Henderson has an MFA in visual art but no formal training in filmmaking. Can that be true? To think of him in relation to indie filmmakers out of UCLA would be rich. The way he spliced his films apparently created some cool looking images but also some preservation issues. It’s intriguing how his films present issues of conceptualization – not only “what is this,” but also, how do we see and keep this?
NG: What are your plans/ideas/goals for the Afrosurrealist Film Society and its film series at IU?
TF: I plan to teach my Afrosurrealism course soon and it would be great to have the weekly screenings open to the public. The syllabus would include literature, music and plays – the arts are a necessary framework to the study of media and ideas, obviously. Afrosurrealism, just like surrealism, is a multidisciplinary endeavor.
Meanwhile, let’s do a modest series. Two screenings with filmmakers present per school year would be fantastic. I’d love to bring in filmmakers who are nearby in the Midwest – Cauleen Smith in Chicago and Robert Banks in Cleveland, OH. We could meet in the BFC/A classroom and screen and talk. Easy peasy. Or we could collaborate with IU Cinema. And I’d love to have Chris Harris and Kevin Everson here. I’d also like to get scholars in the region who are invested in experimental film, like at Ohio State, into the conversation.
I’d want to bring together people on campus who are already interested in experimental film but also I want it to be a place where people can discover this type of filmmaking the way I did back in late 1990s in Paris. I enjoyed collaborating with Black Cinema House in the fall and it would be great to do more of that. The BFC/A could also connect with the Wexner in Columbus and SAIC.
But in terms of who would come to these screenings I imagine a core of Black Film Center/Archive and Black Camera staff, students, associated faculty, and graduate students in relevant departments. But there are a lot of people in film studies who are into experimental film including you so let’s build on that. My vision is for a group between 5 and 20 people varying throughout the school term.
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Upcoming Screening:
April 3, 6:30 PM, Indiana University Cinema
“Just Another Notion: Short Films by Mike Henderson”
Director Mike Henderson and archivist Mark Toscano are scheduled to be present.
Thank you to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive for providing all 16mm prints included in this series.
For more on Mike Henderson and the recent preservation of his 16mm films by archivist Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archives), check out Toscano’s post: “Will She Get Over It” on his blog “Preservation Insanity.”
Afrosurrealist Film Society: Conversation with IU Professor Terri Francis, Part 1
“Afrosurrealist films can look as though they’ve been buried in earth and have come up through the ocean. Afrosurrealism might be a sous-realism, a realism beneath.” – Terri Francis
The Afrosurrealist Film Society screening series launched at Indiana University this past November with the films of Akosua Adoma Owusu. IU film professor Terri Francis, founder of the Afrosurrealist Film Society, invited the Ghanaian-American experimental filmmaker to screen a selection of her short films for a small community of faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Departments of Communication and Culture, Gender Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, and American Studies, among others.
The films screened, including Me Broni Ba/ My White Baby (2009), Drexciya (2010), and Split Ends/ I Feel Wonderful (2012), explore issues of diasporic identity, experiences of location and dislocation, post-colonialist space, and hair politics. As Nzingha Kendall wrote in Black Camera, “Owusu takes full advantage of the filmic form to grapple with the paradox of representing the unrepresentable—blackness, memory, and displacement—in her films. This haunting, in a cinematic sense, can be detected in the way she deconstructs the relationship between sound and image through her creative editing and assemblage technique.”
In the conversation below, BFC/A Graduate Assistant Noelle Griffis discusses the films and the politics of the Afrosurrealist Film Society with Francis. Part 2 of the interview, coming next week, will focus on the “Just Another Notion: Short Films by Mike Henderson,” an upcoming screening at the IU Cinema, co-presented by the Afrosurrealist Film Society with the Underground Film Series and the Black Film Center/Archive, Friday April 3rd at 6:30 PM.
Noelle Griffis (NG): What is the Afrosurrealist Film Society?
Terri Francis (TF):The Society represents the applied aspect of my research on experimental film. It’s a way to meet new filmmakers, find material to write about, form community and curate. It’s also a dream space — my place of idealism and creativity. A vision of what matters to me and what I would spend all my time doing if I could. Having space where I could think about movies by making them, by scratching it out frame by frame.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I want it to be a flexible platform for the screening and discussion of black experimental film; to provide a home base for filmmakers who want to screen and discuss their work; and to encourage small-scale inexpensive filmmaking.
We do have a mission statement: The Afrosurrealist Film Society is an imaginary collective of artist-intellectuals engaged with film in its varied forms and transnational histories. Animated by Amiri Baraka’s rubric Afro-Surreal Expressionism, we seek, through our art and scholarship an entirely different world, full of the fantastic, that is organically tied to this one. We draw upon an electric mash-up of black folklore, history, consciousness and location in order to engage representations and refractions of reality through film. And we rely on the natural world for surreal venues that sustain contemplation, conversation and creativity. Black Liberation. And Beauty.
Baraka modeled his idea of Afrosurreal Expressionism on poet and storyteller Henry Dumas, of whom he wrote, “Dumas’s power lay in his skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one. The stories are fables; a mythological presence pervades. They are morality tales, magical, resonating dream emotions and images; shifting ambiguous terror, mystery, implied revelation. But they are also stories of real life, now or whenever, constructed in weirdness and poetry in which the contemporaneity of essential themes is clear.”
NG: Can you talk about the way that you became involved with Afrosurrealist Film.
TF: Experimental nonnarrative film is actually how I got interested in films and film study. That background informs how I look at any film. I studied in Paris off and on in the late 1990s and that’s where I discovered film and interesting things you could do with films and inspiring discussions that were happening with them. I saw Chris Harris’s thesis film at the University of Chicago when I got back from France and still/here became the first thing I wrote about beyond my dissertation. I liked that experimental film had a community and a live in-person conversation around it that was accessible to me – the filmmakers are usually there and experimental films look like something I could make and that I want to make. I’m interested in the visceral affective aspects of movies. I see them as sculptural and painterly as something that I can share space with, look at, think about and revisit. The film is actually a space of contemplation.
NG: How did the Black Camera “Close Up” on Afrosurrealist film come about? How did this lead to the film series?
The Black Camera issue was a natural scholarly evolution of my fascination with experimental film. I just really needed to see my ideas in print and put Afrosurrealism into the scholarly marketplace. In the 10 years since seeing still/here I developed an approach to writing about film that is grounded in close formal analysis. I started teaching Kevin Everson’s work along with Akosua Adoma Owusu and of course Isaac Julien, Cauleen Smith, Bill Greaves and more—in dialogue with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and others.
In the Black Camera issue I drew on Robin Kelly’s work on surrealism where he argues that surrealism was always black. The Afro in Afrosurrealism is a reminder and a restoration. Scott MacDonald has an important essay “Desegregating Film History” about addressing the blind spots in avant-garde film history and how it’s organized around unacknowledged whiteness.
The poet Cathy Park Hong wrote a very strong piece on whiteness in avant-garde poetry. She writes that “American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgment.” She is really critical of what she calls the “snake oil” of being “against expression” and “post-identity.” Her critique points out that “marginalized voices need a concept of voice, expression, identity and specificity to intervene and “alter conditions forged in history.” Asserting marginalized subjectivity and interrogating conventional history is the work of black experimental film. And that pretty much sums up my scholarly imperative.
NG: In addition to Everson and Owusu, who are some filmmakers that embody the Afrosurrealist spirit to you? Are there connections between these films and filmmakers in terms of aesthetics, politics, or vision?
TF: Neither surrealism nor Afrosurrealism is a style, a set of criteria, an ideology, a genre, or even a coherent exploration. It is not a movement. It is an imaginary, magnetizing loosely related sensibilities, and it certainly is a modernism connected to other forms of modernism such as the Harlem Renaissance, negritude, magical realism, and what Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis called marvelous realism. All are advance guard approaches to life and society from which intellectuals and artists drew inspiration as they sought to challenge convention. We have to be open to what’s next and the “what else” and not get stuck in a pre-determined diagnostic.
I’m drawn to films like Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1987) that are grounded in a clearly defined reality but approach it diagonally. Like those early surrealist films, formal strategies in Afrosurrealism include non-narrative structures with the objective of finding unexpected associations. A film like Handsworth experiments with the film essay form to get at invisible structures in society. They can make us see what’s been right in front of our eyes all along, which is really powerful.
Also, Ja’Tovia Gary started making direct animation a couple of years ago – that’s frame-by-frame painting and scratching directly on the film. http://mononoawarefilm.com/workshop/2015/04/direct-filmmaking/ She is re-working some family home movies in that fashion for a feature film. It’s an incredible dialogue because it’s both enchanting and destructive. Christopher Harris uses an optical printer and hand processing which gives his films a bluesy and tactile look. Reckless Eyeballing (16mm, 2004) moves way beyond the usual criticisms of Birth of a Nation and gets into the structures of looking, desire and beauty that govern it.
I’m currently immersing myself in Richard Fung’s work on videotape for an essay in the “Caribbean Queer Visualities” collection with Small Axe and I’m thinking Afrosurrealism might be an interesting way to stretch his work or the other way around. He is a video artist from Trinidad and based in Toronto who does experimental work on identity. Dirty Laundry (1996) and Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) both examine migration, labor and affective bonds through identity and sexuality. His appropriation film Islands tells the story of his Uncle Clive’s role in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. He asks a great question there about whether islands are so obvious that they can never be really seen—and by whom, for whom? Fung uses home movies juxtaposed with fictional performances, historical footage and talking head excerpts to queer and query conventional ways of defining Caribbean, Chinese, or Canadian histories. His film Out of the Blue tells a very familiar story about a young black Canadian man who is falsely accused of a crime because he “fit the description.” It’s a film with a lot of talking – just talking actually but it somehow demands that you look at it for subtleties of framing and performance. Fung might not seem to fit into Afrosurrealism but the way he examines cultural identity and cinematic representation and Caribbeanness, as unsettled and produced speaks to the project.
Afrosurrealism is a no-theory. More of a poem than a syllabus.
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Next week: Part 2 of the conversation will discuss more on the Afrosurrealist Film Society Screenings at IU, Mike Henderson’s visit, Blues Cinema, and More!
See Also:
Francis, Terri. “Close-Up Gallery: The Afrosurrealist Film Society.” Black Camera 5 no. 1 (Fall 2013): 209-219.
Kendall, Nzingha. “Close-Up Commentary: Haunting in Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Short Experimental Films,” Black Camera 5 no. 1, (Fall 2013): 232-236.