People and Places – The Land Beneath Our Feet

On Thursday, March 8, please join us in welcoming Emmanual Urey and Dr. Greg Mitman for a screening of their 2016 documentary, The Land Beneath Our Feet. Co- directed by Mitman with Sarita Siegel, The Land Beneath Our Feet follows US doctoral student Emmanual Urey’s return to Liberia with historical film footage offering new evidence of a 1926 corporate land grab. Mr. Urey and Dr. Mitman will be present to discuss the film following the screening.

This event takes place at 5:00 pm, Thursday, March 8, at the IU Libraries Screening Room (Wells 048).

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/166601524 Website: http://thelandbeneathourfeet.com

The screening is part of the IU African Studies Program’s event series, People and Places: Conversations about The Meaning of Land, centered around questions of 21st century land rights, land tenure, and land ownership around the globe. The Black Film Center/Archive is a co-sponsor of this program, with the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity & Multicultural Affairs; College Arts & Humanities Institute (CAHI); Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology; IU Libraries; Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center; and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Sketchy Humorists at SCMS 2018

BFC/A director Terri Francis will attend the 2018 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Toronto from March 14-18. On Friday, March 16, at 1:15pm, Dr. Francis will chair the panel, Sketchy Humorists: Black Sexuality in the Comic Works of Spencer Williams, Josephine Baker, and Larry Fuller. Dr. Francis will also present her paper, “Josephine Baker’s Oppositional Burlesque: Strategic Incongruity and Film Pioneering,” along with papers by Jacqueline Stewart of the University of Chicago and Rebecca Wanzo of Washington University in St. Louis. Harvard University’s Glenda Carpio will participate as respondent.

This panel is sponsored by the Comedy and Humor Studies Scholarly Interest Group and the Oscar Micheaux Society of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

The full 2018 Toronto conference program is now available online here: http://www.cmstudies.org/news/387544/2018-Toronto-Conference-Program-Now- Available.htm

Black Film: Nontheatrical – Ina Archer

The Black Film: Nontheatrical series, a partnership of the BFC/A and the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive, continues in March with a visit from Ina D. Archer of the Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

Archer will present two programs on March 22 at the IU Libraries Screening Room (Wells 048): At 2:15pm, What are we looking at? The (black) nontheatrical gaze; and at 6:00pm, What was I looking at? Recovering the neglected Archina Studio.

Ina Archer is a filmmaker and visual artist whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally. She was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA Fellow, and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video. Prior to joining NMAAHC as Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant, Archer was adjunct faculty at Parsons School for Design. She is the former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Archer earned a BFA in Film/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU. She studied Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at UCLA (MIAS) and NYU (MIAP). She is also a contributor to Film Comment and has written for Framework and Black Camera.

The Black Film: Nontheatrical series continues in April with a visit from Shani Miller of UCLA.

A Celebration of Ella Fitzgerald

Be sure to arrive early when the 1958 film, St. Louis Blues, comes to IU Cinema on March 19. The film begins at 7:00 pm but you’ll want to take a seat at 6:30 pm when jazz musician Monika Herzig and jazz vocalist Janiece Jaffe will offer a musical prelude in celebration of Ella Fitzgerald’s 100th birthday, performing beloved songs from Fitzgerald’s repertoire.

A musical biography of composer and musician W.C. Handy, St. Louis Blues features some of the most important African American stars of the mid-20th century: Nat ‘King’ Cole, Eartha Kitt, Cab Calloway, Mahalia Jackson, Pearl Bailey, Ruby Dee, and Ella Fitzgerald — performing “If Beale Street Could Talk” with the Memphis Jazz Quartet. This screening is sponsored by the Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection, Pamela J. Schlick Fund, and IU Cinema.

Find a few moments to visit the Cinema’s lower lobby, where BFC/A archivist Ronda Sewald and Media School senior Elijah Pouges have curated a small exhibit of recent donations to the BFC/A from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation.

Eve’s Bayou at IU Cinema

The BFC/A tips our hat to SPEA graduate student Phillisha Wathen for her upcoming Staff Selects presentation of Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou. IU Cinema screens this modern classic in 35mm on Saturday, March 24, at 7:00 pm.

Coffee & Donuts

Coffee and Donuts at the BFC/A is fast on its way to cherished tradition status after just two months. Join us here again to share a morning treat with our director and staff on Tuesday, March 27, from 9:00-11:00 am.

Black Film: Nontheatrical

Black Film: Nontheatrical is a three-part series hosted by the BFC/A and the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive featuring archivists, museum specialists, and preservationists working specifically with nontheatrical black film collections. The series begins this week with a visit from Candace Ming, Archivist and Project Manager at the University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project.

The South Side Home Movie Project is an initiative at the University of Chicago to collect, preserve, digitize, exhibit, and document home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Candace Ming will speak about the project’s growing archive and host an exclusive screening of films from the collection. Ming is a graduate of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University and has worked as a Public Records Officer for the New York Police Department and for the Museum of Modern Art.

Upcoming Black Film: Nontheatrical presentations include Ina D. Archer of the Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of African American History and Culture (March 22) and Shani Miller of UCLA Library Special Collections (April 26).

BFC/A 2018 Visiting Research Fellowships

The Black Film Center/Archive in The Media School at Indiana University-Bloomington is pleased to announce 2018 Black Film Center/Archive Visiting Research Fellowships to support research toward a dissertation, thesis, publication, presentation, or production. These competitive fellowships for visiting researchers residing outside the Bloomington area are intended to advance the study of black film and media and to promote research in the collections at the BFC/A by filmmakers, graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members at any rank. Scholars and filmmakers currently working or studying at an HBCU are strongly encouraged to apply. Applications are due by February 15, 2018.

Race Swap Wraps

On Friday, February 23, don’t miss Change of Mind (1969), the final screening in the Race Swap series at IU Cinema. Unearthing early roots of Jordan Peele’s political horror film Get Out (2017), Race Swap presents cult films which explore and exploit racial ideology, playing on the supposedly irreducible fact of racial groups and the disgust/desire to get inside the body of the other. And yet in some ways, they picture a proposed new race relations in post-civil rights America that is imperfect and unsettling, but united nonetheless.

Buoyed by an original score by Duke Ellington, Robert Stevens’ Change of Mind introduces us to white district attorney David Rowe in the operating room as his brain is transplanted into the skull of African American Ralph Dickson (Raymond St. Jacques). Rowe/Dickson’s transformation challenges the women in his life—both Rowe’s wife (Susan Oliver) and Dickson’s widow (Janet MacLachlan)-—as he himself is challenged on the job as district attorney overseeing a racially charged murder case involving Sheriff Webb (Leslie Nielsen).(Digital Presentation)

This series is sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, Cinema and Media Studies, and IU Cinema. Screenings are free, but ticketed. Visit the IU Cinema website for more information. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program. For more on the Race Swap series, see IU senior Jesse Pasternack’s post at the IU Cinema blog, A Place for Film.

Wounded Galaxies: 1968

In February, the BFC/A is proud to cosponsor the ambitious festival and symposium, Wounded Galaxies: 1968 – Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach. Highlights of the film program curated by J. Hoberman include Jules Dassin’s UPTIGHT!, Agnes Varda’s BLACK PANTHERS, and more. For a full program, visit http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/woundedgalaxies

Coffee & Donuts at the BFC/A

Stop by the BFC/A again this month for hot coffee and fresh donuts on Tuesday, February 27, from 9:00- 11:00am. Come and go as you like!

What’s new at the BFCA?!

It has been quite some time and lots of happenings, but one thing is for certain… We’ve missed you! We truly hope that this email finds you well and look forward to reconnecting with each of you! To start, we would like to virtually introduce you to our new interim director, Dr. Akinwumi Adesokan. Many of you may already be familiar with him, from previous events and interactions. We are very happy to have him join us and appreciate his willingness to serve.

New name, new logo, new website

We kicked off the new 2022 year with the launch of our new name, logo, and website! Starting January 18, 2022, we are officially the Black Film Center & Archive. Updated with details on all of our current collections and featuring a cleaner, more user-friendly interface design, this site is primed to enhance the accessibility of the BFCA’s holdings and resources. Visit us at bfca.indiana.edu to check it out and see an example of our new logo below:

Something old, something new, and it’s certainly a beautiful blue!

Last fall (2021), we welcomed a new team member when the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive gifted us a Steenbeck 16mm flatbed film editing table. Known for their widespread use by professional film editors to view and edit film stock for much of the 20th century, Steenbeck machines have become highly sought after by film archivists for their ability to easily screen 16mm film without the risks associated with running a physical film through a movie projector. With the Steenbeck, we are now able to allow researchers to watch titles from our extensive 16mm film collections onsite in our office. Please send an email to bfca@indiana.edu to schedule a tour or research appointment, to check it out in-person!

Paulin S. Vieyra Collection

Beninese filmmaker Paulin S. Vieyra is one of the most significant yet relatively unknown figures in African cinema history, directing the first substantial film by a French-speaking sub-Saharan African and advising numerous postcolonial filmmakers, festivals, and film initiatives from the 1960s until his death in 1987. In Summer 2021, the BFC&A, through a generous donation from Paulin’s son Stéphane Vieyra, acquired thousands of Vieyra’s personal and professional papers and artifacts. We spent weeks on the initial inventorying and storage of these the materials that now comprise our new Paulin S. Vieyra Collection. We expect it to be a significant resource for future researchers, historians, and students of African and postcolonial film once it is fully cataloged. Additional information on the initial acquisition of this collection can be found in our recent blog post. 

To assist with the enormous task of cataloging this collection (most of which is written in French), archivist Amber Bertin and assistant archivist Dan Hassoun partnered with Prof. Vincent Bouchard from IU’s Department of French and Italian. The team spent many days throughout the Fall 2021 semester meticulously identifying the contents of the collection, most of which have never been circulated or published in the English-speaking world. Dr. Bouchard is currently at work translating some of Vieyra’s essays on African film culture for future publication.

Flyover Culture spotlight

In October 2021, the Black Film Center & Archive was profiled on the YouTube channel Flyover Culture. Check out the video here.

Upcoming events

Vieyra Screenings 
Paulin Vieyra’s film works are rarely screened and extremely difficult to access. To celebrate the arrival of the Paulin S. Vieyra Collection, the Black Film Center & Archive is proud to partner with the IU Cinema to program a selection of Vieyra’s groundbreaking shorts on February 8 (in addition to a virtual stream of the same program from February 4-11). The film program is free and open to the public and will be accompanied by a February 10 virtual conversation on Vieyra’s life and career with former BFCA director Terri Francis and IU French and Italian professor Vincent Bouchard. Visit the IU Cinema’s website for more information on attending any of these events.

BFCA Poster Exhibit in Franklin Hall 
Starting February 8th, posters from the Black Film Center & Archive’s extensive collections will be exhibited in the Commons in Franklin Hall. Stop by during the semester to see this tastefully curated show and learn more about the collection.

“Voice with a Mission”: Amazing Grace Screening
In collaboration with the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center’s Black History Month programming, on February 22nd, we will be screening Amazing Grace. Registration is limited and will be managed by the NMBCC. Immediately following the film, we will have a panel discussion in a hybrid format.

For more information about the BFCA, please visit our website www.bfca.indiana.edu. To subscribe to our blog, please visit our blog page https://blogs.iu.edu/bfca/ and click on “Subscribe” in the bottom right of the screen. Please consider ways to give, to continue our efforts and supporting our mission. We sincerely thank you all for your support. We would not be able to complete all of our wonderful programs and awesome events, without your help.

Warmest regards,
BFCA Interim Director and Staff

Bridgett M. Davis to Visit: 25th Anniversary Screening of Naked Acts

The Black Film Center & Archive is honored to welcome back multi-talented writer, novelist, teacher, and filmmaker Bridgett M. Davis on Thurs., Feb. 23. Ms. Davis is Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she instructs classes in creative writing and screenwriting. She is the author of two novels, Shifting Through Neutral (2004) and Into the Go-Slow (2014), as well as the New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers (2019). Her film directorial debut Naked Acts (1996) was a landmark feminist exploration of Black women’s sexuality and body image, capturing a rich period of ‘90s independent cinema when increasing numbers of BIPOC film artists were expanding the range of acceptable Black screen representations.

Ms. Davis will lead a special Master Class from 11am-12:30pm at the BFCA office (Wells 044) on Thurs, February 23, where she will lead participants in an intimate conversation about her writing and filmmaking techniques and experiences as an independent filmmaker. The event is free and open to the public.

Black Filmmaker Interviews

The Black Film Center & Archive holds hundreds of rare interview recordings documenting the stories of Black film artists. In our ongoing series, “The Black Film Center & Archive Presents: Black Filmmaking Interviews,” we are widely publishing one previously-unreleased interview from our collections monthly from January through July.

In honor of her upcoming visit to the BFCA, our series continues this month with a recorded conversation with Bridgett M. Davis. Recorded September 29, 2014 during a visit to IU, Ms. Davis talks about her career and the challenges of independent filmmaking with then-BFCA director Michael T. Martin and graduate assistant Noelle Griffis.

https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/z603rk780

A full list of published interviews in this series to date is available on our website.

Black ArchiveZ Pop-up Exhibit at the Lilly Library 

On Wed, February 15, IU’s Lilly Library (in partnership with the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center) will host a Black History Month pop-up exhibit highlighting the history and legacy of the Black Panther Party. The BFCA will be contributing materials to the exhibit, with our archivists onsite to answer questions.

Exhibit exploration will run from 5:00-6:00pm at the Lilly Library’s Slocum Room. A faculty talk with Dr. Jakobi Williams, chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, will follow the exhibit from 6:00-7:00pm, proceeded by a reception at the Neal-Marshall Bridgewaters Lounge.

Black Lit 2023 

Archival Assistant Essence London is a featured artist in this year’s Black Lit Exhibit hosted by IU Arts & Humanities Council and the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library. Her poem “Suggested Questions to Ask Your Father” will be on display in Maxwell Hall, alongside the work of other writers, until March 10, 2023. If you’d like to hear her read, stop by Cook Center this Friday, February 10 at 6:00 p.m. Other presenters include Ellise Smith, PDVNCH, Maria Hamilton Abegunde, Gloria Howell, and Elena Guzman. Drinks and catering will be provided by One World Catering and Big Red Liquors.

(Ja Quita Joy Roberts, BFCA Finance & Office Administrator; Eva Stuart, BFCA Archival Assistant; Photos by Ja Quita Joy Roberts.)

BFCA Co-sponsors Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts at Univ. of Chicago 

For the spring 2023 term, the BFCA is proud to cosponsor the University of Chicago’s Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts. The event commemorates an historic 1976 festival of the same name, held at New York’s Women’s Interart Center, that brought together pioneering groups of Black feminist artists and activists to celebrate, analyze, and advocate for the then-emerging body of work by Black women filmmakers. The first festival focused on Black feminist film issues (predating the rise in Black women filmmaking output in the 1980s and 1990s), this ‘76 event featured screenings, performances, lectures, and panel discussions with figures such as Camille Billops, Monica Freeman, Madeline Anderson, Ayoka Chenzira, Carol Munday Lawrence, and many others.

The 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival includes a free 9-week “open classroom” series of screenings and discussions held in conjunction with Dr. Allyson Nadia Field’s University of Chicago course on 1970s Black Women’s Filmmaking. From March 2-4, the series concludes with a symposium of keynote lectures and roundtable discussions with both original festival participants and contemporary directors exploring the past, present, and future of Black women filmmaking. In addition to contributing films and research assistance for the event, the BFCA will host a workshop on archival practices led by interim director Rachael Stoeltje.

Please visit https://voices.uchicago.edu/sojourner for more info on this special event, including screening dates and symposium participants. Consider joining if you are in or near the Chicago area!

Franklin Hall Screenings

In celebration of Black History Month, the BFCA is programming a series of pop-up screenings of films from our collections each day in February on the 24×12 foot video wall in the Franklin Hall Commons. For screening times and more information, click here.
https://mediaschool.indiana.edu/news-events/news/item.html?n=bfca-at-franklin-hall

Summer of Soul Screening

On Saturday, January 21, the BFCA hosted a screening of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021) in the Wells Library Screening Room. Chronicling the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, the film showcases stunning footage of performances by artists like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and the Staple Singers that had not been widely available for over 50 years.

This screening was sponsored by the Indiana University NAACP, Monroe County NAACP, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, and Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. A discussion panel followed the screening, featuring Dr. Audrey McCluskey (former BFCA director and AAADS Professor Emerita), Dr. Olivia Ekeh (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and History), and Brother William Morris (attorney and host of the WFIU radio program Soul Kitchen).

(Event photos by Ja Quita Joy Roberts.)

BFCA partnered with Cicada Cinema on Screening of Love Jones (1997)

On February 5, the BFCA partnered with Cicada Cinema for a screening of the 1997 classic Love Jones at the Blockhouse Bar in downtown Bloomington, which started with a live Jazz Session! Thank you to everyone who turned out for this screening!

Cicada Cinema is a volunteer-run and community driven, local pop-up cinema with the mission to provide high-quality screenings of underrepresented cinema. If you would like to learn more about their programming, you can visit their website: cicadacinema.com.

IU Cinema open house

BFCA Staff attended the IU Cinema’s Open House and were joined by partnering friends from IU Libraries Moving Image Archive and Cicada Cinema.

Be sure to check out their website for upcoming events and screenings!

Social media highlights

Muhammad Ali

On January 17, we observed the birthday of the one and only Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)! One of the 20th century’s most iconic athletes and countercultural figures both in and out of the boxing ring, Ali has had considerable impact on film and media culture. Ali’s boxing career has been extensively chronicled in documentaries like A.K.A. Cassius Clay (1970) and the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings (1996). Ali also took several scripted acting roles, including playing himself in The Greatest (1977), an adaptation of his own autobiography, and starring as a former slave-turned-politician in the miniseries Freedom Road (1978). Many actors, including Will Smith in Ali (2001) and Eli Goree in One Night in Miami… (2020), continue to step into Ali’s larger than life shoes.

(Posters and promo photos from the BFCA’s General and Edward Mapp collections)

George Tillman, Jr.

On January 26, we wished happy birthday to filmmaker George Tillman, Jr. (born 1969)! Raised in Wisconsin and educated at Columbia College in Chicago, Tillman’s industry breakthrough came with the commercial success of Soul Food (1997), which he wrote and directed. Since then, Tillman has dabbled in a variety of genres, helming big-budget productions like the drama Men of Honor (2000), biopic Notorious (2009), and romance The Longest Ride, in addition to producing Dee Rees’s Mudbound (2017) and the Barbershop film series (2002-2016). A long-standing advocate for racial justice and diversity in the film industry, Tillman achieved considerable critical acclaim in 2018 for directing the Black Lives Matter-inspired YA adaptation The Hate U Give, one of the most prominent wide releases at the time to address police brutality.

(Photo by Randy Shropshire via Getty Images; Films from the BFCA’s General Collection)

Kevin Jerome Everson

February 1 marked the birthday of multi-faceted artist, filmmaker, photographer, and painter Kevin Jerome Everson (born 1965)! A prolific chronicler of working class and Black American life, Mr. Everson has completed over 100 short and feature-length film projects that have screened at festivals and museums worldwide, including projects on automobile factories, the 1973 Tombigbee River flood in Mississippi, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019, he visited Indiana University for a symposium about his 16mm film Rough and Unequal, which screened as an installation at the Grunwald Gallery. In 2021, the Black Film Center & Archive was proud to publish an edited volume through IU Press dedicated to the Rough and Unequal project.

(Photos of Everson are from the BFCA’s Interviews and Events Collection, Sam House from The Media School, and Annette Hornischer)

Dee Rees

On February 7, we wished happy birthday to master filmmaker Dee Rees (born 1977)! A graduate of NYU’s Tisch film program (where she was mentored by Spike Lee), Rees worked for nearly five years to finance and complete a feature-length version of her semi-autobiographical thesis film, Pariah, about a Black teenage girl’s emerging lesbian identity.

The feature version of Pariah won universal acclaim after its 2011 debut at Sundance, quickly cementing itself as a landmark work of queer cinema. Rees followed up Pariah with the Emmy-nominated Bessie (2015) and Oscar-nominated Mudbound (2017). She continues to be a prominent industry advocate for greater racial and gender parity both in front of and behind the camera.

(Pariah poster from the BFCA’s General Collection)

Race Swap film series at IU Cinema

Unearthing early roots of Jordan Peele’s political horror film Get Out (2017), Race Swap presents three cult films which similarly explore and exploit racial ideology. Combination science fiction, horror, and exploitation comedy films, they play on the supposedly irreducible fact of racial groups and the disgust/desire to get inside the body of the other. And yet in some ways, they picture a proposed new race relations in post-civil rights America that is imperfect and unsettling, but united nonetheless. Post-film discussions with IU faculty will follow all screenings.

This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program.

This series is sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, Cinema and Media Studies, and IU Cinema. Screenings are free, but ticketed. Visit the IU Cinema website for more information. The series begins Friday, January 12, with Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man (1970), presented in a 16mm print from the BFC/A collection

BFC/A 2018 Visiting Research Fellowships

The Black Film Center/Archive in The Media School at Indiana University-Bloomington is pleased to announce 2018 Black Film Center/Archive Visiting Research Fellowships to support research toward a dissertation, thesis, publication, presentation, or production. These competitive fellowships for visiting researchers residing outside the Bloomington area are intended to advance the study of black film and media and to promote research in the collections at the BFC/A by filmmakers, graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members at any rank. Scholars and filmmakers currently working or studying at an HBCU are strongly encouraged to apply. Applications are due by February 15, 2018.

Curator Greg de Cuir Jr. at BFC/A and IU Cinema

The Black Film Center/Archive welcomes Greg de Cuir for a workshop and screening series organized around de Cuir’s week-long research residency at the BFC/A. This series is sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive, College Arts and Humanities Institute, Underground Film Series, Center for Documentary Research and Practice, Cinema and Media Studies, and IU Cinema.

Greg de Cuir Jr. is the selector for Alternative Film/Video and Beldocs (both in Belgrade, Serbia). As an independent moving image curator, he has organized programs for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Los Angeles Filmforum; goEast Wiesbaden; Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque; and other institutions. He is the managing editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and has published writing in Cineaste, Jump Cut, Festivalists, Art Margins, La Furia Umana, Politika, and other journals and volumes. De Cuir received his DPhil from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts Belgrade.

Cheryl Dunye: Blurring Distinctions

Cheryl Dunye emerged as part of the New Queer Cinema movement of young film and video makers in the 1990s. Dunye’s work is defined by her distinctive narrative voice. Often set within a personal or domestic context, her stories foreground issues of race, sexuality, and identity. Dunye’s narratives are peppered with deconstructive elements with characters directly addressing the camera and making ironic references to the production itself.

The effect of these devices, and of Dunye’s appearance in her films and tapes as herself, is to blur the distinctions between fiction and real life. Dunye has made over 15 films including Mommy is Coming, The Owls, My Baby’s Daddy, and HBO’s Stranger Inside, which garnered her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best director. Her debut feature, The Watermelon Woman, was awarded the Teddy at the Berlinale in 1996 and was recently restored by Outfest’s UCLA Legacy Project for the film’s 20th anniversary.

Dunye has received numerous awards and honors for her work including a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Presently, Dunye is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, and her most recent directorial work includes episodes of Queen Sugar, The Fosters, and Claws. She is currently at work on her next film, Black is Blue, a feature-length adaptation of her 2014 short film.

This series is sponsored by IU Cinema, Black Film Center/Archive, and Bloomington PRIDE. Screenings are free, but ticketed. For more information, visit the IU Cinema website.

Alice B. Russell Micheaux Memorial Campaign

Alice B. Russell Micheaux was a pioneering film actress and film producer, as well as the widow of Oscar Micheaux, renowned African American filmmaker, and both were active during the silent era through the 1940s. Yet unfortunately, Alice spent her final years as a ward of the state suffering from dementia, and was buried in 1985 in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye, New York.

To learn more about Alice and the current efforts of the Alice Micheaux Headstone Committee to honor her life and career, please read BFC/A director Terri Francis’s post online at https://www.gofundme.com/alice-b-russell-micheaux-headstone

BFC/A’s Josef Gugler Collection at Image Collections Online

Earlier this fall, BFC/A archivist Ronda Sewald quietly launched the Josef Gugler African and Middle Eastern Film Collection on the IU Libraries’ site, Image Collections Online (ICO). As of this posting, access-quality jpegs of approximately 785 posters and photographs — more than one-third of the visual items in the collection — are viewable at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/images/splash.htm?scope=bfca/VAD9191, with the remaining items to be scanned and uploaded in the months ahead. Ronda and the BFC/A offer our thanks to the IU Libraries’ Digital Collections Services team for their support of this effort.

For more on the project, see Ronda’s blog post at https://blogs.iu.edu/bfca/2017/12/06/bfc-as-josef-gugler-collection-at-image-collections-online/

Coming in January 2018

We’ll be announcing our Spring 2018 events calendar very soon with some exciting guests and programs to kick off the new year. Here’s a small peek at what’s coming up in January, with thanks to our programming partners at IU Cinema, Bloomington PRIDE, Cinema and Media Studies at The Media School, the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.

Dee Rees’s Eventual Salvation

On Friday, November 10, the Black Film Center/Archive and the IU Libraries’ Liberian Collections present a rare screening of Dee Rees’s first documentary feature, Eventual Salvation (2008). This free screening will take place at 3pm in The Media School’s Franklin Hall Screening Room (304C).

Founded in 1847 as a home for former African-American slaves, the West African nation of Liberia has welcomed generations of expatriate Americans fleeing racism. One such immigrant was Earnestine “Amma” Smith, who settled in the capital, Monrovia, in 1958. An educator and landowner, Amma fled her new home during the recent deadly civil wars. Smith’s granddaughter, filmmaker Dee Rees, accompanies Amma on her return to a new Liberia governed by Africa’s first woman president, as she attempts to rebuild her life. Featuring cinematography by Bradford Young, who also collaborated with Dee Rees on her 2011 feature, Pariah.

IU Libraries African Studies Librarian Mireille Djenno will be present to introduce the screening. Special thanks to Mireille Djenno, Garrett Bird, Craig Kestel, and Dee Rees for making this event possible.

Dee Rees series at IU Cinema: Choosing the Hard Things

Next week, IU Cinema will be among a select few theatrical venues given the opportunity to screen Dee Rees’s Mudbound on the big screen before its Netflix premiere on November 17. Regretting her absence, Dee Rees will provide a special video introduction to the film. Also showing will be Rees’s 2011 feature, Pariah, and her 2015 Bessie Smith biopic.

For more information, see Dee Rees: Choosing the Hard Things at IU Cinema’s website.

New: A Virtual Film Quarterly Reader

This week, the journal Film Quarterly published a selection of its recent articles online to introduce members of the American Studies Association to its work. Among the articles selected was BFC/A director Terri Francis’s “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris,” Other selected articles include Racquel Gates on Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man, and Joseph Livesy on Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves.

IU Libraries presents Get Out

Thursday, November 9, at 6:00pm, BFC/A director Terri Francis will introduce the IU Libraries screening of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and conduct a post-screening discussion. This free event takes place in the IU Libraries Screening Room, Wells Library 048. Refreshments will be provided.