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“Let me make up the pictures” | Apparel company tees-en-scène honors Cheryl Dunye with T-Shirt design and print collaboration with BFC/A Director Dr. Terri Francis

Posted on by BFCA

What is now the apparel company tees-en-scène originated as a 2017 Kickstarter campaign by Colin Stacy with the intention of creating and distributing a “Written and Directed by Elaine May” T-Shirt. Stacy got the idea for the project after spontaneously meeting filmmaker Steven Soderbergh at an event in Plano, TX and noticing his shirt – a simple black tee with the words “A Film by Mike Nichols” printed front and center. As a fan of Nichols’s “comedy partner and frequent film collaborator” Elaine May, Stacy saw an opportunity to similarly honor the legacy of an influential yet under-appreciated filmmaker.

“Not enough people talk about the work of Elaine May. With 13 acting, 11 writing, and 5 directing credits, she’s hardly as prolific as some of her contemporaries. (Blame the industry.) Yet despite her hardships, the work she has managed to produce is one of a rarefied distinction within American filmmaking. Her four directorial features from ’71-’87 are films that should constantly be on the lips of any red-blooded, wide-eyed lover of cinema: A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and Ishtar.” – Colin Stacy

Following the success of the kickstarter campaign, Stacy officially opened the tees-en-scène online store with the mission of creating “shirts that place women and non-binary filmmakers front and center.” The company now produces 12 shirts and counting, honoring visionary filmmakers like Kathleen Collins, Claire Denis, the Wachowski Sisters, and now, Cheryl Dunye.

Dunye, who emerged as part of the New Queer Cinema movement of young film and video makers in the 1990s, visited Indiana University in January 2018 as part of a collaboration between IU Cinema, the BFC/A, and Bloomington PRIDE. Dunye’s stories are often set within a personal or domestic context, foregrounding issues of race, sexuality, and identity. Her 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 the award-winning The Watermelon Woman (1996), and recently joined Ava Duverney and Oprah Winfrey as a director on OWN’s episodic television series Queen Sugar.

During her visit, Dunye sat down for an IU Cinema Exclusive Interview (featured below) and a conversation with BFC/A Director Dr. Terri Francis, which was later published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 72 No. 2, Winter 2018 (pp. 45-54).

Structural Laughter and Constructed Intimacies: The Self-Reflexivity of Cheryl Dunye

For each filmmaker they celebrate, tees-en-scène contracts a relevant writer, scholar, and/or critic to submit a companion essay that is printed and distributed alongside the associated T-Shirt design as a collectible card.

The essay cards are printed with a unique image on the other side, paying tribute to the individuality of each honored filmmaker. These cards come from the collection of Caitlyn Stevens, featuring (from left to right), The Wachowski Sisters, Sandi Tan, Claire Denis, and Lucrecia Martel.

For the “a film by Cheryl Dunye” design, Stacy reached out to our own Dr. Francis, who opted to put Cheryl’s voice front and center by contributing a segment from her 2018 Film Quarterly article/conversation. We are very excited and proud to share the product of this collaboration, which was captured perfectly in the following twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/teesenscene/status/1191751474952523788?s=20
https://twitter.com/teesenscene/status/1191752829700050944?s=20
https://twitter.com/teesenscene/status/1191753858260832257?s=20
https://twitter.com/teesenscene/status/1191754764524146688?s=20

BFC/A Director Terri Francis and Communications Assistant Caitlyn Stevens rocking their new Cheryl Dunye T-Shirts by tees-en-scène ♥︎

So, what’s next for Dunye and tees-en-scène?


From Cheryl Dunye’s website:

“In 2015, Cheryl’s multi-award winning short film BLACK IS BLUE was named one of the top five “Must See Feminist Films” by IndieWire. It is now being developed into a feature film with Laverne Cox attached to star in the lead. She is also set to adapt and direct a feature based on the novel THE WONDER OF ALL THINGS for Lionsgate. In 2019, she launched her Oakland-based production company called JINGLETOWN FILMS, which is actively developing two episodic series — THE GILDA STORIES, an adaptation of the beloved 1991 queer vampire novel by Jewell Gomez and ADVENTURES IN THE 419, based on Nigerian scammers.”


From tees-en-scène’s website:

“we don’t just endeavor to elevate past directors and their work, we want to help continue pay and elevate women and genderqueer persons and POC working in the filmmaking and critical spheres. as we grow, tees-en-scène will dedicate a percentage of our profits to help fund filmmaking projects from women and genderqueer people of color. if you are a filmmaker or know of a project that could benefit from extra funds to complete a project, email us at teesenscene@gmail.com.”

You can purchase a Cheryl Dunye shirt of your own HERE for $28 (short sleeve) or $35 (long sleeve)!

  • Cheryl Dunye at the Indiana University Cinema on Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.
  • Cheryl Dunye and Bloomington PRIDE Board Chair Janae Cummings, who moderated a post-film Q&A after IU Cinema’s screening of THE WATERMELON WOMAN on Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.
  • Bloomington PRIDE Board Chair Janae Cummings and Cheryl Dunye in conversation after IU Cinema’s screening of THE WATERMELON WOMAN on Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.
  • IU Cinema screened Cheryl Dunye’s THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996) on Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

HYENAS (1992) Restoration: Free Screening 11/6 || About the Filmmakers

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On Wednesday, Nov. 6 at 7 pm, the BFC/A and the IU African Studies Program are thrilled to present the new restoration of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s HYENAS courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Hosted by the iu libraries moving image archive: FREE tickets

SHORT SYNOPSIS

The village of Colobane, devastated by drought and unemployment, sees sudden hope for the future with the arrival of a former citizen, Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate), who left her hometown when still a young woman, but now returns with a great fortune. The grocer Dramaan Drameh (Mansour Diouf), one of Colobane’s leading citizens and Ramatou’s former lover, is selected to lead a welcoming committee, but after a seemingly tender reunion to the two, Ramatou reveals the true depths of her bitterness towards Dramaan Drameh, who impregnated her and denied his responsibility, resulting in her being sent into an uncaring world where she had to turn to prostitution to survive. 

She offers the villagers a hard deal: One hundred billion dalasis (Gambian currency) in exchange for the death of Dramaan Drameh. The citizens of Colobane refuse, but as the village is flooded with consumer goods, they are driven deeper and deeper into debt, forcing them to make a hard collective decision. Will it be the money, or Dramaan Drameh’s life? 

Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

Djibril Diop Mambéty at the Cannes Film Festival (Credit: Getty Images)

DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY (Director) was a Senegalese director, actor, composer, and poet. His filmmaking output represents one of the most remarkable compact bodies of work in all of cinema, consisting of two feature (Touki Bouki, 1973; Hyenas, 1992) and five short films (Contras’ City, 1969; Badou Boy, 1970; Parlons grand-mére, 1989; Le franc, 1995; La petite vendeuse de soleil, 1999) produced during a short life of fifty-three years, ended by lung cancer. 

Contras City (1969) still

Parlons grand-mére (1969) still

Badou Boy (1970) poster

Touki Bouki (1973) still (courtesy of Janus Films)

Le franc (1995) still

La petite vendeuse de soleil (1999) still

Touki Bouki (1973) poster

Le franc (1995) still

Born in 1945 in Colobane, outside of Dakar, the son of an imam and member of the Lebou tribe, Mambéty began his creative life as an aspiring actor, but was thrown out of the National Theater Daniel Sorano for a perceived lack of discipline. This rebuke spurred the young man to pursue his passion for film, and without formal training, he directed his experimental first short at age twenty-three, a satirical survey of Dakar’s colonial architecture. Gaining an international reputation after his anti-establishment Badou Boy, a burlesque following a street-smart young punk outwitting an oafish cop, won the Silver Tanit at the 1970 Carthage film Festival in Tunisia, Mambéty undertook his first feature. The result, Touki Bouki—the title translates as The Hyena’s Journey—was a wildly unconventional work, politically and sexually provocative, which set the world on fire, taking awards from the Moscow and Cannes Film Festivals.

Touki Bouki (The journey of the hyena), 1973, 1:25 (Africine.org)

Touki Bouki, the stylistically freewheeling story of a hip, hustling Senegalese couple united by their dream of an escape to Europe and a film that offered a snapshot of African society in its postcolonial hangover is today acknowledged as a masterpiece, but its success was followed by a nearly twenty-year hiatus from feature filmmaking, in the space of which Mambéty worked as an actor in Senegal and Italy. He finally returned, undiminished in power, with Hyenas, based on a 1956 play by the Swiss-German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der Alten Dame, or The Visit. Making the material very much his own, Mambéty conceived of Hyenas as a spiritual sequel of sorts to Touki Bouki, and the centerpiece of a proposed trilogy on the abuse of power and the deleterious effects of Western materialism on his native land.

LINKS
Essay: “Touki bouki: Mambéty and Modernity” by Richard Porton | Contras’ City clip | Watch Touki Bouki on The Criterion Channel | Badou Boy clip | Watch La petite vendeuse de sole on Kanopy | Le franc clip

MATTHIAS KÄLIN (Cinematographer) was a Swiss-born cinematographer and director; he was born in Aarau in 1953, and died in Portugal in 2008, aged fifty-five. Hyenas was not Kälin’s first outing in Africa: he had previously shot, with the Haitian director Raoul Peck, the 1990 documentary Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, concerning assassinated Prime Minister of Zaire Patrice Lumumba, as well as the 1989 film Yaaba, a Swiss-Burkinabé co-production directed by Mambéty’s friend, the Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Oeédraoko, and produced by Pierre-Alain Meier. The arresting beauty of Kälin’s images is an essential element of Hyenas, and he was recognized by Variety’s Deborah Young for “capturing both village color and the golden African desert in sharp images.”

In his over thirty-year career, Kälin worked most extensively in nonfiction, both in Switzerland and abroad. Additionally, he co-directed, with Meier, Douleur d’amour, a 1987 documentary about the trans community in São Paulo, and only the year before his death completed his second directorial outing, Josephson Bildhauer. 

A NOTE ON THE CAST
Djibril Diop Mambéty never worked with the same performers twice, and never with professional actors. The case of Hyenas is no exception. Insofar as is known, Hyenas is a first film for all of its central performers, including Mansour Diouf (Dramaan Drameh) and Ami Diakhate (Linguère Ramatou), who was discovered by Mambéty selling soup in a Dakar market. The lone exception to this rule is Mambéty himself, playing the former local magistrate of Colobane, now in the service of Ramatou.

WASIS DIOP (Composer) is a Dakar, Senegal-born musician; the younger brother of Djibril Diop Mambéty, born 1950, known for his intermixture of traditional Senegalese folk music with jazz and pop influences. After traveling to Paris in the 1970s with the intention of studying engineering, Diop instead immersed himself in music, forming the group West African Cosmos. He began a solo career in 1979, marked by collaborations with Japanese jazz saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu and Black Heritage vocalist Marie-France Anglade, then achieved a new level of success with the release of his soundtrack album to the film Hyenas. Of the score, the Bissau-Guinean/Senegalese director Alain Gomis has called it “somehow both uplifting and terribly dramatic; it takes you into a completely unique world.”

Since the watershed moment of Hyenas, Diop has continued to work steadily as a solo recording artist and soundtrack composer, his most significant ongoing cinematic collaboration being with Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun on the films Daratt (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), and A Season in France (2017). His daughter, Mati Diop, is an actress and director, and he stars as himself in her 2013 Mille soleils, a film that revisits the legacy of her uncle’s Touki Bouki.

Mati Diop’s latest film, Atlantics, has been selected as Senegal’s official entry for the best international feature film category at the 92nd Academy Awards. The film will be released in select theaters on Nov. 15, and on Netflix on Nov. 29 (Variety).

▶︎ Check out the first trailer, available exclusively on IndieWire

LOREDANA CRISTELLI (Editor) is an Italian-born, Switzerland-based film editor. Born in Italy in 1957, she studied photography in Zürich, then began an apprenticeship as an assistant editor which included working on films by Alain Tanner, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nicolas Gessnet. Beginning her career as a lead editor, among her first assignments were 1987’s Ikaria BP 1447, shot by Matthias Kälin and directed by Pierre-Alain Meier, and the Meier-produced 1989 Yaaba, a Swiss-Burkinabé co-production directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty’s friend, the Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Oeédraoko. Following her celebrated collaboration with Mambéty on Hyenas, to whose unorthodox, stuttering rhythms she contributed greatly, she has continued to work regularly with Swiss filmmakers including Patricia Plattner, Bruno Moll, Jacqueline Veuve, and Nino Jacusso. 

PIERRE-ALAIN MEIER (Producer) is a Swiss director and producer, born in Delémont in 1952. In his early filmmaking efforts, including Douleur d’amour, a documentary about the trans community in São Paulo which he co-directed with Matthias Kälin, and Ikaria BP 1447, shot by Kälin and edited by Loredana Cristelli, he assembled a close group of collaborators who would be essential to his efforts with his company Thelma Film AG, founded in 1988. Through his efforts in Thelma Film, Meier was an invaluable friend to African cinema, supporting movies by the Burkinabé directors Idrissa Oeédraoko and S. Pierre Yameogo—1989’s Yaaba and 1991’s Laafi – Tout va bien—as well as the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 Hyenas. Meier continues to produce and direct today under the auspices of Prince Film SA, founded in 2005.

OUMOU SY (Costume Designer) is a fashion maven born to a Toucouleur Muslim family in Podor, Senegal in 1952, and raised in the coastal city of St. Louis. Self-taught in her trade, she began in the 1980s to undertake collaborations with fellow African artists working in film, theater, dance, and music, including Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour.

Senegal’s best-known fashion designer and celebrated “Queen of Couture”, Sy operates a prêt-à-porter line that has been sold in boutiques in Dakar, New York, Paris, and Geneva. In 2018, in conjunction with the National Museum of African Art’s exhibition “Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women,” Sy designed what the Smithsonian Institute described as “a new haute couture ensemble inspired by the strength and savoir-faire of Senegalese women for the museum’s collection, which will be unveiled in the exhibition.” 

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas RESTORED!
11/6 at 7 pm | IULMIA (Wells 048)

→ FREE TICKETS! ←

Text and research by Nick Pinkerton.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound,Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, 4 Columns, The Baffler, Harper’s, and the Village Voice, among other venues.

Additional research provided by Amélie Garin-Davet.
Amélie Garin-Davet is the Program Officer, Cinema for the Cultural Services French Embassy in the United States.

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

COMING SOON || Nov. 4-8: Djibril Diop Mabéty’s Hyenas RESTORED, and more!

Posted on by BFCA

JUMP TO: Do the Right Thing ⇣ || Hyenas ⇣ || Babylon ⇣

DO THE RIGHT THING (Dir. Spike Lee)

Mon, Nov 4 at 7 pm | IU Cinema | $4 tickets
30th Anniversary Screening / New 4K Restoration

It’s the height of summer and the hottest day of the year—a scorching 24-hour period that will change the lives of its residents forever. Over the course of a single day on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines—ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen. Restoration courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Contains mature content.

More info
Buy Tickets

HYENAS (Dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty)

“The hyena is an animal of Africa. Singularly wild. It practically almost never kills. First cousin to the vulture. It knows how to sniff out illness in others. And then is capable of following, for a whole season, a sick lion. From a distance. Across the Sahel. To feast one evening on its corpse. Peacefully.”

—Djibril Diop Mambéty, original Hyenas press materials

Wed, Nov 8 at 7 pm | IULMIA (Wells 048) | FREE tickets
New restoration

SHORT SYNOPSIS

The village of Colobane, devastated by drought and unemployment, sees sudden hope for the future with the arrival of a former citizen, Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate), who left her hometown when still a young woman, but now returns with a great fortune. The grocer Dramaan Drameh (Mansour Diouf), one of Colobane’s leading citizens and Ramatou’s former lover, is selected to lead a welcoming committee, but after a seemingly tender reunion to the two, Ramatou reveals the true depths of her bitterness towards Dramaan Drameh, who impregnated her and denied his responsibility, resulting in her being sent into an uncaring world where she had to turn to prostitution to survive. 

She offers the villagers a hard deal: One hundred billion dalasis (Gambian currency) in exchange for the death of Dramaan Drameh. The citizens of Colobane refuse, but as the village is flooded with consumer goods, they are driven deeper and deeper into debt, forcing them to make a hard collective decision. Will it be the money, or Dramaan Drameh’s life? 

Courtesy of Metrograph


PRODUCER PIERRE-ALAIN MEIER ON THE RESTORATION:

“Hyenas, shot in 35mm, was developed and color graded in 1991 and 1992 at GTC in Joinville-le-Pont. The last positive copy was struck in 2000, for a special projection at the Festival de Locarno. Since then, with the advent of digital, almost every laboratory has closed their doors. DVDs of the film have been circulating ever since 2006, made from the ancient Betacam, which has softened a bit over time. 

I had known for some time that the Hyenas negative was found in a bunker, said to be humid, located in the north of France. As a result of the filming of Adieu l’Afrique, a personal film I made a few years ago in Senegal in homage to Hyenas, I decided to find the negative and restore the movie. If I had to save one film from amongst all my productions before bowing out, that was certainly the one.

Knowing little about the restoration of films, I approached the Éclair Cinema Laboratory at Vanves, and thanks to the support of Pierre Boustouller, director of the Restoration Division; head of the project Florence Paulin; Aude Humblet, responsible for color grading; and Fadoua Isidore-el Ajjourl, responsible for subtitles, among many other collaborators, the film was patiently restored in the course of the year 2017. This work—a negative scan, a complete new color grade, a careful restoration job shot by shot, image by image, including the manufacture of different subtitles (French, German, English, Spanish, Italian)—cost me highs and lows and, with the different DCP products, about €35,000.

On this occasion, I discovered the benefits of restoration work. And I asked myself once again if Djibril, from the sky up above, had also inspired or if those responsible for restoration at Éclair Digital were simply excellent.

NOTES ON CULTURAL CONTEXT

Hyenas is a Wolof-language film. Wolof is the language of the Wolof people, a group of some five-and-a-half million spread across Senegal, the Republic of the Gambia, and Mauritania. Director Djibril Diop Mambéty was a native Wolof speaker, as was Senegal’s other best-known filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène.

[Wolof] is the most widely spoken language in Senegal, spoken by 40% of Senegalese.

The setting of the film, replacing the fictional Swiss village of Güllen in Mambéty’s source material, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame), is Colobane, Mambéty’s hometown.

By 1990, when Mambéty was shooting Hyenas, the actual Colobane would have been a very far cry from the dusty backwater village depicted in the film—today boasting a population of some 50,000, it has essentially been absorbed into the metropolitan sprawl of Greater Dakar.

Courtesy of Metrograph

While connected to current events, Mambéty was never a didactic political filmmaker. In his intuitive formal boldness, he combined features of both European high modernism, represented by a figure like Dürrenmatt, and African folklore, leading some to label his 1973 Touki Bouki as Africa’s first avant-garde film.

“One could even imagine transforming its main characters into animals, a common feature for African folk tales: the wise lion, the crafty rabbit, the persistent turtle, the pensive elephant. Indeed, the film begins with a herd of elephants, who, at the stroke of one cut, become human beings.”

– Charles Tonderai Mudede, writing of Hyenas and its connection to the folk tradition

N. Frank Ukadike, in his book Black African Cinema, has questioned the application of the Western term “avant-garde” to a singularly African filmmaker like Mambéty. Mambéty, for his part, had this to say about his experimentation in search of an “African film language”: 

“One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts. I feel that a filmmaker must go beyond the recording of facts. Moreover, I believe that Africans, in particular, must reinvent cinema. It will be a difficult task because our viewing audience is used to a specific film language, but a choice has to be made: either one is very popular and one talks to people in a simple and plain manner, or else one searches for an African film language that would exclude chattering and focus more on how to make use of visuals and sounds.”

Text and research by Nick Pinkerton.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound,Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, 4 Columns, The Baffler, Harper’s, and the Village Voice, among other venues.

Additional research provided by Amélie Garin-Davet.
Amélie Garin-Davet is the Program Officer, Cinema for the Cultural Services French Embassy in the United States.


Djibril Diop Mambéty‘s Hyenas RESTORED!
11/6 at 7 pm | IULMIA (Wells 048)

⇨ FREE TICKETS! ⇦

BABYLON (Dir. Franco Rosso)

Fri, Nov 4 at 7 pm | IU Cinema | Free, but ticketed
Musician/Actor Brinsley Forde is scheduled to be present.

Initially released in 1980 at Cannes, though not in the U.S. for fear that it would incite racial tension, Rosso’s film follows a dancehall DJ (played by Brinsley Forde, the lead singer of the reggae band Aswad) in South London as he pursues his music and confronts the racism and xenophobia of employers, neighbors, and police in Margaret Thatcher’s England. The upbeat reggae soundtrack is a counterpoint to the unapologetic portrayal of urban life for Caribbean immigrants. Contains mature content, including violence and strong language.

Brinsley Forde is an actor and musician best known as the founding member of the British super Reggae group, Aswad. Aswad was formed in West London in 1974 with Brinsley fronting the original five piece on both vocals and rhythm guitar. The group quickly became recognized among reggae fans for their rich melodies and compelling harmonies, woven over hard rhythm tracks and later inspired horn riffs.

More info
Reserve tickets

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media || First Screening: Body Publics 10/21 at 7PM, IU Cinema

Posted on by BFCA

We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media

The We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media series is part of a national, traveling exhibition focused on place-based documentaries that situate their collaborative practice in specific locales, communities, and a need for social change. Comprised of six thematic programs that probe salient topics (body publics, collaborative knowledges, environments of race and place, wages of work, states of violence, and turf), this series features a diversity of voices, time periods, and geographic locations which explore and unearth the 50-year history of participatory community media in the United States.

Last Monday, October 14, BFC/A Director Terri Francis joined film archivist and curator Carmel Curtis on WFHB’s Bring It On! – Indiana’s only weekly radio program committed to exploring the people, issues and events impacting the African-American community – to discuss the themes and collaborators involved in the “labor of love” that is the We Tell series.

“[We Tell] centers on the hidden histories of…community-made, collaboratively-made media; so moving away from a singular filmmaker – a singular ‘auteur’ – and acknowledging the creation of media as a group process.”

Carmel Curtis

See below for more information about the upcoming We Tell programs at IU Cinema: Body Publics (10/21), Collaborative Knowledges (11/16), Environments of Race and Place (11/21), Wages of Work (12/5), and States of Violence (12/15). Guest archivists, filmmakers, and scholars will be present at each film screening to participate in a post-film discussion.

Free tickets for the events can be reserved ahead of time at the IU Auditorium Box Office and online for a $1 surcharge, or in the IU Cinema lobby starting one hour before any screening.

We Tell: Body Publics

Mon, Oct 21 at 7PM | IU Cinema

Not rated | 1973–2000 | 2K DCP

Introduction by Carmel Curtis (IULMIA, XFR Collective)
Post-screening discussion with Carmel Curtis, Terri Francis (BFC/A), and Louis Massiah (Scribe Video Center)

Body Publics exposes the ailments from within with works that focus on how access to various forms of healthcare, or lack thereof, affects people from many walks of life as well as the celebrations and concerns of the LGBTQIA community. From the 70s to the 90s, shorts like HSA Strike ’75 from Kartemquin Films, Diabetes: Notes from Indian Country from Beverly Singer, and Bodyworks from Scribe Video Center, illustrate a continued advocacy for self-regulation of the human body.

Films in this program include:

  • Diabetes: Notes from Indian Country, 2000, Beverly Singer | More info | Trailer
Bodyworks by Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art BodyWorks; Scribe Video Center

We Tell: Collaborative Knowledges

Sat, Nov 16 at 4 pm | IU Cinema

Not rated | 1973 – 2011 | 2K DCP

Introduction by Andy Uhrich (IULMIA)
Post-screening discussion: TBD

We Tell: Collaborative Knowledges focuses on inter-generational dialogues, unearthing lost knowledge and histories, highlighting shared experiences, and traditions and practices of storytelling. This program includes shorts from community media centers—such as Appalshop in Kentucky, Paper Tiger TV in NYC, and Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia—that view participatory media making as a tool for self-expression, education, and social change.

Films in this program include:

  • In the Good Old Fashioned Way, 1973, Herb E. Smith, Appalshop | More info | Excerpt
  • Herb Schiller Reads the New York Times 712 Pages of Waste, 1980, Paper Tiger TV | More info
  • Seeds of Awakening – Muslim Voices, 2011, New Africa Center, ICPIC, Scribe Video Center, & Nation of Islam | More info | Excerpt
Seeds of Awakening (Excerpt) | Muslim Voices 2011; Scribe Video Center

We Tell: Environments of Race and Place

Thurs, Nov 21 at 7 pm | IU Cinema

Not rated | 1967–2007 | 2K DCP

Introduction by Josh Malitsky (Center for Documentary Research and Practice)
Post-screening discussion with Josh Malitsky, Greg Waller (IU Media School), and Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College)

We Tell: Environments of Race and Place focuses on issues surrounding immigration, migration, and racial identity unique to a specific environment. These works embrace and enhance the micro rather than the macro, moving away from the national to the local and from the long-form, theatrical feature to the short-form documentary. Discussions of police brutality in Third World Newsreel’s Black Panther: Off the Pig or animations about toxic pollution made by the Indigenous youth media collective, Outta Your Backpack, expand conceptualizations of independent non-fiction work.

Films in this program include:

  • Who I Became, 2003, Michael Siv and Aram Siu Wai Collier, Vietnamese Youth Development Center | More Info
  • Legends of Weresheep, 2007, Outta Your Backpack | More info
  • Stories of TRUST: Calling for Climate Recovery: TRUST Alaska, 2011, Christi Cooper-Kuhn, Katie Lose Gilbertson, Kelly Matheson, WITNESS | More info
  • DIGITAL SMOKE SIGNALS Aerial Footage From The Night Of November 20,2016 At Standing Rock, 2016, Myron Dewey, Digital Smoke Signals | More info

We Tell: Wages of Work

Thurs, December 5 at 7 pm | IU Cinema

Not rated | 1970-2019 | 2K DCP

Introduction by Zeynep Yasar (Indiana University)
Post-screening discussion: TBD

There are endless ways in which people approach issues surrounding job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment. Wages of Work puts a spotlight on the various lives under the restraints or freedoms of these topics. Through this framework, this program includes shorts like Visual Communication’s Wataridori: Birds of Passage, which explores the legacy of first-generation Japanese Americans, and I’m NOT on the Menu made by Labor Beat, which documents fast food workers protesting their employers’ failure to take action on sexual harassment.

Films in this program include:

  • The United Mine Workers of America: A House Divided, 1971, Appalshop | More info
  • Plena is Work, Plena is Song, 1989, Pedro Rivera and Susan Zeig, Cinema Guild | More info
  • VozMob (Mobile Voices/Voces Móviles), 2010,Institute for Popular Education of Southern California [IDEPSCA] | More info
  • I’m NOT on the Menu, 2018, Gary M. Brooks and Andrew Friends, Labor Beat | More info
Excerpt: WATARIDORI: BIRDS OF PASSAGE by Robert Nakamura; Visual Communications

We Tell: States of Violence

Sun, December 15 at 1 pm | IU Cinema

Not rated | 1978 – 2018 | 2K DCP

Introduction by Carmel Curtis

Concerns of the American criminal justice system are at times extremely complex, involving many stories of truth, policies, and laws that can center around just one case. We Tell: States of Violence takes a personal approach from those directly affected by incarceration, police, crime, and war. From the 1970s to present day, this program demonstrates how participatory community media has enabled artists and creators to produce their own moving images in the name of creating a discourse for better socio-cultural understandings and tangible progressions towards change.

Films in this program include:

  • Ain’t Nobody’s Business, 1978, Lenora Champafgne, Karen Kern, Karl Spicer, Adam Steg, Marianne Wafer, YWCA Battered Women’s Program, New Orleans Video Access Center | More info
  • Inside Women Inside, 1978, Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio/Newsreel | More info | Trailer
  • Just Say No: The Gulf Crisis TV Project #55, 1990, Deep Dish TV | More info
  • Books Through Bars, 1997, Books Through Bars & Scribe Video Center | More info
  • M4BL: Ceremony, 2016, Movement for Black Lives | More info
  • A Cop Watcher’s Story: El Grito de Sunset Park Attempts to Deter Police Brutality, 2017, BRIC & Copwatch Brooklyn | More info
Inside Women Inside Trailer – Trailer – TWN; ThirdWorldNewsreel

The We Tell series is curated by Louis Massiah of Scribe Video Center, Patricia Zimmerman of Ithaca College, and Carmel Curtis, Brendan Allen, Flamina Fortunato, Caroline Gil, Michael Grant, Marie Lascu, and Treva Walsh of XFR Collective, with support from IU Cinema, National Endowment for the Arts, IU Libraries Moving Image Archive, the Black Film Center/Archive, Center for Documentary Research and Practice, and The Media School. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program.

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

Research Notes: Dr. Randi Gray Kristensen, a 2019 Summer Repository Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study reflects on her BFC/A Visit

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Dr. Randi Gray Kristensen, 2019

Dr. Randi Gray Kristensen is assistant professor in the University Writing Program, deputy director of the Writing in the Disciplines program, and affiliate faculty in the Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs, at the George Washington University, Washington DC. She is co-editor of Writing Against the Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom (Lexington Books, 2009), and has published fiction, poetry, and memoir in Gargoyle, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, and A River of Stories from the Commonwealth Trust, among others. 

(more…)

Screening Qubeka’s Sew Winter to My Skin TODAY 10/6, 4PM, IU Cinema in Filmmaker to Filmmaker: Jahmil X.T. Qubeka and François Verster series || Verster Masterclass, 10/7, 4PM, IU Cinema.

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The Filmmaker to Filmmaker: Conversations from the Director’s Chair event is an annual IU Cinema program that pairs two complementary film directors on stage together, discussing their artistic vision, process, and bodies of work, surrounded by screenings of their films.

Filmmaker to Filmmaker: Qubeka and Verster

From the IU Cinema site: This series highlights the work of two South African-based filmmakers, Jahmil X.T. Qubeka and François Verster, who each produce very different kinds of films, but are both at the leading edge of film production in South Africa and on the African continent. The screenings highlight the innovative and engaged work of a new generation of African filmmakers.

This year the program will be in the form of a masterclass by François Verster. Unfortunately, Filmmaker Jahmil X.T. Qubeka will no longer be present for this event.

The masterclass, open to the public, takes place on Monday October 7 at 4pm at IUCinema!

GET FREE TICKETS

François Verster is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. His films generally follow creative and observational approaches to social issues and have all won local and international awards. Verster has taught documentary or held fellowships at Columbia University, NYU, and University of Cape Town. He currently teaches a postgraduate course in creative documentary at the University of the Western Cape.

Jahmil X.T. Qubeka has directed numerous documentaries, television dramas, and feature films. For his work, he has received both a Peabody and BAFTA. Of particular note are his film Of Good Report (2013) and his Sew Winter to My Skin (2018)—the latter which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. He is at work on a film about a boxer in South Africa’s Eastern Cape entitled Knuckle City. Qubeka is the co-owner and creative director of Yellowbone Entertainment.

SCREENINGS
Qubeka’s SEW THE WINTER TO MY SKIN, Sun. Oct. 6, 4 pm at IU Cinema

Verster’s DREAMS OF SHAHRAZAD , Mon. Oct. 7, 7 pm at IU Cinema (Q&A with the director)

Verster’s SEA POINTE DAYS, Weds. Oct. 9, 7 pm at Wells 048 Screening Room (Q&A with the director)

Qubeka’s OF GOOD REPORT, Thurs. Oct. 10, 7 pm at Wells 048 Screening Room

From left to right: The Dream of Sharazad, Still || Sea Pointe Days Still || Sew the Winter to My Skin Still || Filmmaker Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, ||

Curated by Marissa Moorman of the Indiana University African Studies Program and Josh Malitsky from the Indiana University’s Center for Documentary Research and Practice, with support from IU Cinema, the Black Film Center/ Archive, College Arts & Humanities Institute, Indiana University, and the IU Food Institute. The Filmmaker to Filmmaker program is endowed through a generous gift from Roberta and Jim Sherman, with an Indiana University Bicentennial Campaign Match. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaboration program.

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Rewind to Spring 2019: Black Sun/White Moon Film and Conversation Series

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This series featured cult favorite Space is the Place (1974) and a brand new documentary on the role of Jamaican bauxite in the American space race.

This past February and March the BFC/A and the IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program, with the support of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, showcased Black Sun/White Moon: Exploring Black Cinematic Imaginations of Space. 

A reflection on the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 “giant leap for mankind,” the series grappled with the ambitions and costs of the space race and celebrated black cinematic explorations of outer space.

SPACE_fb_1

Space is the Place (1974)

Following last year’s box office success of Black Panther (2018), popular interest in Afrofuturist imagery and mythology surged among a new generation of audiences. Originally, Space is the Place was intended to be a short performance documentary featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra. But Sun Ra himself saw the collaboration with producer/director John Coney as an opportunity to introduce a radical new genre that would combine avant-garde jazz, science-fiction, and mythological imagery and imagined a liberating and celestial black experience.

The music is different here, the vibrations are different, not like Planet Earth

Planet Earth sound of guns, anger, frustration
There is no one to talk to on planet earth to understand

Sun Ra

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvmF5c3wn_Q&w=560&h=315]

 Sun Ra travels back/forward in time to prepare the groundwork for this new world. The year is 1943 and Ra must confront a man known as the Overseer by challenging him to a card game for the souls of the black people of Oakland and planet Earth.

Back/forward to the present time, the 1970s, Sun Ra then begins his mission to spread the word of the new settlement and arranges to promote his message of establishing the new colony through musical performances and public airwaves. Along the way, Ra faces setbacks from white men in suits who kidnap him and try and steal his secrets for “converting his harmonic progressions into energy.”

“We just want to speak with realities. No myths…well…I’m the myth talking to you.” Sun Ra proclaims at the end of the film, as he and his people blast off into space.

Much of the story and thought behind Space is the Place was inspired by a college course Sun Ra taught at Berkeley in the early 1970s. As an artist in residence, Ra taught the course under the title “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” (You can find the reading list for the course here!) Many have remarked on how Sun Ra’s teaching style resembles his improvisational musical style, both of which characterize the feel and timbre of Space is the Place. 

Afronauts Still
Afronauts (2014) is now available via http://vernac.media

Afronauts (2014)

In this short film, Zambian adventurers decide to try and beat the United States to the moon. But this is no fantasy. African would-be astronauts had planned and trained for a mission that was to be supported by the UNESCO foundation. In addition to the lunar mission, grade school science teacher, Edward Makuka Nkolosos established the Zambia National Academy of Science and intended to explore Mars with a young woman, a one-eyed cat, and a missionary. Writer-Director Nuotama Bodomo’s short film reimagines the ambition and sincerity of those involved with the project, providing a visual perspective of a lunar landing for and by Africans. The story, according to Bodomo, is an opportunity to reflect upon the untold stories of “exiles and outsiders” in the history of scientific advancement and the pursuit of interplanetary knowledge.

AFRONAUTS4Press
Diandra Forrest as Mata in Afronauts, 2014.

With a truly global crew undertaking the mission of the film, Bodomo, (who is herself Ghanian), collaborates with producers and crew from Great Britain, Barcelona, and Sierra Leone, as well as a cast with American and Angolan players. The largely crowd- funded project has been shown at venues like the International Film Festival Rotterdam and at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

polly-one_02 - USE THIS ONE FOR PROGRAM

Polly One (2018)

Titled in tribute to his paternal grandmother, Bertha Everson, Polly One is artist Kevin Jerome Everson’s meditation on the solar eclipse that took place on August 21, 2017. The event took place less than one day after his grandmother passed away. Using 16mm film, Everson captures images that conjure feelings about the passage of time, the inevitability of powerful celestial movement, and a vision of interplanetary im/permanence. Polly One has been exhibited in theaters and gallery spaces, in some instances using multiple projectors, and it is part of a substantial body of work from Everson that, in addition to film, includes still photography, painting, and sculpture.

Kevin Jerome Everson_filmmaker photo by Sandy Williams III (2)
Kevin Jerome Everson. Photo by Sandy Williams III.

Everson’s work is known for combining documentary visuals with cinematic formalist styles. The visible phenomena and individual subjects in his work are both direct and indirect refractions of African American and African live. Abstractions and sensorial invitations in his work drive a path toward inward contemplation and looking up.

See Everson’s installation of 16mm films and projectors, Rough and Unequal. Created with a camera and telescope, the images document the waxing and waning of the moon. On view in Bloomington now through October 4 at the Grunwald Gallery of Art, Tuesdays to Saturdays 12-4PM.

Two Eiki projectors power Rough and Unequal, 2017

More information about Rough and Unequal here.

On View at Grunwald Gallery until October 4.

Aerial view of bauxite mining trucks. Photo by Michael Schwartz. Courtesy the filmmaker.

Jamaican documentary filmmaker Esther Figueroa screened Fly Me to the Moon at the IU Cinema on Sunday, March 24, 2019.

This most recent work of Dr. Figueroa’s presents an account of the history and effects of bauxite mining in Jamaica that originated out of U.S. and worldwide demands for aluminum in the midst of a post WWII industrial complex. The film juxtaposes the international space race, and the massive quantities of aluminum materials needed to equip rockets for space travel, with the extraction of natural resources and displacement of people and farms across the Jamaican countryside. In her recent Sunday editorial in the Gleaner, Jamaica’s national newspaper Dr. Figueroa wrote:

Strip mining is never good for the environment and it is never sustainable development. In a time of climate crisis with record high temperatures, unpredictable weather with long droughts and catastrophic storms, it is stupidly suicidal to be cutting down our trees and polluting and depleting our soil and water. All of Cockpit Country must be protected.

Esther Figueroa July 28, 2019, The Gleaner (Jamaica, West Indies)

Figueroa’s documentary style is both gravely serious and subversively whimsical in its presentation of commercial exploitation and the recurring aftermaths of colonial oppression, which collectively have led to many of the environmental, economic, and social problems facing Jamaica and the planet as a whole. Those problems are multivalent and traceable to other extractive industries like tourism, local fishing industries, and corrupt public officials—topics that are expertly addressed in three short films of Figueroa’s, Jamaica For Sale, Massa God Fish Can Done, and Cockpit Country is Our Home, which screened at the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive. Dr. Figueroa was present for both screenings, receiving praise and enthusiastically seeking feedback on how to continue developing her work for a growing audience of engaged scholars, artists, and activists. 

Filmmaker Esther Figueroa and Director of the Black Film Center/Archive Terri Francis have a Q&A session after the Fly Me To The Moon screening at the IU Cinema on Sunday, March 24, 2019.
Chaz Mottinger. Courtesy IU Communications.

The Black Sun/White Moon series concluded with a two-day symposium featuring Everson’s work, Rough and Unequal. Conversations in the series evoked the specificities of form and place–specific places, Mansfield, OH, Brown’s Town, Jamaica and also looking to outer space a location that inspires optimism, creativity and making art.

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

NUMA PERRIER: THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE || Screening JEZEBEL, 9/23 and 9/27 at 7PM + Jorgensen 9/24 at 5PM + Varda’s Cléo 5 to 7 at 7PM, all at IU Cinema

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NUMA PERRIER: THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE || Screening JEZEBEL, 9/23 and 9/27 at 7PM + Jorgensen 9/24 at 5PM + Varda’s Cléo 5 to 7 at 7PM, all at IU Cinema

Do I have to perform masculinity or some form of neutralized sexuality to be taken seriously as a director? Hmm. I discuss this and more on THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE

Numa Perrier

Jezebel (2019) Directed by Numa Perrier September 23 – 7 pm – Free, but ticketed September 27 – 7 pm – Free, but ticketed. R – 2K DCP – 88 min. For more click http://go.iu.edu/2bkS

https://vimeo.com/311008841
Courtesy Numa Perrier.

Writer/Director Numa Perrier is scheduled to be present for the September 23 screening. Set in Las Vegas in 1998, Jezebel is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story based on writer/director Numa Perrier’s own experience as a webcam girl in Sin City. In the last days of her mother’s life, 19-year-old Tiffany (Tiffany Tenille) crashes with five family members in a Las Vegas studio apartment.

Synopsis: In order to make ends meet, Tiffany’s sister Sabrina (Numa Perrier), a phone sex operator, introduces her to the world of internet fetish cam girls. Kellee Terrell (NBCNews.com) said of the film “ … the storytelling in Jezebel is full of life. It’s adorned with emotion, grit, and heart, but most importantly, it’s rich in creating spaces for Black women’s sexuality to develop, expand, and awaken on-screen, a rarity in film.” The film was shot in the same building as Perrier’s actual former residence, which she found to be virtually unchanged from the time she lived there. Contains mature content.

Numa Perrier Presents: Cléo From 5 to 7

Series: Agnès by Varda, Numa Perrier: The Politics of Pleasure, Running the Screen: Directed by Women

About Cléo from 5 to 7

Rating: PG-13, 1962 

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the ’60s with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. Cléo from 5 to 7 premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. In French with English subtitles. Contains mature content.

Running the Screen: Directed by Women

Still image for Running the Screen: Directed by Women.
Images from IU Cinema’s website.

IU Cinema’s wonderful Running the Screen: Directed by Women celebration continues this week. IU Cinema has dedicated its entire September 2019 programming line-up to films directed by women in celebration of September as Woman Director Awareness Month. Additionally, 2019 commemorates the fifth annual #DirectedbyWomen Worldwide Film Viewing Party, an initiative celebrating the creative work of women filmmakers, which was founded in 2015 by Barbara Ann O’Leary, IU Cinema’s founding social media specialist and blog editor.

Curated and programmed by Brittany D. Friesner and Jon Vickers, with support from IU’s Women’s Philanthropy Leadership Council; Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Series; Black Film Center/Archive; Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design; College of Arts and Sciences’ Themester 2019: Remembering and Forgetting; Union Board Films; the Turkish Flagship Program; and the Hard Truth Hills Movies by Moonlight Film Festival.

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Click HERE for more information about our fall programming.

Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

SYMPOSIUM on Rough & Unequal: 9/27 noon Roundtable with Kevin Jerome Everson in Grunwald Gallery || 9/27 5PM Public Conversation with Terri Francis in FA 015 || 9/28 2PM Screening and Conversation with Ross Gay in Wells 048

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The Grunwald Gallery and Black Film Center/Archive are pleased to present Rough and Unequal, a film by Kevin Jerome Everson. The film will be exhibited in the Grunwald Gallery as the centerpiece for a symposium featuring the filmmaker in conversation with IU faculty, staff, and students and Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields Associate Curator of American Art, Kelli Morgan.

The exhibit, organized by the Black Film Center/Archive and the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, opened on August 6 and will continue through October 4, 2019. The artist will be present on September 27–28th to participate in several public programs including a conversation with Black Film Center/Archive Director Terri Francis on Friday, September 27 at 5PM.

Rough and Unequal was first screened at the Fralin Museum of Art at University of Virginia, where Everson is on the faculty. Everson felt a need to reflect upon this place where he lives and works: The University. Lately, however, the space seems fraught and he chose instead to look inward by, in fact, looking outward and upward—the subject of this film is the moon. Filming from McCormick Observatory, Everson documented the waxing and waning of the moon. In many ways, this appears a fairly radical departure from earlier work, but one can see ties to, among other themes, the repeated subject of the cycle of labor that appears throughout his oeuvre.

While Everson’s films frequently articulate the profundity in every-day life via a microcosmic approach that focuses on close-knit communities, the outlook of this new work is macroscopic. This installation of Rough and Unequal expands the Black Film Center/Archive’s exploration of the reverberations between the genre of nonconformist filmmaking known as “the avant-garde” and the parallel insurgent cinemas of the African Diaspora. The screening of Rough and Unequal in an art gallery setting is consistent with previous screenings, providing a contemplative space for the 11-minute silent film. Yet, the presentation of the film in this setting, where the public will be able to revisit the film over a period of time, will provide a viewing experience very different than one that can be provided in the cinema. Placing Everson’s film in an art gallery context draws attention to the visual aspects of the film and creates the connection to visual art.

Symposium

Rough & Unequal

by

Kevin Jerome Everson

Friday 9/27

Roundtable

Kevin Everson, Carmel Curtis, Anne Mahady, Terri Francis, Ross Gay, Kelli Morgan, and Joan Hawkins.

12PM

Grunwald Gallery

Public Conversation

Kevin Everson and Terri Francis

5PM

Fine Arts 015

followed by a reception

Three Quarters (2015) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Saturday 9/28

Screening and Conversation

FORM AND PLACE: Two artists from different locations on the Allegheny Plateau, working in the disciplines of film and of poetry, talk about gesture, flight, and witness.

Kevin Everson and Ross Gay

9/28

2PM

Wells 048

Get Free Tickets for the Screening.

Screening Program:

I

Polly Two is about ninety-nine percent totality. Filmed during 2017 eclipse across North America. (2018, 12:00, b/w, silent).

Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau is loosely based on William Klein’s1980 documentary, The Little Richard Story. The city of Mansfield, Ohio sits at the Allegheny Plateau and has an incredible range of musical talent. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. (2019, 7:00, color).

IFO is about three famous UFO sightings over Mansfield, Ohio. (2017, 9:50, b/w).

Polly Two  (2018) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

II

The Foothills of the Allegheny Plateau is where the city of Mansfield Ohio lies. (2019,1:24, b&w).

Mansfield Product Company is about receiving something new layered with something old. (2014, 2:15, b&w, silent).

Tygers is a glance at the fancy moves of the Mansfield Senior High football team in Mansfield, Ohio. (2014, 2:00, b&w, silent).

In A Good Fight a gentleman recalls the play-by-play of the 1978 boxing match between Sugar Ray Leonard and Art McKnight, local prizefighter from Mansfield, Ohio. (2017, 2 min, b&w, sound).

Three Quarters features two magicians in Philadelphia practicing their sleight of hand tricks. (2015, 4:37, 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, silent).

Tygers (2014) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

III

Cardinal is a film about bird-watchers looking for the state bird of Ohio. (2019, 16mm transferred to digital, 2:30, b&w).

During an Ears, Nose and Throat examination, Shadeena Brooks recounts a horrible event she eye-witnessed. (2016, 10:30, color)​. Cast: Shadeena Brooks, Dr. Heather Honeycutt, Dr. Eric Mansfield.

Get Free Tickets for the screening.

IFO (2017) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Featured Participants:

Carmel Curtis is a moving image archivist committed to increasing access to film and video by supporting viewing of diverse media to diverse audiences. Carmel currently works in the Moving Image Archive of Indiana University; is a board member of the non-profit Screen Slate, a daily resource for independent, repertory, and gallery screenings in New York City; and is a is a proud member of XFR Collective (pronounced transfer collective), a volunteer run group that works to increase community access to at-risk audiovisual media. Previously, Carmel has worked with a range of institutions and individuals including the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the United Nations, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dirty Looks, Lincoln Center Archive, NYU, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and Deluxe. She holds a masters in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU.

Interview – Kevin Jerome Everson, invité d’honneur du 41e Cinéma du réel

I think about the content first and what I want to say formally and what materials I want to use.

Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) works in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He is known for his filmic fables that articulate the profound within the ordinariness of everyday life. Everson, who was born in the working-class community of Mansfield, Ohio, depicts details in the lives of people living and working in similar American communities: a mechanic repairing an old car in a backyard, a black beauty queen in a segregated pageant, men boxing, snowplow operators in winter, young men walking into a courtroom, the aftermath of a murder.

Some of Everson’s films are constructed from appropriated news and film footage, uncovering forgotten details of African- American life in the 1960s and 70s. In other films, the artist explores the waxing and waning of a community’s sense of itself and the migration of black people from the South to the North in order to find work. Everson, whose work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, approaches race, sexuality, and economic circumstances with a poetic yet unflinching eye. Adopting the stance of an observer, his interest in labor has both a political and a formal aspect, exploring the relationship between the human body and the materiality of the labor it performs as both an expression of class and identity, and as a performative gesture.

Rough & Unequal Installation View (2019).

With a sense of place, drawing on historical research, Everson’s films, which number 160, including 9 features, combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or the weather. Instead of standard realism he favors a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making.

Everson’s film Condor One (2019) premiered at the Venice International Film Festival of the Biennale di Venezia. ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Everson received the 2019 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities one week ago. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, Ohio Arts Council, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, an American Academy Rome Prize, grants from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Creative Capital and the Mid-Atlantic, residencies at Mobile Frames / Media City Film Festival (Windsor/Detroit), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Yaddo and MacDowell Colony, and numerous university fellowships. 

Terri Francis teaches film studies courses through the Media School and directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University. An expert on Black film and critical race theory, her work involves archival research, cultural history and attention to form, as it’s set within the vicissitudes of performance and representation. Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Her interviews and essays appear in Film Quarterly and Film History. She guest edited a close- up on Afrosurrealism in film and video for the 2013 fall issue of Black Camera. Film recommendation: Losing Ground, Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film about a professor seeking ecstatic experience.

Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau (2019); ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays,The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.  Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, “River.”  He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press.  Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.  

Rough and Unequal installed at the Grunwald Gallery.

Joan Hawkins’s Ph.D is in Comparative Literature and she was a 19th century French and English lit student before she started working on Film.  Feminist theory drew her to Film Studies; the Gothic drew her to Horror, and the rest is history.  She wrote her dissertation with Carol Clover and have been working at the intersection of horror, European art cinema, and the avant-garde ever since.  Her sub-discipline is generally known as taste politics and taste cultures, and it interrogates the way notions of taste (good and bad) are constructed. Her research interests are: Film Theory and History; taste politics; horror cinema; European art cinema; film subcultures; the avant-garde
Her teaching interests are Film Theory and History; taste politics; horror cinema; European art cinema; film subcultures; the avant-garde; experimental film, theater and performance art; gender politics and theory; panic culture; French cinema; women directors; Fascism and Psychoanalysis; genre theory; the body in cinema; the event; site-specific art; and sex.

  • Setting up installation. Photo by Essence London.
  • Platter for the continuous projection of Rough & Unequal. Photo by Essence London.
  • Unpacking for Rough and Unequal. Photo by Essence London.
  • Tools. Photo by Essence London.
  • Each Eiki projector sits on a pedestal. Photo by Essence London.

Anne Mahady is a PhD candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In her research, she examines questions of the role of the folk within 20th-century discourses on American national identity and racial representation. Her dissertation, entitled Envisioning the American Folk in the Art of Palmer C. Hayden, investigates the ways in which African American modernist Palmer Hayden addressed, replied to and re-framed discourses about African American folklife in his mid-career works. Philosophically aligned with the New Negro project of racial reinvention yet skeptical of uplift imagery, Hayden offered an alternate vision of racial self-hood and citizenship through images of the lives, stories and experiences of “the low-down folk”. Her research interests include: 20th-century African American art, folklore and laborlore, American visual culture and curatorial ethics.

Aspects of Everson’s work evoke structuralist Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970)

Kelli Morgan is Associate Curator of American Art for the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. In this role, Morgan manages and refines the IMA’s significant collection of American Art and provide curatorial oversight for future exhibitions. The IMA’s collection of American paintings and sculptures include some of the most iconic and beloved works such as LOVE, Robert Indiana’s original sculpture made of cor-ten steel, Gamin by Augusta Savage and Jimson Weed by Georgia O’Keeffe. Originally from Detroit, MI., Dr. Morgan earned her doctorate in Afro-American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Public History – Museum Studies in 2017 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a scholar and curator, Morgan has worked in a variety of curatorial, programming, teaching and research positions at various institutions, including The Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). In early 2014, Morgan was awarded a dissertation fellowship by the prestigious Ford Foundation. She was also named the Curatorial Fellow of African American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art (2014 – 2015) and in 2016 became the inaugural recipient of The Winston & Carolyn Lowe Curatorial Fellowship for Diversity in the Fine Arts at PAFA.

Ears, Nose, and Throat (2016); ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

As a critical race cultural historian, Morgan specializes in American art and visual culture. Her interdisciplinary research concentrates primarily on historic African-American women artists, however her curatorial work often examines, critiques and theorizes the ways in which American artists, art objects, art history and art institutions both challenge and support the systematic mechanisms of anti-Black violence and oppression in the United States. By analyzing the ways in which Americans construct visual discourses, conceptualize images and sometimes resist these discourses, Morgan’s curatorial and teaching practices link art history, women’s studies, African American history and museum studies to create stimulating and culturally sensitive educational opportunities for students and public audiences alike.

Rough and Unequal (2017); ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Rough and Unequal (2017) is about the beautiful lunar surface. Filmed over several months from Earth to Moon, this is a film for a two channel installation. (11:30, b/w, dual channel).

Rough and Unequal at IU. Photo by Caitlyn Stevens.

Rough and Unequal Symposium Schedule

  • All events are free and open to the public.

Friday, September 27

  • 12–2pm: Lunch roundtable discussion led by Kevin Everson with participation by Kelli Morgan, Terri Francis, Anne Mahady, Ross Gay, Carmel Curtis, and Joan Hawkins. Located in the Grunwald Gallery.
  • 5–6pm: Public conversation: Kevin Everson and Terri Francis. Located in Fine Arts 015.
  • 6–7:30pm: Opening reception. Located in the Grunwald Gallery.

Saturday, September 28

  • 2–4pm: Screening of Kevin Everson films followed by conversation with Ross Gay. Located in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archives, Wells Library.
  • Get Tickets HERE.
A Good Fight (2017); ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

The Rough & Unequal exhibition and symposium are made possible by New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities and the College Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana University. Special thanks to Madeleine Molyneaux of Picture Palace Pictures and Ian Burnley. Appreciating early support of our Everson research from The Ruth Lilly Professorship of the English Department thanks to Ross. The series continues the BFC/A’s reflection on the 1969 moon landing and black cinematic imaginations of outer space begun in Black Sun/White Moon.

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Running the Screen: Directed by Women

Still image for Running the Screen: Directed by Women.
Images from IU Cinema’s website.

IU Cinema’s wonderful Running the Screen: Directed by Women celebration continues this week. IU Cinema has dedicated its entire September 2019 programming line-up to films directed by women in celebration of September as Woman Director Awareness Month. Additionally, 2019 commemorates the fifth annual #DirectedbyWomen Worldwide Film Viewing Party, an initiative celebrating the creative work of women filmmakers, which was founded in 2015 by Barbara Ann O’Leary, IU Cinema’s founding social media specialist and blog editor.

Curated and programmed by Brittany D. Friesner and Jon Vickers, with support from IU’s Women’s Philanthropy Leadership Council; Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Series; Black Film Center/Archive; Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design; College of Arts and Sciences’ Themester 2019: Remembering and Forgetting; Union Board Films; the Turkish Flagship Program; and the Hard Truth Hills Movies by Moonlight Film Festival.

Contact: Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

The Racially Queer Politics of Playing with Broken Video Games || Public Talk: Friday, September 20, 2019 at 12:15PM by TreaAndrea Russworm, PhD

Posted on by BFCA

The Racially Queer Politics of Playing with Broken Video Games

Dr. TreaAndrea Russworm

September 20, 2019 || 12:15 – 1:30PM Franklin Hall 312

PUBLIC TALK

Although it may seem that the multi-billion-dollar mainstream video game industry remains indifferent or outwardly antagonistic to the fight for Black liberation and U.S. political reform, movements like #BlackLivesMatter have become central to the politicized play practices of Black gamers, geeks, blerds, and technocrats.

In this talk TreaAndrea M. Russworm explores some of the ways in which recent encounters with what she theorizes as the “brokenness of video games” complicate our popular assumptions about the cultural life of video games. This talk makes Black cultural fan-practices more visible and also directly challenges the growing academic discourse that “queers” games and reinscribes whiteness in trying to locate examples of non-normative play.

What might it mean to make queer theory, queer activism, and now queer game studies more accountable for the continued reproduction of racial and intersectional blindspots? In thinking about our methods for digital cultural analysis, how might new interdisciplinary contributions to Black film and media studies venture beyond the usual digital cultural focus on Black Twitter, Facebook, and social media as important sites of contest and critique? 

An Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, TreaAndrea M. Russworm teaches classes on video games, digital cultural studies, and African American popular culture. She is the author of Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and a co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University of Mississippi Press, 2016) and Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is currently writing a fourth book on race, gaming, and the politics of play.

Public Talk: Friday, Sept. 20, 2019 12:15 – 1:30PM

Franklin Hall 312

BFC/A Events This Past Semester

Contact: Black Film Center/Archive, 1320 E. 10th Street Wells 044, Bloomington, IN, 47405 || bfca@indiana.edu

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