News from the Black Film Center/Archive

Public Programs

In September, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences and the College Arts & Humanities Institute at Indiana University, the Black Film Center/Archive presented “Naked Acts: Image Making and Black Female Sexuality,” a two-day workshop on black female sexuality and representation with filmmaker Bridgett M. Davis and artist Renée Cox. The program featured a screening of Davis’s 1996 film Naked Acts, the first U.S. feature written, directed, produced, and self-distributed by an African American woman. Department of Communication and Culture professor Terri Francis introduced the film. Davis and Cox (who performed in the film) were present for the screening at the Indiana University Cinema and were the featured guests of the Jorgenson Filmmaker Lecture, interviewed by gender studies professor LaMonda Horton-Stallings. Cox also gave an artist talk, hosted by art historian and professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Phoebe Wolfskill. In addition to meeting with faculty and students during receptions and dinners hosted by the BFC/A, both Davis and Cox joined the undergraduate course “The Black Image in American Film,” taught by PhD student Marsha Horsley. The workshop concluded with a reading by Davis from her recently published novel, Into the Go-Slow (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2014), at Bloomington’s Boxcar Books. All events were co-sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive, College of Arts & Humanities Institute, the Kinsey Institute, departments of American Studies, Gender Studies, English, and African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Creative Writing Program, and IU Cinema.

Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult classic Ganja and Hess kicked off the “Blaxploitation Horror of the 1970s” program at the IU Cinema that ran from late August through Halloween, culminating with the screening of William Crain’s Blacula (1972). Gunn’s film, a meditation on black ritual and sexuality, is far from exploitative, but its producers re-edited and repackaged the film as such to cash in on the new trend stemmed by the popularity of American International Pictures’ Blacula. The underseen and underappreciated possession thriller J.D.’s Revenge (dir. Arthur Marks, 1976) rounded out the three-part series that screened at the IU Cinema. The departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Gender Studies co-sponsored the BFC/A and IU Cinema program series.

Academy Award–winning director Roger Ross Williams’s recent documentary God Loves Uganda (2013) screened at the IU Cinema in September. Williams’s film reveals a direct link between the most extremist American missionaries working in Uganda and the human rights violations mandated by the African nation’s recent laws against “sexual immorality” (homosexuality). Sponsors for the screening included GLBT Student Support Services, Office of Diversity Education, a unit of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs, Commission on Multicultural Understanding, Black Film Center/Archive, and IU Cinema.

In October, Gloria Rolando, Afro-Cuban filmmaker and founding member of the film collective Imágenes del Caribe, visited the IU Bloomington campus. Two of Rolando’s recent documentaries screened at the IU Cinema, where the filmmaker was present: Reembarque / Reshipment (2014), which explores intra-Caribbean migration, and 1912, Breaking the Silence (2013), a three-part series on the history of Cuba’s Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), which organized in 1908 in response to racial, political, and economic inequality in the early years of the republic. The series was co-sponsored by La Casa, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies Program, CUBAmistad, Film & Media Studies, departments of Gender Studies, History, Spanish and Portuguese, the Black Film Center/Archive, and IU Cinema.

Filmmaker Darius Clark Monroe visited campus for the IU Cinema screening of his first documentary film, Evolution of a Criminal (2014). Monroe’s autobiographical feature counters the dehumanizing statistical portraits of juvenile black male prisoners by presenting an unflinching self-portrait of his own experiences with poverty and crime. Evolution of a Criminal, produced by Spike Lee, traces his family’s increasing financial struggles that lead to his growing frustrations and eventual incarceration as a youth. Monroe, recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent...