News from the Black Film Center/Archive

Public Programs

This fall, the Black Film Center/Archive hosted a number of film screenings. The first was a series dedicated to the work of independent director and distributor Ava DuVernay, U.S. Directing Award winner at Sundance in 2012. In addition to writing, directing, and producing her own films, DuVernay launched a ground-breaking film distribution venture, the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), in 2011. In conjunction with her visit, the BFC/A and Indiana University Cinema partnered to show her films My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth about Women in Hip Hop (2010), This Is the Life (2008), Venus vs. (2013), Middle of Nowhere (2012), and I Will Follow (2011). Also screened were two films distributed by AFFRM: Big Words (2013), directed by Neil Drumming, and Better Mus’ Come (2010), directed by Storm Saulter. During her visit, DuVernay spoke at a master class with Indiana University students, delivered a Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture at the IU Cinema, attended a brunch with the Black Graduate Student Association, and sat for an interview with BFC/A director Michael T. Martin. DuVernay’s visit was partially funded by an IU Women’s Philanthropy Council Award.

In October, BFC/A archivist Brian Graney chaired a panel at the film symposium Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image, held at the IU Cinema. The panel, titled “Off the Rails—Hell Bound Train,” discussed the reconstruction issues of film fragments in the Gist Collection at the Library of Congress for the early black films, Hell Bound Train and Verdict Not Guilty (1930–33). Also on the panel were Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago) and S. Torriano Berry (Howard University). Later in the month, the BFC/A hosted KB Boyce and Celeste Chan, of Queer Rebel Productions, curators of Exploding Lineage!: Queer of Color Histories in Experimental Media (2012). The series, which included work by various directors, also included Boyce’s Bulldagger Women & Sissy Men (2010), a tribute to queer artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and Chan’s Bloodlines (2012), a recognition of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Also in October, the BFC/A hosted director Kevin Willmott, professor at the University of Kansas, and screened four of his films: The Battle for Bunker Hill (2008), The Only Good Indian (2009), CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004), and Destination: Planet Negro (2013).

In early November, the BFC/A co-sponsored a series on South African film that included Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Come Back, Africa (1959), and Searching for Sugar Man (2012). This event was in conjunction with IU’s Mathers Museum of World Cultures exhibit, Photos in Black and White: Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa. Additionally, during this semester BFC/A assistant archivist Stacey Doyle presented and discussed Pearl Bowser and Bestor Cram’s documentary on early race movies, Midnight Ramble (1994), with students from the IU Thomas I. Atkins Living-Learning Center, and the BFC/A print of Cheryl Fabio’s Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio (1975), which premiered at the IU Cinema last spring, was screened at Chicago’s Black Cinema House.

On November 15–16 the BFC/A hosted the conference Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The conference convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars and moving image archivists to discuss new methodologies and questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black film, and to consider how we render a film as an object of study in transformative digital environments. The conference also included screenings of Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926), restored by the Library of Congress in 2010 from an original nitrate print donated by the director’s son, Captain Richard Norman Jr., and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919). Long thought lost, a single nitrate print of Within Our Gates was discovered under its Spanish release title, La Negra, at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid and reconstructed by the Library of Congress.

At conference end the BFC/A, in...