Category: Curated Programs

Kathleen Collins – Losing Ground

On the occasion of the online screening of Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground on 3 June 2021, jointly organized by Courtisane and Sabzian, Sabzian published several writings and interviews.

► Oliver Franklin: An Interview: Kathleen Collins
► David Nicholson: A Commitment to Writing. A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman
► Kathleen Collins: “I refuse to create mythological characters”
► Kathleen Collins: A Place in Time and Killer of Sheep: Two Radical Definitions of Adventure Minus Women

Michel Khleifi – Fertile Memory

On the occasion of the online screening of Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory on 18 March 2021, jointly organized by Courtisane and Sabzian, Sabzian published several texts on the film. These texts were already part of the publication Michel Khleifi, MÉMOIRE FERTILE / FERTILE MEMORY, compiled, edited and published by Courtisane, CINEMATEK and Sindibad Films, but on this occasion new (English) translations have been produced.

► Michel Khleifi: From Reality to Fiction – From Poverty to Expression
► Jacqueline Aubenas, Michel Khleifi, Serge Meurant, Johan van der Keuken: Excerpts from a conversation on Fertile Memory
► Catherine Arnaud, Mouloud Mimoun: Interview with Michel Khleifi on Fertile Memory
► Mouloud Mimoun: Fertile Memory. A Budding Filmmaker Generates a Past With a Future
► Edward W. Said: Interiors

The Case of Farrebique

If we were to choose one film to ponder over the debates on “realism” that occupied a large part of the 20th century arena of cinema, then let it be Farrebique (1946): George Rouquier’s magnificent chronicle of a year in the life of a farming family in Goutrens, Aveyron. André Bazin famously and vigorously defended the film against its detractors, who scornfully remarked that “cowpats are not photogenic” (Henri Jeanson) and that “it’s not even a documentary, rather a film which teaches us exactly nothing” (Jean Fayard), by declaring that the film’s singular accomplishment was to “deprive reality of all that has nothing to do with it, especially the parasitism of art”. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, James Agee lauded Farrebique as one of the rare films that was able to keep the original promise of cinema alive: the promise to capture “the cruel radiance of what is.” After all, he claimed, the camera was the central instrument of his time, able to do what nothing else in the world could do: “To record unaltered reality; and it can be made to perceive, record, and communicate, in full unaltered power, the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing and which are in great degree, inevitably and properly, lost to every other kind of artist except the camera artist.”

The controversy around the film – a new Battle of Hernani, as Jean Painlevé phrased it – brought into sharp focus the limitations and paradoxes of some of the denominators that have been used ad nauseam to divide and evaluate the cinematic landscape: documentary and fiction, authenticity and duplicity, asceticism and artfulness. These considerations, however, could not have been further away from George Rouquier’s mind when he set out to film the life on Farrebique, a farmstead that had been owned by his relatives for generations. Between 1944 and 1945, he spent a year with the family whose manner of living is governed by the seasons, by the dinnertime ritual of the grandfather cutting and handing out slices of bread, and the toilsome management of farm life on the eve of the introduction of electricity. The first shots in the film linger on the cracks slithering up the walls of the farmstead. “The house needs to be repaired,” says the grandfather, setting in motion the plot of the film: a series of daily comings, goings, and disputes, from the installation of electricity to the birth of a child, from quarrels about the farm’s inheritance to the cruel anticipation of death. All this, Rouquier films with a poetic sensibility and a sense of composition and rhythm that summons echoes with the work of Chaplin and Flaherty, Eisenstein and Dovjenko. No wonder Pedro Costa, when presenting the film at the Courtisane festival in Ghent, described the film as a form of science-fiction, as if the most day-to-day events crystallize and glisten on the screen like we’ve never seen them before; as if the actions and gestures that are all too often set aside as meritless prove to be, against all odds, all too worthy of fiction.

After making Farrebique, Rouquier directed a series of short films, documentaries, and features before finding a sideline as an actor. In 1983, he went back to the region in order to make a sequel, Biquefarre, with some of the original characters from the first film, shot some forty years earlier. Recently, seventy years after its first appearance, Farrebique was given a new lease of life, thanks to a beautiful restoration by Les documents cinématographiques. At a moment when contemporary cinema is increasingly challenging its borders and divisions and is eagerly exploring both its documenting and poetic forces, Farrebique’s splendour might be shining brighter than ever, as its achievement, to use Agee’s words, remains “wholly of our time.”

Compiled on the occasion of the online screening of Farrebique, hosted by Sabzian and Courtisane on 18 February 2021, this small dossier consists of a selection of conversations with and writings on the film.

Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane) and Gerard-Jan Claes (Sabzian)

Available on sabzian.be

The Night of Counting The Years

From the very beginning, I have had a cause.
My cause is our lost or missing history.
The people you see on the streets, in the fields, factories and even those at home… they all contributed once to forming, to creating life.
Those people have enriched human civilization.
How can we revive their creative role?
How can we restore their positive and constructive participation in life and human endeavour?
First, they have to know where they come from and what contribution they made.
We must form a link between the past and the present Egyptian, in order to attain the Egyptian of tomorrow.
This is my cause.

“You who go, you will return / You who sleep, you will rise / You who walk, you will be resurrected.” So begins Al-mummia or The Night of Counting the Years, Shadi Abdel Salam’s first and only feature film. The quote derives from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it is not only indicative of the events depicted in the film but also of the lifelong desire that infused Shadi Abdel Salam’s work: to rekindle memory in view of activating the future.

After graduating from Victoria College in Alexandria and a short stint studying theatre arts in London, Abdel Salam studied architecture under Hassan Fathy, a man renowned for his promotion of pre-industrial design methods and materials. The crux of Fathy’s argument was a desire to return to the use of ancient mud brick forms, which he described as the “sole hope for rural reconstruction.” This concern for the duality of tradition and modernism, as well as of urban and rural life, undoubtedly influenced Abdel Salam in his forthcoming creative endeavours. Instead of pursuing a career in architecture, however, he opted for cinema, initially shaping his vision by designing decorations and costumes for numerous historical Egyptian films among which Wa Islamah [Sword of Islam] (Enrico Bomba & Andrew Marton, 1961), Almaz we ‘Abdou el Hamoulî [Almaz and Abdul Hamuli] (Helmy Rafla, 1962) and Al Nasser Salah Ad-Din [Saladin] (Youssef Chahine, 1963), as well as foreign films such as Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), Faraon [Pharaoh] (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1966) and La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza [Man’s Struggle for Survival] (Renzo & Roberto Rossellini, 1964–1970).

It was notably Roberto Rossellini who proved to be instrumental in the procurement of the necessary funding for Al-mummia, a project that had occupied Abdel Salam ever since 1956, when he first read the story of the discovery of mummies in Dayr al-Bahri. Finding inspiration in a historical event that took place in 1881, on the eve of British colonial rule, when it was brought to light that a tribe had been secretly raiding the tombs of the Pharaohs in Thebes, the first-time filmmaker rigorously crafted a haunting meditation on identity, loss and legacy; its deeply melancholic tone tentatively reflecting the sense of demise felt at the time of shooting, in the months following the political cataclysms of 1967, as well as the passing of the filmmaker’s father. When completed, Rossellini ensured that the film received a substantial international audience at festivals throughout Europe in 1970, winning, amongst others, the Georges Sadoul Prize of the French Cinémathèque and the Golden Prize of the Carthage Cinema Festival in Tunis. However, the film was not to receive a release in Egypt until February 1975 — an event that was sadly eclipsed by the death of the renowned Egyptian contralto Umm Kulthum, which plunged the whole country into mourning. Death, it seems, kept on haunting the film.

Abdel Salam continued to delve into Egypt’s history and culture with subsequent cinematic projects, perhaps most notably the short film Shakawa Al-Fellah Al-Faseeh or The Eloquent Peasant (1970), based on a Middle Kingdom text of the same title, in which a peasant, wronged by a greedy nobleman, must rely on his elegant speaking style in order to attain justice. However, while responsible for a number of other short and documentary films after 1970, and being appointed as Director of the Centre for Documentary Films, the great sweep of Abdel Salam’s cinematic work began to take a single direction: preparations for his magnum opus, a film variously referred to as The Tragedy of the Great Royal House and as Akhenaton, which would have dealt “with the dynasty which preceded him [the Pharaoh Akhenaten] and that which followed him.” In spite of fifteen years of intensive preparation and research, during which he not only wrote the screenplay but also diligently designed the costumes, decors and decorations for the film, Abdel Salam was never able to see his dream project come to fruition. He passed away in October 1986, leaving us with a legacy that continues to brim with life and promise.

Compiled on the occasion of the online screening of Al-mummia, hosted by Sabzian and Courtisane on 21 January 2021, this small dossier consists of a selection of conversations with and writings on Shadi Abdel Salam, as well as the complete screenplay of Al-mummia and some of the drawings that he sketched in preparation for the film.

Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane) and Gerard-Jan Claes (Sabzian)

Available on sabzian.be

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Kevin Jerome Everson

Curated by Stoffel Debuysere for the Courtisane Festival 2020 and CINEMATEK, but cancelled due to COVID.

“My work must project and reveal the materials, procedure and process. I believe that this approach is not necessarily important to be noticeable to the viewer; it merely explains how I continue to approach the craft of art making. I firmly believe that the materials of the work must be noticeable. Procedure is the formal quality I am exploring with the work. The process is the execution of the formal quality. Once I have a grasp of procedure, the process becomes a discipline.”

Material, procedure and process: for the artist-filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, these three words define the core of his artistic approach. It is with this approach, grounded in an early preference for minimalism and a background in sculpture and street photography, that he knows like no other how to evoke the poetics of the lives and experiences of working-class African-American communities. Rather than pursuing conventional realism, he elects to abstract everyday expressions into theatrical gestures and to choreograph prosaic situations as artificial compositions. Rather than seeking a classical narrative form, he tends, more and more, towards pure abstraction.

Living and teaching in Virginia but born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, as the child of parents who came from Mississippi during the Great Migration, Everson makes films that are inextricably linked to the socio-economic conditions and histories of the Midwest and South of the United States. The place-specific conditions of work, migration, language and culture form the primary material from which he derives his subjects, whereby he pays a great deal of attention to the concrete gestures and customs that are brought about by those conditions. From Taylorian labour rituals to Spartan sports exercises, from the agility of rodeo riders to the dexterity of street magicians, Everson focuses pre-eminently on the performative qualities expressed by gestures, expressions and interactions that all too often go unnoticed and undervalued. The films not only suggest the unrelenting cycle of everyday life but also the beauty, dignity and skill that lie within it. “The people on screen are always smarter than the viewer,” he notes, “so the viewer has to catch up.”

Everson’s esteem for work and craftsmanship can also be seen in his own artistic practice and work ethic. In over twenty years, he has produced a continuously growing body of work of more than 170 short films and a dozen full-length films, which time and again stand out for their exceptional care for the specificities of place, movement, speech and form. A look at the life of black communities near Lake Erie is organized as a structural composition (Erie), a portrait of polling stations in Charlottesville, Virginia, can be experienced as a “flicker film” (Tonsler Park), a demonstration of consumer products manufactured in Mansfield, Ohio, takes on the allure of a Kerry James Marshall painting (Westinghouse). Constantly juggling between reality and artificiality, materiality and narrativity, Everson displays an ever-increasing skill in the art that was once aptly described by another craftsman as “sculpting in time”.

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PROGRAM 1

Eason
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2016, HD, 15′

Part of the one-hundred anniversary of the great Black migration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Eason is loosely based on the life of James Walker Hood Eason (1886-1923) a long time member of the UNIA of Philadelphia.

The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2007, HD, 4′

One of Everson’s signature archival films that reveal the construction of performance and portrayal in a minimally edited interview with Martin Luther King’s first cousin about police brutality during race riots in Cleveland Ohio.

According to …
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2007, HD, 9′

With a rich source of found and original footage, this short film presents several versions of tragic events in the rural South.

Second and Lee
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2008, HD, 3′

A cautionary tale about when not to run. It uses archival reportage and voiceover recollection to trace through repetitive corridors of presumption, justice and judgment.

Ears, Nose & Throat
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2016, HD, 10′

In Kevin Jerome Everson’s deeply affecting Ears, Nose and Throat, a woman’s testimonial faculties are confirmed through medical examinations before she recites a tragic story, whose horrors we don’t see, hear, or smell, but can imagine far too easily.

IFO
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2017, HD, 10′

In Mansfield, Ohio, multiple UFO sightings yield both passionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflections; meanwhile, suburban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed surrender.

Recovery
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2020, HD, 10′

About an Airman training to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi.

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PROGRAM 2 – Black Fire UVA

Over the last half-dozen years, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold have collaborated with their students on a series of films that examine the history of African American students and faculty at Charlottesville’s University of Virginia (UVA).

Sugarcoated Arsenic
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2013, HD, 20′

A cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s. The film tells the story of African American women and men who through their public and private gestures sought to create a beloved community that thrived on intellectual exchange, self-critique, and human warmth.

We Demand
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2016, HD, 10′

The story of the anti-Vietnam War Movement from the perspective of James R. Roebuck, a northern- born African American who studied at the University of Virginia dur- ing the late 1960s and early 1970s. Over a ten-day period of unprecedented student upheaval at the University, Roebuck, the first African American president of UVA’s Student Council, confronted a series of political challenges and existential dilemmas.

Fastest Man in the State
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2017, HD, 10′

Kent Merritt waxing poetically about being one of the first four Black scholarship athletes at the University of Virginia.

How Can I Ever Be Late
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2017, HD, 10′

African American students at the University of Virginia greet the band Sly and the Family Stone at the Charlottesville airport in 1973.

Black Bus Stop
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2019, HD, 9′

Students reclaim a popular gathering spot on the campus of the University of Virginia.

Hampton
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2019, HD, 7′

Finds the University of Virginia gospel choir, Black Voices, returning from a triumphant concert in Hampton Roads.

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PROGRAM 3

Workers Leaving the Job-Site
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2013, HD, 7′

Another take, another era, another factory, shot in Mississippi in summer 2012, this is a riff on the Lumière Brothers classic 1895 film.

Fe26
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2014, HD, 7′

Shot on 16mm in the summer of 2013, Fe26 follows two gentlemen around the East Side of Cleveland, Ohio, and examines the tensions between illegal work — in this case, the stealing of manhole covers and copper piping — and the basic survival tactics that exist in areas of high unemployment. The film features two local residents, Issac “I-Pleeza” Chester and Jonathan “Streets” Lee, previously seen in Rita Larson’s Boy/The Tombigbee Chronicles No. 2. As in Sound That, the buried suggests the relationship between what’s seen above ground and the elements taken for granted beneath the surface, in this instance, criminal deeds and activities. (KJE)

Sound That
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2014, HD, 12′

Sound That follows employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for what lies beneath, as they investigate for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. As in Fe26, the buried suggests the relationship between what’s seen above ground and the elements taken for granted beneath the surface, in this instance, basic city services. The sound invites the viewer/listener into the hollow sounds lurking under Cleveland’s surfaces. (KJE)

R-15
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2017, HD, 5′

An insulator doles out R-15, a material that keeps homes warm in the winter months and cool in the summer.

Westinghouse Four
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2020, HD, 3′

About an old consumer product produced at the Westinghouse factory in Mansfield, Ohio in the 1960s.

Ten Five in the Grass
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2012, HD, 32′

A film about Black cowgirls and cowboys in preparation for the specific rodeo event of calf roping. Filmed in Lafayette, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi in late spring/summer 2011, the title Ten Five in the Grass refers to the type of rope used to capture fast calves.

Union
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2019, HD, 3′

Illustrates the Virginia Union University football team working together.

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PROGRAM 4

Emergency Needs
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2007, HD, 7′

Emergency Needs is a 16mm film about the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio Carl Stokes, dealing with the July 1968 uprising.

Rhinoceros
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2013, HD, 6′

A staging of the last speech of Alessandro de’ Medici (1510- 1537), the first Duke of Florence. Because of his mixed African Italian heritage, Alessandro, sometimes referred to as Il Moro (the Moor), has been called the first black European head of state. Rhinoceros suggests that Alessandro de’ Medici’s final political performance was captured on tape for television broadcast and now exists as found object and historical document.

Rita Larson’s Boy
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2012, HD, 11′

Everson hoped to find a lost audition tape of the actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, MS, who portrayed the character ‘Rollo Larson’ — Rita Larson’s Boy — in the 70s sitcom Sanford and Son. With no luck, he set out to make his own version of the tape. Ten young actors, in Cleveland Ohio, portray ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson.

Round Seven
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2018, HD, 19′

Centers on the famous 1978 boxing match in Dayton, Ohio between Sugar Ray Leonard and prizefighter Art McKnight of Mansfield, Ohio. One of a series of films focusing on people and phenomenon related to the filmmaker’s hometown.

Undefeated
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2008, HD, 2′

About mobility and immobility, or just trying to stay warm. Featuring DeCarrio Couley shadowboxing to the rhythm of a hand-cranked Bolex.

Charlie’s Proof
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2013, HD, 13′

Charlie’s Proof is about legendary Charlie Smith of Columbus, Mississippi disagreeing with the filmmaker.

Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2019, HD, 7′

Rappers and gospel singers, on the streets and in their homes. Everson was inspired by William Klein’s The Little Richard Story (1980), a film that tells the story of the rock- and-roll icon’s life through the eyes and experiences of friends, family, and impersonators.

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PROGRAM 5

BZV
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2010, HD, 28′

A film about the result of labor. It has a couple using their hard earned wages in search of furniture, citizens’ leisurely water skiing and fishing. BZV was shot in and around Brazzaville, The Republic of Congo. With a naturalistic approach, the film also interweaves various elements concerning the social and physical landscape. The title is the three-letter airport code for Brazzaville.

The Island of St.Matthews
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2013, HD, 70′

The Island of St. Matthews happened because I was looking for a lot of old photographs for artist’s books years ago. When I was down in Mississippi, I was asking my aunt on my mom’s side, “Where are the old pictures and stuff like that?” And she kept saying, “We lost them in the flood.” So I always wanted to make a film about the 1973 flood of the Tombigbee River back home. (KJE)

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PROGRAM 6

Regal
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2015, HD, colour, 3′

Regal is three Pontiacs and a Buick Regal becoming something entirely different.

Company Line
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2009, 30′

Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield Ohio. The title refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post-war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late forties. The neighborhood was purchased in the early seventies and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield. City employees and former residents of the Company Line narrate the film.

Lead
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2009, b&w, 3′

Lead is a story of an early 20th Century Robin Hood.

Lost Nothing
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2016, colour, 3′

Lost Nothing is the subject Willie James Crittenden waxes poetically about.

Traveling Shoes
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2019, colour, 7′

Traveling Shoes is based on the hit record by the Ohio based gospel group, The Brown Singers.

Improvement Association
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2016, colour, 11′

Improvement Association has Malik Hudgins, an UNIA life-long member of Philadelphia Pennsylvania, waxing poetically about life.

Oscar at 8903 Empire
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2016, colour, 2′

Oscar at 8903 Empire is the address of proud home owner Oscar Dickerson.

Ninety-Three
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2008, b&w, 3′

Ninety-Three is a wonderful age to celebrate.

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PROGRAM 7

Condor
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2019, HD, b&w, 7′

The July 2, 2019 solar eclipse, filmed in 100% totality, over the Chilean coast, in 16mm black and white. Condor is the national bird of Chile.

Erie
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2010, HD, b&w, 81′

Erie consist of a series of single take shots in and around communities near Lake Erie. The scenes relate to a Black migration in the USA, contemporary conditions, folks concentrating on the task at hand, theater and famous art objects.

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PROGRAM 8

The Mayberry Practice Calf
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2012, 4′

The Mayberry Practice Calf is about Natchez, Mississippi’s Fred Mayberry’s wonderful design.

Second Place
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2012, colour, 3′

Second Place is about the skillful effort that goes into a rodeo’s finest events.

The Wooden Calf
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2012, colour, 2′

The Wooden Calf is about keeping sharp before the rodeo.

Cinnamon
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2006, colour, 70′

Cinnamon presents a glimpse into the world of African American drag racing. It is an experimental feature film about the consistent routine of a bank teller and a mechanic as they prepare for the sport of drag racing. Once the routine is disrupted, the result of the race comes into doubt. The bank teller is a driver who tries to stay focused before races. The mechanic’s routine is to constantly examine the driver’s behavior. He has to adjust the racecar to the driver’s skill and ability. Also the mechanic adjusts the racecar for the weather conditions. The film portrays their relationship as similar to that of a composer and a musician, in which the mechanic is the composer and the driver interprets the music. Cinnamon hosts several different formal styles as well as different materials. The techniques and styles employed will alternate between the conventionally scripted scenes and documentary footage. The scripted scenes have a naturalistic feel.

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PROGRAM 9

Tonsler Park
Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2017, 16mm, 80′

This portrait of Afro-American staff members of the polling station at Tonsler Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, was filmed during the US Presidential Election Day on 8 November 2016, the day when the battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was decided. Kevin Jerome Everson records the staff taking oaths, rows of voters passing as they hand out voting slips, while no one seems aware of the camera that is standing there, motionless. Conversations change to hubbub, backs block the camera’s view. This is democracy in practice and every vote counts. The film slowly opens a space for those who so often remain invisible, and the location is itself not without significance: Tonsler Park is named after Benjamin Tonsler, a local Afro-American school director who defied the rules to continue to teach older Afro-Americans in the era of segregation. With a sense of place and historical research, Kevin Jerome Everson’s films combine scripted and documentary elements with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks generated by certain conditions in the lives of working-class African Americans and others of African descent.

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Oh, Weary Rivers
Curated by Terri Francis

Kevin Everson’s films echo the blues, as much a revolt within weariness as a catalog of creative resilience in the everyday.

As a secular musical expression, the blues have specific formal qualities and social contexts that speak to the dislocations, meteorological threats, economic precarity, inequity and overcoming in the epic story of Black lives in the United States.

Neither European nor African, the blues, say scholars like James Sellman are distinguished by the “blue note,” which is “sung or played slightly flat, or lower than their ‘correct’ scalor pitches.”[1] The blues means, as Langston Hughes put it, “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith” and the “incongruous humor” of lamenting life’s disappointments and struggles, whether personal as in a lover gone away or political as in a collective sense of resilience and pride in the face of economic deprivation and voter disenfranchisement. The blues involves mythologies of deals with the devil and histories of Black Migration from Mississippi to points north such as Chicago and Detroit. The lyrics can be funny, even raunchy, as well as plaintive and poetic.[2]

The blues conjures that certain shift in the weather, felt in the bones, that portends a stranger’s arrival, a secret revealed — something calamitous — or else, the blues convey the relief in the air once the storm has passed; it’s an exhaling of grief, loss, longing. The blues always feels old, and somehow even older than nineteenth-century cinema, despite taking shape in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This program presents a chamber of resonances and dissonances with documentary tradition, labor movements, and collectivity. Madeleine Anderson’s coverage of civil rights demonstrations speak to the past with newsreel-like immediacy. Harris’s film is marked by the absence of visible people where almost any Everson film is defined by the presence of people, his neighbors, family members, students, and co-creators in Northern Ohio and Mississippi. Both Anderson and Harris’s films feature the human voice through essayistic montage and Black music traditions, still resonating with the formal rigor of Everson’s work. (Terri Francis)

[1] “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926).” Oxford African American Studies Center. 31 May. 2010; Accessed 5 Feb. 2020. https://oxfordaasc-com. proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref- 9780195301731-e-78675.
[2] “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926).” Oxford African American Studies Center. 31 May. 2010; Accessed 5 Feb. 2020. https://oxfordaasc-com. proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref- 9780195301731-e-78675.

Integration Report 1
Madeline Anderson, US, 1960, DCP, 20′

Preserved by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Integration Report 1 examines the late 1950s struggle for Black equality in Alabama, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., through speeches and the musical tradition of protest singing, here performed by Maya Angelou. Filmed in part by pioneering television producer and editor Madeleine Anderson, it speaks of both one person’s testimony and collective history.

still/here
Christopher Harris, US, 2000, 16mm, 60′

Harris’s dirge-like remembrance of a bygone neighborhood is too a direct critique of real estate and banking policies in the neighborhood. Its blues influences are heard in the melancholic score performed by Chicago bassist Tatu Aoki.

Mississippi Blues
Robert Parrish, Bertrand Tavernier, US, FR, 1984, colour, 96′

Described by New York Times film critic Janet Maslin as “both serious and quaint,” the documentary situates the blues within a quilt of humor, gospel, blues, Faulkner, and the African American church. Blue notes are heard in both storytelling, both spoken and sung. (Terri Francis)

The Southerner
Jean Renoir, US, 1945, b&w, 85′

Evoking the Franco-American writings of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, Renoir turns his gaze on the American South. Nominated for a Best Director Oscar, the film portrays a white family’s struggle with their cotton farm in Texas. Is this film one of erasure that pictures the South devoid of Black Americans except in the background of its fleeting early sequences? (Terri Francis)

Zouzou
Marc Allégret, FR, 1934, b&w, 91′

As the star of Zouzou, Josephine Baker was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture. Jazz and the blues defined American “blackness” in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Not only does the film resonate with the theme of mutual curiosity between the French and African Americans but it features themes of displacement, disappointment, and longing, characteristic of the blues. (Terri Francis)