Series: Underground Film Series, Additional Films and Guests
In presenting his first Avant-Noir program in 2014, curator Greg de Cuir Jr. conceived of it as “an intervention into the status quo of alternative film and video curating.” This second volume continues his project with a collection of short films and videos from young and established artists both of African and non-African descent, who together play with identity and the notion of the personal as political; employ performance as a means to narrate social reality; and utilize archival footage to reconstruct the cinematic. (HD/16mm Presentation)
Greg de Cuir Jr. is the selector for Alternative Film/Video and Beldocs (both in Belgrade, Serbia). As an independent moving image curator, he has organized programs for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Los Angeles Filmforum; goEast Wiesbaden; Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque; and other institutions. He is the managing editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and has published writing in Cineaste, Jump Cut, Festivalists, Art Margins, La Furia Umana, Politika, and other journals and volumes. De Cuir received his DPhil from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts Belgrade.Michael Boyce Gillespie is associate professor of film in the Department of Media and Communication Arts and the Black Studies Program at the City College of New York, City University of New York. In Film Blackness, Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture.
This screening is sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive, College Arts and Humanities Institute, Underground Film Series, Center for Documentary Research and Practice, Cinema and Media Studies, and IU Cinema. This partnership is supported through IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program.
The screening order for this program is:
My Only Idol is Reality, 2007, 7 min.
Bird’s Milk
Directed by Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009, 6 min.
Ditch Plains
Directed by Loretta Fahrenholz, 2013, 30 min.
Nice Baskets
Directed by Luther Price, 2006, 8 min.
Kuhani
Directed by Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, 2013, 7 min.
Short History of Abandoned Sets
Directed by Rä di Martino, 2012, 8 min.
Songs for Earth & Folk
Directed by Cauleen Smith, 2013, 11 min.
