Baltimore with Lessons of the Hour Thu, Jul 13 | 7:30pm | TMT Baltimore
An homage to writer-director-producer-actor Melvin Van Peebles (1932–2021), whose 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song ushered in the “blaxploitation” era, Isaac Julien’s film employs the look and feel of blaxploitation films, using Baltimore’s streets and museums as locations. Currently on view in conjunction with the museum’s Regeneration exhibition as a three-channel installation, Baltimore is presented here in its single-channel theatrical version. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Isaac Julien. WITH: J. R. Adduci, Leia Thompson, Tony Colavito, Nato Jude. 2003. 11 min. UK. Color. English. DCP. Lessons of the Hour Named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s famed speech delivered at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1894, Isaac Julien’s portrait of this key Black American orator gives screen time to a figure who died mere years before his tremendous rhetoric could be documented by a motion picture camera. This single- channel version of Julien’s resonant tableau centers both Douglass’s personal life and his consistent activism, placing his history in dialogue with the contemporary movement for Black lives and the continuous struggle for justice and liberty currently reverberating throughout our country. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Isaac Julien. WITH: Valerie Edmond, Charlotte Emmerson, Ray Fearon, Cara Horgan. 2019. 28 min. UK. Color. English. DCP.
BODY AND SOUL (1925)
Renée Baker scores Body and Soul Sat, Jul 8 | 7:30pm | DGT
Renée Baker is founding music director and conductor of the internationally acclaimed Chicago Modern Orchestra Project. She has created unforgettable original scores for more than 400 silent films. Tonight, she will present her music created to accompany Body and Soul , the film that introduced audiences to actor Paul Robeson. Writer- director Oscar Micheaux’s Southern picaresque is one of his most visually expressive works. Robeson portrays twin brothers, one pious, the other a crook passing for a pastor who betrays a small-town Georgia family. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Oscar Micheaux. WITH: Paul Robeson, Lawrence Chenault, Chester A. Alexander, Marshall Rodgers. 1925. 79 min. USA. B&W. Silent. English intertitles. DCP. Restored by the George Eastman Museum.
ILLUSIONS (1982)
Illusions with America Fri, Jul 14 | 2pm | TMT Illusions
Looking back to 1940s Hollywood, Julie Dash’s short film scrutinizes the sexist, racist practices of the entertainment industry through the experience of Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee), a white-passing Black woman employed at National Studios. Selling her illusion of whiteness to maintain her employment, Mignon is tasked with dubbing a voice of a Black singer over a white female performance in a film, creating a dual subversion and the primary tension of the piece. Our protagonist’s experience is not just an evocation of Franz Fanon’s “by any means necessary” ethos; her actions are also Dash’s emotional commentary on survival and self-preservation. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Julie Dash. WITH: Lonette McKee, Rosanne Katon, Ned Bellamy, Jack Rader. 1982. 34 min. USA. B&W. English. 16mm. Preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. America “So much of the spirit of this piece,” Garrett Bradley has said about her stunning short work America , “is about disrupting the symbols and the iconography around how America is defined.” Asking us to acknowledge the fact that
SIDEWALK STORIES (1989)
Sidewalk Stories Sun, Jul 9 | 2pm | TMT
Writer-director-actor Charles Lane lovingly renders a Chaplinesque fable on the forsaken streets of lower Manhattan in this indie classic that premiered at Cannes. Lane plays a street artist attempting to scrape together a living by sketching passersby in Greenwich Village. Finding refuge in abandoned buildings, one wintry night he stumbles upon a little girl (Lane’s real-life daughter) whose father has just been murdered and must find her mother. Without using a single intertitle, Lane’s playful and poignant film is propelled by the music of composer Marc Marder, and the expressive performances of Lane and his costars, seamlessly translating the visual language of a century ago. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Charles Lane. WITH: Charles Lane, Nicole Alysia, Tom Alpern, Edie Falco. 1989. 97 min. USA. B&W. Silent. DCP.
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