I Heard It through the Grapevine (1982)
LIMITED SERIES
JAMES BALDWIN
AT THE MOVIES
SEP 6–14, 2024
Whether in his deeply personal Notes of a Native Son or his acclaimed Go Tell It on the Mountain , the brilliant novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924–1987) always spoke through his writing with an incredible urgency and resonance. His convictions became further accessible through frequent televised appearances and lectures on college campuses in the 1960s, holding those in power accountable with his commanding delivery (he trained as a preacher in his youth) and sharp tongue. His persisting message, which insists on equality and humanity, remains alive today thanks to filmmakers who have supplied nuanced views on the writer and orator that artfully supplement his legacy. On the occasion of Baldwin’s centenary, the Academy Museum presents a series of films adapted from his literary works alongside documentaries that spent time with Baldwin while he was alive and posthumous pieces that reflect on his remarkable legacy. Programmed by K.J. Relth-Miller. Notes by Hyesung ii and K.J. Relth-Miller.
I Heard It through the Grapevine in 4K Fri, Sep 6 | 7:30pm | TMT Los Angeles Restoration Premiere A child during Jim Crow, Baldwin never felt at ease in the United States, first finding comfort and community abroad in Paris and later in Saint-Paul de Vence. Yet, he continued to write about the fraught existence of Black Americans and Black Europeans, and his returns to the US fueled his personal philosophy. On one such homecoming, in 1980, Baldwin acts as a docent through the history of the Civil Rights Movement, guiding filmmakers Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley on a tour of his roots in the South for a documentary essay that “lays bare the fiction of progress in post-Civil Rights America” (Rich Blint). DIRECTED BY: Dick Fontaine, Pat Hartley. WITH: James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, David Baldwin, Chinua Achebe. 1982. 92 min. USA/UK. Color. English. 4K DCP.
LOOKING FOR LANGSTON
Looking for Langston Sat, Sep 7 | 2pm | TMT
Looking for Langston is a poetic manifestation of the reimagined world of James Mercer Langston Hughes—an American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright. A meditation on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, Isaac Julien’s 1989 black-and- white film travels between the realms of realism and surrealism, explicitly exploring desires and
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