BLACK FILMS MATTER (1920-2020)

Oscar Micheaux. The Darktown Revue
USA, 1931, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA and DCP, 18’

Oscar Micheaux. Within Our Gates
Estados Unidos, 1920, b/n, muda, DCP, 79’. Versión restaurada

This session retrieves the oldest conserved feature-length film made by an African-American film-maker: Within Our Gates, by Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951). The picture was restored from a unique 35mm version found in Filmoteca Española, an incredible, barely believable discovery in the film world which also occasioned the idea of producing this series. Thus, the programme opens and closes with the two versions of Within Our Gates. Micheaux’s father was born into slavery in Kentucky, and the family later moved north, to Illinois, where Micheaux worked different trades — on a shoeshine stand, in a barbershop, as a porter on the railroads — before moving into film production and directing and subsequently becoming a cornerstone of Black film. Within Our Gates was made in response to the premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D.

W. Griffith’s highly popular and blatantly racist film. Micheaux sought to break away from the racial stereotypes that dominated American culture at the dawn of the twentieth century and which he experienced first-hand through his own family and the scars of slavery they bore. Within Our Gates tells the story of a young Black woman who fights to avoid the closure of a poverty-stricken school for children. The session is opened with The Darktown Revue, a short musical in which Micheaux satirises some of the African-American community’s most deeply rooted customs.

Solomon Sir Jones. Rev. S. S. Jones Home Movies
USA, 1924–1928, b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 18’

Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage
USA, 1928, b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 2’

The Works Progress Administration. We Work Again
USA, 1937, b/w, original version with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 15’

Zora Neale Hurston. Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940  
USA, 1940, b/w, silent, DCP and DA. 15’

―And a live musical accompaniment with Jordi Ballarín and Harold Rey in the second session

This programme sets out four works that document the life of the African-American community between the Great Depression and the USA’s full engagement in the Second World War. On one side, the home movies of S. S. Jones and the documentary Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 show the community’s spaces, from the importance of religious circles to schools and businesses; and on the other, the working reality for African-American citizens faced with the idealised vision of We Work Again, propaganda created by the Roosevelt Administration. The session also represents a unique opportunity to discover the work of film-maker, writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, a central figure in the African-American cultural and intellectual movement in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Kara Walker. 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture
USA, 2005, b/w, silent with intertitles, DCP and DA, 16’

Kara Walker. Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road
USA, 2009, colour, silent with intertitles, DCP and DA, 13’

Kara Walker. Lucy of Pulaski
EUSA, 2009, colour, silent with intertitles, DCP and DA, 12’

Kara Walker is a distinguished contemporary artist whose work explores the confluence of race, gender, sexuality and violence during the period of African-American slavery. In her practice, she uses modest and elemental materials that allude to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century popular culture, employing drawing, black silhouettes, cut-paper and shadow theatre to evoke the way of life and customs in the age of film pioneers, with whom she engages in dialogue in this series. This session screens the artist’s short films, which reference the animations of Lotte Reiniger from the 1930s while addressing, on this occasion, physical and sexual exploitation in the cotton plantations.

Melvin Van Peebles. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
USA, 1971, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 97’

The disappearance during the 1940s of so-called race films, pictures made exclusively for Black audiences and focused upon at the start of this film season, left the African-American community orphaned, cinematically speaking, in the decades that followed. The only possibilities of on-screen references were reduced to timid Hollywood ripples made in relation to the civil rights struggles across the 1960s, largely featuring Sidney Poitier as the lead, until Melvin Van Peebles entered the fray. Through the story of a Black prostitute that saves a member of the Black Panthers from the brutality of two police officers, Van Peebles fired the starting signal of the explosion of Blaxploitation films that flooded into the film theatres of American cities in the early 1970s, underscoring a whole potential audience being totally disregarded and marginalised. Furthermore, it denoted the first openly revolutionary African American film, proudly reflected on its release poster: “Rated X by an All-White Jury”.

Don Amis. Ujamii Uhuru Schule / Community Freedom School
USA, 1974, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 9’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Charles Burnett. Killer of Sheep
USA, 1978, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 83’

Charles Burnett was the most prominent member of L.A. Rebellion, the film movement also known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, active from 1960 to 1980 and one of the keystones of committed independent Black cinema. In his early films, Burnett had a knack for combining neo-realist naturalism with lyrical elements. Killer of Sheep, his MA thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is set in LA’s Watts district, the city’s most infamous ghetto as Burnett created a humanist portrait of America’s Black working class with the story of a sensitive and frustrated slaughterhouse worker whose job seriously affects his private life with his wife and two children. The session concludes with a documentary short by Don Amis — also an L.A. Rebellion member — that looks inside a community primary school based on Black Power principles: respect, righteousness and revolution.

Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust
USA, 1990, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and B-R, 120’. Version restored by the Cohen Film Collection

Julie Dash’s first feature became an indispensable reference point in contemporary Black film. The picture explores, at the turn of the twentieth century, the origins of a family saga within Gullah culture, a creole community with a strong presence in South Carolina and Georgia and known for fusing and maintaining the roots and customs of West Africa in the USA. Following a non-linear history of three generations of the Peazant family, the story of Daughters of the Dust starts in 1902 and spans almost the entirety of the twentieth century. The film is an oneiric celebration of popular tradition and Black femininity, in which Dash set out to evoke the past, present and future unity and identity of a community. It also features the work of artists Arthur Jafa, as director of photography (winning an award at the Sundance Film Festival), and Kerry James Marshall, on the production design.

James y Eloyce Gist. Hell-Bound Train
USA, 1930 ca., b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 50’

James y Eloyce Gist. Heaven-Bound Travellers
USA, 1935 ca., b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 15’

―And a musical accompaniment with Jordi Ballarín y Harold Rey, in the second session

Husband and wife James and Eloyce Gist pursued the making of educational films, intended to be shown in schools and churches in the African-American community across much of the 1930s. Their films, shot in 16mm with limited resources, no sound and amateur actors, served as an accompaniment to the sermons James Gist preached around the country. Hence, they unfold with a definite enlightening and spiritual quality, as well as a surprising formal freedom. This session starts by screening their most ambitious work, Hell-Bound Train, a catalogue of vices from the time that the couple wished to vilify (animal cruelty, alcoholism, gambling, dance, etc), accompanied by a new score composed by Samuel Wymon, and is followed by its unfinished sequel, Heaven-Bound Travellers, discovered while restoration work was being carried out on the original film.

Kevin Jerome Everson. The Island of St. Matthews
USA, 2013, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 70’
Courtesy of Picture Palace Pictures

The work of Kevin Jerome Everson, a contemporary artist and film-maker who operates in the field of experimental film, shines a light on the working class African-American community, portraying their material conditions, jobs and daily gestures. Shot in 16mm, the film starts with the loss of material history focusing on objects and photographs. The director gives a voice to the residents of Westport, a community to the west of Columbus, Mississippi, after discovering that his aunt’s old family photographs were lost in the Tombigbee River flood of 1973. A filmic poem on memory and remnants left behind by disaster.

Spencer Williams. Hot Biskits
USA, 1931, b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 10’

Spencer Williams. The Blood of Jesus
USA, 1941, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 56’

Before becoming famous among the USA’s white community for his participation in the popular television programme Amos 'n' Andy in the 1950s — the first fictional series with an all-Black cast — Spencer Williams had started his career in cinema as an actor in small independent films intended for segregated film theatres. After notching up a number of similar roles, Williams tried his hand at directing, first with short films and finally with the medium-length film The Blood of Jesus, which brought him mass acclaim in the African-American community. The film tells the story of a dead woman who faces the temptations of the devil in the afterlife. The screening in this session is accompanied by a comedy short, also directed by Williams, which shows how independent African-American cinema from that era adapted the genres and common places of the major Hollywood studios — in this instance using the conventions of slapstick.  

Richard Maurice. Eleven P.M.
USA, 1928, b/w, silent, DCP and DA, 60’

Eleven P.M., the only surviving film directed by film-maker and trade unionist Richard Maurice, represents a genuine oddity on several fronts. For starters, it is a fictional film set and shot in real locations in Detroit, in itself unusual in American silent cinema, which was overwhelmingly saturated with shots of New York and LA. Most of all, however, the film is eye-catching within the African-American cinema from that era for its adherence to the conventions of crime cinema and its avowed experimental spirit. Through a simple melodrama about a street musician with no choice but to care for a young orphan girl, Maurice articulates a narrative brimming with fantastical and surreal elements which, combined with the documentary-style landscape of Detroit, give form to one of the most distinctive African-American films from the silent era.

Gordon Parks. Shaft
USA, 1971, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 100’

“Shaft has no prejudices. He’ll kill anyone… black or white”. This was the description Ernest Tidyman used to present the protagonist of Shaft (Bantam Books, 1970), the novel with which he opened the series of stories around an African-American private detective. The character smashed stereotypes that had hitherto presented the Black man as a docile and placid figure, a figure posing no threat to the white majority. In his place came a Black response to the male and colonial fantasy personified by James Bond: Tidyman’s Shaft, a character brought to the big screen with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer funding and who boasted about his sexual prowess and was not scared of his voice being heard, either literally or through violence. The huge commercial success of the film saw it become a template for all Blaxploitation films that came after, yet, as its director Gordon Parks never failed to point out, while his film was shot by a largely African-American crew, almost every subsequent Blaxploitation movie brazenly featured white film-makers in the industry’s lode until it was wrung dry. 

Michael Schultz. Car Wash
USA, 1976, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 97’

This film reflects the confluence of some of the most popular forms of expression the African-American community developed across the 1970s. The picture was initially written by a young Joel Schumacher as a libretto for a Broadway musical, but Universal Pictures decided it merited being turned into a feature and entrusted the directing to Michael Schultz, an African-American film-maker who had started out in theatre. Through a series of sketches, daily fragments and musical sections, the film shows the life of a group of (mostly Black) workers in a car wash in a multicultural area in central Los Angeles. Through the car wash, with its openly inclusive spirit (although not free from criticism), parades disco, soul and funk culture; some of the new figures in African-American comedy, including Richard Pryor; an openly and militantly gay man; A Muslim activist; a prostitute who uses the business as an operation hub; and even the son of a businessman who proudly wears a Mao Tse-Tung T-shirt. 

Richard C. Kahn. The Bronze Buckaroo
USA, 1939, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles. DCP and DA, 58’

The figure of musician and actor Herb Jeffries (1914–2014) is interesting as much for his work as a singer as an actor in different Westerns, such as this one, made specifically for an African-American audience. Born to an Irish mother and Italian father, but with North African roots, his work with African-American and Latin American musicians (Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol, to mention a few) led him to understand the extreme discrimination that exists over skin colour. Jeffries would become known for playing a cowboy hero in Westerns produced in the USA’s segregated society at the beginning of the twentieth century. For such purposes, he darkened his skin using make-up and presented himself as openly African-American, proudly displaying roots that many of his contemporaries tried to hide to obtain work (“I’m three-eighths Negro”, he would say). In The Bronze Buckaroo, one of many low-budget Westerns, he plays a cowboy who tries to help his friend Joe deal with the threats of the wicked Buck Thorne and his intention to take the gold he has found on Joe’s land. As was customary in these films, in a running time just shy of sixty minutes it offers romance, shoot-outs, comedy and music, all designed for segregated film theatres.

Spencer Williams. Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.
USA, 1946, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 65’

Following the success of The Blood of Jesus, Spencer Williams sealed funding from producer Alfred N. Sack to make a high-budget film with wider distribution, originally designed to move beyond the African-American community’s theatres. Adapted from the short story by William Somerset Maugham, Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. tells the story of a singer and dancer who travels to a Caribbean island to lead a show in a popular hotel. While there, she meets a soldier and a sailor, who fall in love with her, and a preacher who decries the “shamelessness” of her work. Despite its success among African-American audiences, the film was unable to attract white audiences at the time, although it has become one of the paradigmatic examples (along with Stormy Weather, 1943, and The Green Pastures, 1959) of the leap, from the 1940s onwards, independently produced films for Black audiences took towards greater (though still uncommon) stability.

Bill Gunn. Ganja & Hess
USA, 1973, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 113’

Ganja & Hessi is, and at the same time isn’t, a Blaxploitation film. Seeking to ride on the popular wave of Blacula (1972), film-maker William Gunn saw the chance to turn what he felt was a meaty project into a formally avant-garde film which uses vampirism as an allegory of slavery. Thus, Gunn widened the potential of the narrative to make room for decades of suffering by the African-American community: the virus that infects the main character, an archaeologist, turning him into a sickly and blood-thirsty creature, is the virus of the past, a perpetually open wound that prevents a new identity from being built. Despite the success of the film at Cannes, where it won the Critics’ Choice prize, its appearance in commercial theatres was such a disaster that the producers decided to mutilate it repeatedly, premiering it under different names in the hope of recovering investment. Fortunately, the full version was recently recovered and exhibited by MoMA, cementing its reputation as a cult film. 

Ivan Dixon. The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
USA, 1973, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 102’

Keen to show its eagerness for racial integration, the CIA welcomes its first African-American agent on board. Although he is a token agent with little responsibility, he takes the opportunity to study agency tactics and uses them to organise a militia and bring down the government. An adaptation of the homonymous novel by Sam Greenlee, Ivan Dixon’s film is paradigmatic of the transition that occurred in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, moving from the pacific protest of Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers’ direct action. Thus, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in clearly positing its anti-system stance, would become one of the biggest examples of the political potential of Blaxploitation, so much so that the FBI, directed at that time by J. Edgar Hoover, discreetly seized all copies of the film, which was only saved after its director secretly kept a copy. 

Larry Bullard y Carolyn Y. Johnson. A Dream is What You Wake Up From      
USA, 1978, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 50’

Dedicated to Afro-Cuban film-maker Sara Gómez (1942–1974), from whom it draws inspiration, and Mozambican activist Josina Machel (1945–1971), this dramatised documentary melds fiction, documentary and historical recreation in a pioneering and bold analysis of the intersection of race, gender and social class. A Dream is What You Wake Up From contrasts the daily life of different families of unequal economic status, the problems they encounter and the different subjective positions they adopt thereon.

Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing
USA, 1989, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 110’

Spike Lee, a key figure in contemporary Black film, was one of the first directors to introduce Afro-American issues and vindications to the mainstream, forging a path travelled down by subsequent film-makers such as Steve McQueen. Straddling the positions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and with a cast of stars in the making (Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez and John Turturro) and music by Public Enemy, the film is situated between satire and social critique. In 1989, the title Do the Right Thing called for a reaction through the story of Mookie, a pizza delivery man and witness to inequalities, tensions and racism in the daily life of one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighbourhoods.   

John Singleton. Boyz n the Hood
USA, 1991, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 111’

John Singleton made history as the first African-American director to be nominated for an Oscar for this film, his directorial debut at tender age of 24. Boyz n the Hood tells the coming-of-age story of three boyhood friends in a Los Angeles ghetto shaped by poverty, gangland violence and police brutality. With a rap and hip-hop soundtrack including Compton's Most Wanted, 2 Live Crew, Tony! Toni! Toné! and rapper Ice Cube, and with actors Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut and Laurence Fishburne in leading roles, Singleton admitted that with this film he had explored the reality facing young Black people on the streets through his own personal experience.

Stephen Winter. Chocolate Babies;
USA, 1996, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 83’

In Stephen Winter’s debut, a terrorist group of Black drag queens and militant HIV-positive transexuals confront conservative and homophobic policies on the streets of New York to draw attention to the AIDS crisis, particularly among African-American communities. A political satire which, fusing rage and campness, became one of the most powerful declarations of queer Black identity in the 1990s. 

Cheryl Dunye. She Don't Fade
USA, 1991, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 23’

Cheryl Dunye. The Watermelon Woman
USA, 1996, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 90’

The work of film-maker Cheryl Dunye explores the limits between fiction and documentary, from her early titles to her work in major series such as Lovecraft Country (2020), operating with perpetual humour from the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. She Don’t Fade is one of the most famous “dunyementaries” (a term Dunye uses to refer to the mix of autobiography and fiction in her work) directed by and starring the film-maker, and combines the personal and the imagined through the story of a young Black lesbian woman’s sexuality. The Watermelon Woman, in reference to Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man, was a landmark in New Queer Cinema in the 1990s for facing, head on, Black lesbian identity and the stereotypical image of racialised women in Hollywood, focusing on an employee in a video store, played by Dunye, who is captivated by an unknown African-American actress from the 1930s known as the “watermelon woman”.

Haile Gerima. Hour Glass
USA, 1971, b/w and colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 13’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Haile Gerima. Bush Mama
USA, 1979, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 97’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Ethiopian-American film-maker Haile Gerima made these two films on Black awareness within the framework of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, L.A. Rebellion. Hour Glass, his first work, is a political montage, a black-and-white and colour collage, with music by the band The Last Poets and leader of the Black Panthers, singer and writer Elaine Brown. In the film, a Black basketball player encounters the work of Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King and Angela Y. Davis as Gerima connects civil rights movements with third-world struggles. Made in 1975 as an MA thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and with photography by Roderick Young and Charles Burnett, Bush Mama would not be screened until 1979. Starting with documentary images of the police stopping and searching the crew, Gerima moves from cinéma verité to agitprop to narrate the progressive politicisation of a mother coming up against the dehumanised system of social assistance.

Larry Clark. Passing Through
USA, 1977, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 105’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Passing Through, the showpiece of L.A. Rebellion, the school that brought together African-American film-makers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the 1970s, was Larry Clark’s MA thesis. It is also one of the few fictional features on the world of jazz, featuring music by John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Sun Ra, made by a Black film-maker. Via the story of a saxophonist, recently released from prison, who faces white music-industry executives, Clark counters exploitation and commercialisation with the spirited and raging subjectivity of jazz, looking for a narrative and formal alternative to Hollywood and in the process finding an expressive space by emulating the expressiveness of jazz in film.

Cauleen Smith. The Changing Same
USA, 2001, colour and b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 10’

Cauleen Smith. The Way Out Is the Way Two: Fourteen Short Films About Chicago and Sun Ra
USA, 1998, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 86’

A double session with African-American artist and film-maker Cauleen Smith. The short film is a riff on Afro-Futurism, a genre developed from social critique and parody which argues that the real extra-terrestrial is Black and that their freedom will come about in outer space, far from the Earth. Smith takes this Afro-Futurist outlandishness to a more intimate and existential space. In The Changing Same we find two Black aliens stranded on an empty Planet Earth and trying to find how to relate to one another. Drylongso, or “ordinary” in Afro-American vernacular, is an independent cult film and Smith’s debut feature — it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Independent Spirit Awards, the indie film awards par excellence. In this particular story, Pica, a young African-American art student, obsessively documents with her Polaroid camera the Black men in her environment in connection to the murders taking place in her neighbourhood and with the conviction that very soon they will be an extinct species, with these snapshots the only evidence of their existence.  

Alile Sharon Larkin. Your Children Come Back to You
USA, 1979, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 27’                                             
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Fronza Woods. Killing Time
USA, 1979, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 9’                                               

Fronza Woods. Fannie's Film
USA, 1982, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 15’                                                                                                                 

Julie Dash. Illusions
USA, 1982, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 16mm, 34’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the decade that followed, a series of Black women film-makers emerged who focused on putting African-American women centre stage and giving them a voice, with their films possessing a markedly naturalistic quality. In Your Children Come Back To You, L.A. Rebellion member Alile Sharon Larkin adopted the point of view of a girl divided between the convictions of her mother, proud of her roots but with minimal financial resources, and her aunt, alienated by white values. Fronza Woods, for her part, made different portraits of invisible women: in Killing Time she spotlights the dilemma of a suicidal woman who can’t find the right outfit, while Fannie’s Film narrates the routine of a 65-year-old cleaning woman. Finally, Julie Dash portrays the life of two women in the film industry in the 1940s who need to appear white to work.

Arthur Jafa. Ms Hillsonga
USA, 2017, colour and b/w, sound, DA, 4’

Arthur Jafa. Dreams are Colder than Death
USA, 2014, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 52’
Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Arthur Jafa is a unique figure and to some degree casts light upon the general condition of African-American film-makers and artists. Regarded as one of the most relevant contemporary artists, such international recognition has only come about in recent years after decades working as a director of photography on films by the likes of Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1990) and Spike Lee (Crooklyn, 1994). Jafa defends a distinct identity of Black film across its history, based at once on the ethical role of images and the uniqueness of its very form. Moreover, he coined the concept Black Visual Intonation (BVI), referring to a montage based on the pulsating rhythm of Black music. Ms Hillsonga is a four-minute torrent of BVI with images of racial violence and Black lives to the sound of Jeff Mills’s techno. Dreams are Colder than Death is a feature-length documentary which compiles, fifty years on from Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I Have a Dream”, a series of voices — including the voices of Kara Walker and Charles Burnett — which ask what it means to be Black in the USA today. Jafa’s output stands among the most powerful visual work against the Trump Administration.

Kathleen Collins. Losing Ground
USA, 1982, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 83’

Writer and film-maker Kathleen Collins stood out for the way in which she addressed, via stories, theatre pieces, screenplays and films, marital relationships characterised by self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment. Thus, Losing Ground was a pioneering feature in bringing African-American feminist awareness to films, albeit without a commercial premiere. The film is a semi-autobiographical dramatic comedy that revolves around the marital crisis of a philosophy lecturer and her painter husband. An amorous tangle crossed by issues of race and gender, condemned to obscurity by distributors and re-discovered years later as a landmark of independent film. 

Billy Woodberry. Bless Their Little Hearts
USA, 1984, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 80’
Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

Billy Woodberry filmed Bless Their Little Hearts on the streets of LA ghetto Watts, just as UCLA and L.A. Rebellion comrade Charles Burnett had done. Bless Their Little Hearts is a story of unemployment, chronic poverty and institutionalised racism and was written and shot by Burnett. The naturalist aesthetic, indebted to neo-realism, the gloomy black and white, and a crackly jazz soundtrack make this film a heartrending — but never sentimental — drama, in which a terrible reality finds daily moments of silent grace.

Gordon Parks. The Learning Tree
USA, 1969, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DCP and DA, 107’

The penultimate session in the series pays homage to The Learning Tree, the first film directed by an African-American film-maker for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros. It also pays tribute to the pre-eminent figure of Gordon Parks, one of the twentieth century’s most important photographers and also a musician, writer and film-maker committed to race relations, poverty, civil rights and urban life. The Learning Tree takes the same-titled autobiographical novel by Gordon Park to the silver screen in a portrait of a young Black man and his coming-of-age story in a small Kansas town in the 1920s. Parks directed this film under the constantly watchful eye of the producer. When the Library of Congress created, in 1989, its National Film Registry — a selection of films considered key within American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation — The Learning Tree was one of the first 25 titles to feature.   

Oscar Micheaux. Within Our Gates
USA, 1920, b/w, silent, 35mm, 79’. Unrestored version in Filmoteca Española

Oscar Micheaux. Within Our Gates
USA, 1920, b/w, silent, AD, 80’. Restored version in Museo Reina Sofia

—And a musical accompaniment with The Silent Entertainers Band

The series comes full circle, ending as it began, with the first ever film directed by an African-American film-maker: Within Our Gates, by Oscar Micheaux. In this closing session, the two versions of the film are screened. In Cine Doré, the original 35mm version, which enabled its restoration, retrieval and dissemination. Within Our Gates entered the collections of Filmoteca Española in 1961, hailing from an acquisition by Laboratorios Arroyo. However, it wouldn’t be catalogued or attributed until 1992, and restoration got under way in 2003 from the only original copy preserved in the world. In Museo Reina Sofia this restored version is screened. Screening is accompanied, in both sessions, by live music with a score made expressly for the occasion by the quartet The Silent Entertainers Band.